Jenna.Kristen's Blog

Preoccupied by getting out our first email update over the weekend, I haven’t had the chance to really sit and write another blog post. A lot has happened since last weeks’ rants about this and that. I realized that the tone of our time here has altered after feeling refreshed over the weekend. We are slowly but surely getting adjusted and I only hate Nepal in some crazy moments, no longer all and every day. Hehe What’s changed? Well as of last night we had our first night’s sleep on comfortable pillows that didn’t feel like rocks! Yay! We also had a successful grocery run together to stock up last Friday to stock up for the week ahead and we’ve been able to get acquainted with dealing with circumstances when the power goes out. Realizing that you only need to by the necessary amount of eggs (per item instead of by carton) and that you can always order food to be delivered (an awesome-LY CHEAP food service called Foodmandu) has really started to save us in this transition.

The day before last, 22 (out of 24) people from Tiny Hands met up and went to the movies to see the new Batman (for an awesome-LY CHEAP price of about $2.50)!!! Yesterday was another one of those love-hate days where I experienced A TON at once and I am still processing everything. I attended my very first language course with 3 other Tiny Hands staff at a Christian missions training school (Jon and I are at breakfast and he will be attending today). The classes are so important and I’m realizing more and more how effective we could be with using Nepali here so we’re amped to go to classes 4-5 times every week for 2 hours for the upcoming 11 weeks (initially then we’ll probably bring in a private tutor on occasion. Also, yesterday I got lost in the city on my way back from class by myself for 4 ½ hours. I was being very stubborn to not pay for a taxi because I was trying to be thrifty. I had already paid a little for a bus but it dropped me off in a totally WRONG part of town. The streets are all in zig-zags here and they don’t really have names. Directions are all given by landmarks of stores and other things. Everytime I would ask someone along the way they would say something to the effect of “go straight and then left and the right at the next circle a ways down”. After each time I stopped and asked someone for help (which had to be at least 25+ times), I would feel more confident that I was going to make it to my destination just around the bend. NOPE. After finally making it home, Jon would explain it like this: “Lost, lost, oh pillows! Lost lost Oh cool temples. Lost lost LOST LOST LOST HELP.” Hehe. He’s totally right. I found us some really heavenly pillows along the way but that was so dumb because then I had to trek those huge things around town for the next 2 hours. I finally ended up taking a taxi in the end when I thought I had just crossed over the river to our section of town. I was still way off and then later looked at a map: they do say that the best way to explore a city is to get lost in it! When I got home Jon shared some news that Tiny Hands decided to give a significant chunk of rupees to help us with some start up costs. They are also willing to help us purchase a motorbike (one smaller than the one we’re able to borrow so we would have an easier time learning/managing it). That is all on the down low because there are other new people here and we’re not too sure if they also got the same “signing bonus” to help them start out. What this means though is that we WILL and CAN et taxi’s instead of feeling MUCH too frugal with our spending. Before finding this out, we were on a much tighter budget of only $15 a day per person. It is doable here but we’ve had extra expenses come up like language classes, good pillows, and now we’ll be able to eat out instead of struggle through the idea of grocery shopping/cooking. Things are looking up. So so so blessed. Job. I wanted to briefly state that Jon’s job will indeed take us to the border within the next two weeks. We are blessed, however, because when we had told our staff the importance of me accompanying Jon in travel to honor our marriage first, they agreed. We are working out the company budget to see if this is doable so it would not harm our expenses (at least initially). We are pretty tight on budget in travel because we came with our savings. It’s a blessing to have the assistance from the organization for these things. We compromised to go at least once (which I am totally supportive of) but after that we can determine next steps of whether or not to fit in more or less travel in this phase. I’ll keep you posted.