Ant Wars!

We have two kinds of ants living in our house. Big ants and little ants. We found the little ants attacking the big ants today. We think they are fighting over who takes over the house. We cannot get rid of them despite the bottles of insecticide we've been spraying at them. I guess that is life in Africa! Luckily we have not found anymore large spiders or scorpions in the house. Tim went running the other morning and saw a bunch of monkeys in the trees playing. We decided to take the kids and go find them, but after a two hour walk and much crying and complaining and not finding any monkeys, we decided not to do that again! We feel like we are back in our first days of Portugal without a car, except we don't have the option of the bus here, so walking is our only option. It is the rainy season as well, so if it raining and your only mode of transportation is walking, it's almost like a snow day, you can't really go anywhere.

We have begun our language training already. There is a young man who comes to our house and teaches us Chiyao and we in turn teach him English. This way we trade services and are not required to pay him and he is thrilled to be able to learn English. Tim has been spending a lot of time with a Mozambiquian man that is married to an SIM missionary from Romania. He has enjoyed this growing friendship and has already been asked to teach/disciple another young man here in Bible. He will start this on tuesday and the teaching will all be done in Portuguese. We have had great opportunities to practice our Portuguese and we are finding out that Chiyao is going to be more difficult than Portuguese in a lot of ways. It is not latin based, so there is no where to start from. It is going to be a lot of memorization. Please continue to pray for us as we struggle to learn...

Here are some pictures of the inside of our house and the church that we will attend while learning Chiyao and a just a few other things...


This is the church. It is an Anglican church and the service is done in Chiyao and Portuguese.

Here is the kids bathroom. It is really pretty good size.

This is Kallen's bedroom right now. Eventually it will be Traeger and Karis', but for now it is Kallen's. All of the furniture was left here from the previous family who lived here. Once our container arrives, we will move everything out and move our stuff in. They will be coming to collect their stuff the end of this year.

This is our bedroom. We all have to sleep with mosquito nets. The kids thought it was so fun at first. Kind of like sleeping in a tent.

Here is the kitchen. It is really big. Much bigger than my kitchen back in the states!

Here is Traeger and Karis' room. The floors are all cement, except for the kitchen and bathroom, which are tiled. It makes it really hard to keep things clean. Cement just doesn't come clean.

This is a picture of the road out to Muembe where we will be living. As you can see it isn't much of a road and when raining like this, the clay is very slippery.

Here are the kids playing in our yard, the neighbor kids like to climb the trees and watch them. They sometimes try to talk to them, but Traeger refuses to speak Portuguese with them. We are really hoping that he will warm up after a while and start speaking Portuguese again. He seems intimidated right now by everything being so different and unfamiliar.

Here is the scorpion we found in the house.

And here is that very large spider. I can barely look at this picture.