Things I Have Gotten Used To

1. Mosquitoes eating me alive making it look like I actually have holes in my legs and arms

2.Thousands of flies swarming me all the time, especially in the morning and during the day and covering my food and just having to swipe them away.

3. Ants. Everywhere

4. Showering by pouring buckets of water on myself

5. Having my clothes washed by laundry ladies which means washing my clothes in water/soap, hitting them on the ground, then putting them on our dirt-filled roof to dry, therefore making them sometimes seem dirtier than when I gave my clothes to them.

6. Living with spiders.

7. Becoming pretty much a vegetarian, not by choice because they don't really eat much meat except chicken every couple weeks...this is a huge thing if you know me and how much i loved eating my massive burgers with EVERYTHING on it like 3x/week.

8. No Air conditioning

9. The way people here drive, especially since I usually get extremely car-sick in the US. There are basically no rules for driving here except bigger/faster cars honk and go around the slower cars, sometimes becoming EXTREMELY close to accidents. A lot of death happens here because of their way of driving.

10. Geckos crawling all over the place (i HATE reptiles)

11. Getting looked at like I'm a martian from outer space everywhere I go, and having men here look at me in a way that no woman would want to be looked it.

12. Taking care of myself when I'm sick (i'm usually a HUGE a baby and am very needy when it comes to that)

13. Not having my friends to call everytime I'm having a hard time

14. Not having a community like Crossroads or Third Ref. or the Boiler Room where worshiping God is set right in front of me. Here, they worship God in a different language which makes it hard for me to stay focused or really enjoy worship since it's so different from what I would normally like. God is teaching me and stretching me in that way though.

15. Balancing time here so I can make sure I make time for people here and stay focused, but still make time for certain things back home.

16. Waking up at 6am everyday.

17. Being sick with something different all the time.

18. Mounds of rice 2x/day everyday.

19. The Heat.

20. Not being concerned about how I look because no matter how much makeup you wear or no matter how good you make your hair look, once you step outside, it'll all be ruined. Natural is way more beautiful here anyway.

21. Putting EVERYONE else here before myself. I was a very selfish person so this has taken some work, but it's an awesome thing.

22. Hugging the babies as tightly as I can, or letting them sleep next to me if they're scared, no matter how much lice (almost all of them have it) or scabies they have.

I was sitting here thinking about how different life here is from life back in the US and how I had to get used to certain things that I never thought I would be ok with, but I have. I think if we rely on God, we all are much stronger than we thought.

It's hard here. All of the things above took me a while to get used to. I didn't think i would be able to handle it when I first got here, but God has proved so faithful. It's exciting for me to see the change that He is making in my life after such a short time. I'm definitely becoming stronger and appreciate things in my life back at home So much more now.
I guess it took for me to go to the other side of the world and lose most of my "nice" things in order to see how much I had before. That's pretty sad. I am truly blessed.