It is actually officially reported that men in this country are lazy.....

Now before you get all irate.....I truly enjoy living in this arab culture and enjoy the many differences from American culture. But as a family that have spent about 4 months trying to renew residence visas and watching a husband go slightly mad from all the meaningless steps and stamps and changes in rules....we are pretty fed up.

Happy to have visas!!! Don't get me wrong. But they were stamped at the cost of Tom's sanity at this point. He'll recover...he always does but when he flopped on the bed this afternoon after sitting and staring at a man who specifically NOT doing our paperwork out of spite....he was pretty much ready to pack his bags.

If I had no children and all the time in the world, I'd describe EXACTLY what it is like to renew a visa here. Since that is not my reality we'll just move along and you'll have to take my word for it.

Well, I'll give you one example because it is just too crazy. After you get permission to get your visas, you have to get a letter written to the police department that gives them permission to put the stamp in your passport. Tom was at the office that gives out these letters but for some mysterious reason....they weren't doing that on that day. It was suggested that he go to the airport since there is an office there (?). Tom drove all the way across this busy capitol city to the airport only to be told that the office is open only from 8pm to 11pm. Seriously. And that it would cost about $200.

Or

He could drive 5 mins away to another office and get the letter for free while he stood and watched.

Yeah. this is the craziness. There is just no way to make sense out of that.

But back to the original reason for posting this. I LOVE the local newspaper. So many gems of information and humor. This one totally takes the cake for ALL TIME:

This was a report headlined "Locals need to spend time more wisely" (oh how I agree after the day we had today!)

The report also says, "Sleeping and relaxing were the top activities that consumed time, accounting for 41 per cent of the day."

Quoting a data from 2007-08, the HDR says that paid jobs take up 13 per cent of any male's time 

See what I mean?!?! This is just wonderfully justifying to see the National newspaper also saying "GET TO WORK!" I want to wave this under the nose of the guy who told us to come back an hour later because he hadn't finished his tea yet. sigh. We were not up for that.

All this negativity will die down soon. I promise (-; Besides....we FINALLY got the visas!!

Family Holiday time

So after shaking off the 4.5 hour wait in the borders to process our visa paperwork, we drove about three hours towards the coast to stay in the apartment of some friends who were away. It is RIGHT on the beach and has a pool and two playgrounds. It is a tiny place but it has beds, kitchen and bathroom....all we need (=

We stayed there for three nights and then spent two nights with other friends in another city. We had so much fun that I took hardly ANY photos!

These kids are TOO MUCH FUN! There is a balcony at the apartment and they can run around the paved area right outside the balcony area. Layla is wearing a jumper that Tom's sister wore when SHE was young!

Tom and I went on a date! There is a hotel right by the ocean with an outdoor restaurant. The weather is GORGEOUS at night this time of year. Tom is smoking the local water pipe thing....a very nice, sweet, mellow smoke (= It costs about $12 and lasts about 2 hours depending on how vigorously you puff.

Here you can see the outdoor restaurant with the comfy couches. This culture knows how to LOUNGE! awesome.

The surf was right next to us! It was so lovely. It was a great way to end our little vacation and shake of the weariness of trying to make life work here. sigh. Back at it this week though!

it usually gets worse before it gets better...

So I wrote this post before going on Eid Al Adha holiday. Trying to leave town took 4.5 hours in a border post.
The kids were FANTASTIC though I must say I pulled out every toy, snack, book, song and jumping game I had saved for the week and the six hours of driving. They were awesome.

Border guard people...you were not.

To the bird who was stuck flying around the dome and the second floor....I am very sorry for your plight and identified with you...no idea what to do but fly around and feeling so exhausted from it. Thankfully you finally found the window opened and escaped!

To the hideous children chasing the bird and not letting it land - I can't stand children who are mean to weaker beings but I understand you were also probably a little bit crazy after waiting for 2+ hours yourself.

Either way - we are hopefully going to have some visa progress this week or next (=

Please delete from memory

We've had one of those weeks....maybe longer where I just hate living here. Everything seems to take SO.MUCH.LONGER than it should...we got cheated out of money and probably should have known better but hey...you have to take a stab and trust people sometimes.
Our visa situation that has loomed over us and affected us in so many little ways (can't go here, can't go there need to wait for a phone call this afternoon blah blah blah) and has now crashed our Eid holiday travel at the last minute.
We found out Layla's ears still aren't healed from the bad fall she took in January - there is still fluid in the canal. I can't find the right kind of meat I want at the store...ever these days.
I keep forgetting to buy the vegetables at the right time from the right store.
Then there is dear daughter who seems to be ramping up her desire to test the boundaries all the time. A whole new phase for her and I am so shocked. Tom says I need to stop being shocked and expect her to disobey but she has really been such a "good girl" for so long I am still stunned. So I have been mad and yelling way more than usual.....also makes life feel icky.

There are more things - all basic and small inconveniences about living here but some weeks they add up to too much and I just want to go back to the vision of nice clean, efficient America. Then I remember what is happening there and think good grief. We can't go anywhere to make the hassle go away.

AAAAHHHHHHHHHH!

Random linking....We also love the Ennegram!

If you haven't had a chance to skim through the Ennegram....take this one. Tom and I have found it SUCH a helpful tool to understand each other. All thanks to Tom and Kim Bowers....who pegged me within about 30 minutes of meeting me!

http://www.leighkramer.com/blog/2013/10/lets-enneagram-it-up.html#tpe-action-posted-6a0128776e0503970c019affcb16eb970b

The random things we end up doing because we live here.......

I could fill a blog with things under this heading! It is one of the fun/exciting/stressful/bizarre parts of living in a third world/first world small town.

This last week we arranged a two-day training for 6 local ladies and one local man. There was an American lady traveling through town who is an expert in helping develop "language helpers" to assist foreigners in learning Arabic.

You wouldn't think it is an overly complex thing to explain to a local how to help you learn their language but the educational system here creates teachers who:

-insult you to motivate you
-compare you to other people to motivate you
-tells you that you've totally forgotten everything you learned
-want you to just repeat lists of things

So when we had the chance to have a real expert train some folks for us we were thrilled! Also, it is a GREAT source of income for local ladies who are stuck at home and cannot work. If these ladies can get some skills they will always have some foreigners who want to study a few hours a week!

It was a win-win all the way around but Elsbeth and I were POOPED from trying to put this together at the last minute......because of course that is how things happen here (=

Another upside to the whole situation was the chance to work with the Women's Center in town! More on that later and their follow-up phone call.......

While I would love to say that I know the people picture below...I can't! The culture here doesn't allow me to take pictures of my friends, but here are some people who look JUST LIKE THEM (= So pretend this is what our training group looked like (=

Thank you for the visit!

Mom and Dad and Jen and Lily left a few days ago. It was VERY sad to see them go )-:

September is usually a busy month and this one was no exception! We had the extra craziness of the fact that our residence visas were being renewed and my passport was expiring and needing to be renewed all during their visit! Our town developed after the border lines between two countries were drawn....so you can actually exit one country, drive through town and and out of town for another 30 minutes before "entering" the next country. It is a hard concept for people to grasp at first.

Consequently, there is ALWAYS something about visas that come up in conversations.....like I was going to have a few friends get together at a nicer hotel for tea for my birthday. Even though it was in the same country I am, the border is between us and I had to check who was on what visa from which side of the border.....or like me, because my passport AND visa were in progress you can't "leave" the country even though I wasn't trying to leave the country.

Anyway - I share all this so you get a sense of the complexity of just doing normal things here. As a result we just pretty much stayed in the house almost the entire time. The heat was a bit much for my sister and little niece but suddenly the second week the fall weather kicked in! It was really lovely.....(I realize I need to state that I mean it went down to about 95 degrees.)

So we meet with some of my local friends and Jen got to see what we do on a normal "visit" to local ladies. That was fun. She is always full of good questions. We don't have any pictures to show which is so irritating - both of us forgot our phones/cameras!

We went to our glorious park with some other families.....we had a  birthday party for Layla, a small one for me (this one without kids!!) and we went to the grocery store about 100 times (=  We got to swim in the pool a few times (getting COLD!) and run around with the neighbor kids and ride bikes and Jen cooked with Layla and

We made cupcakes for Layla's school party.....typically weird for our small town....I could find no ROUND cupcakes...only semi circle so each one looked like someone had taken a bite out of it and then frosted over it!

This indoor scooter is a life saver for us - our house has a long hallway where the kids can really get up some speed and have fun even when it is too hot to be outside. It is also a major mover of toys and babies!

Playing trains!

We tried not to snap pictures EVERY time they were sitting close enough but we couldn't help ourselves!

There was LOTS of opening of gifts! Whohoo! Thank you everyone! Thanks for the colored construction paper Sue! and for the book (=

Baba holding little Lily above the fray....

All crammed in the car!

In our culture you only go to the park at night....never really during the day. This is our new park that is so wonderful!

Layla got a bike for her birthday! She did such a great job on the bikes in Holland this summer and her old bike was really tiny. Tom had to search in 4 cities in two countries to find something girly-enough (girls don't really ride bikes here) and at a decent price and decent quality.

Lily is a Florida kid with her cool sunglasses!

Running in the heat! Tutu Lisa - layla has FINALLY passed this dress on to Lily. I think you gave it t her when she was 3 years old! I am completely convinced that high-quality kids' clothing is easier to clean and it really does last forever!! 

And if you visit out here you need to buy a bucket of dates at least once! I think this is 6 kilos and was $8.

Our last day together we went to the crazy kid-zone in our fancy new mall that was built this year. Fancy looking and totally poor quality with only half the stuff working (= Gotta love it.  Mom and Layla drove around and Dad and Ryan were EXPERTS. I was super impressed at Dad's driving skills!

We had lily stick to driving things like this hideous plastic camel......

This is more her Florida style!

As usual Tom ran into someone he knows....this happens everywhere.

Nana gave this to us ages ago but we looked at it while Ahma was here (=

It was a great visit and I have tons more pictures (= I will spare you all of them! I'm shocked that I don't have a picture of feeding Lily....she ate prolifically and took great lengths of time to do so. Mom probably spent half her time here feeding her!

Layla's School Birthday Party

This is Layla's first grade class - it is an international school with 95% local students and an almost completely South African staff. Layla was pumped to have cupcakes to hand out!

Mom and Dad and Jen and my niece Lily are visiting us for 2 weeks to celebrate my 40th and Layla's 6th birthdays. It has been a great visit but the rest of life is very busy this September so it is a bit rushed at times. 

Azeb is our Ethiopian househelper. She really is a part of our family and LOVES babies. She is desperate for me to have another child (!) but is enjoying Lily while she is here (= We couldn't survive without Azeb....we maybe but all we'd do is keep the house running and little else!

A work of Art

I just have to share these photos of these AMAZING quilts made by the father of our Tutu Lisa (tutu is grandma in Hawaiian and Lisa is from Hawaii and married to Tom's dad). She has brought some fun things into our family and one is a FATHER who quilts! Stanley made a quilt for Layla when she was born and now we have one for Ryan.

As soon as he opened it up it wanted to be rolled up like a paratha sandwich which I guess is "burrito" to most folks (=

Here they are side by side.....I didn't realize Layla's quilt was folded under until the moment past....they are tired of posing for pictures every five minutes!

This is Layla at four months with the quilt in the crib. This was how it was for ages and ages.

Here she is again at the same age.....you can see the quilt is fish in the ocean. SO amazing.

Thank you Stanley!

Best buddies and wiggling tooshes

Layla and Sally have been in class together for two years - they are now in first grade in Ms Rosie's class. Perfect name, right!?

Last week she was BEGGING me to take her on a playdate to visit her house but I didn't have the mom's phone number or anything so we just stopped by....at 830 at night. Love the Middle East. Sally was thrilled and Layla and she ran around and did 6-year-old stuff together.

Sally's mom is from africa and her dad is a local guy who works for the petroleum industry. They are a bit more liberal and open to foreigners than the average local family. They are also better educated than the average family.

Here they are at the wedding! Layla is wearing what she thinks is a lovely head covering though it is more like a missouri farm girl than local arab girl (= Bless her. They are holding big glasses of thick sweet juice. Lots of that at weddings!

While we were there we were invited to a wedding and Layla was THRILLED to be able to attend this past weekend. I have to say it was the most fun wedding I have attended in the seven years we have been here. Really. Mostly because a LOT of the women danced! Those african ladies can shake their tooshes let me tell you.

There were two outstanding ladies - one was young, slim and in a shocking;y tight red dress. There is a catwalk that goes through the room (basement of a hotel with a large banquet hall) so the bride can walk through the crowd and be admired. Before she comes out though, the children run around and the ladies can dance (= Anyway, the gal in red was young and stunning and had a BIG booty that seemed to float around separated from her body. It really was amazing and not at all dirty or shameful as we so often see it in the US.

The other lady was old, SHORT and very fat. Sorry to offend, but they call each other old and/or fat here all the time so all you Americans just have to deal with it (= Anyway, she was the total opposite of the gal in red but she had STYLE and a huge sense of humor....she was loving it up there! What a treat to watch. You'd see this lady walking and have no idea she could wiggle her large toosh so skillfully. She even did that thing where you kneel on the floor and still wiggle. You probably don't know what I mean because you'd never be caught renting a video that would have a sample...too risque in the US. Here, it is just ladies having a good time.

I just loved this older gal and would have given my right arm to take a video or picture but of course nothing is allowed. It was such a great example of someone being young and being old and how we gain confidence and personality and learn how to OWN it all as we age. Love it. This is coming from a gal who just turned 40 so I am all about owning my age these days (=

Anyway - it was a treat and I was able to bring one of the new gals in our little community to see her first wedding. Sadly I had to tell here that they were mostly going to be less interesting than this one! Very few weddings have such expert dancers!