My K family

I'd like to show you all some pictures of my family here in K land:

 From left to right:

Mary(age 17), Life, Belinda(4), Erin(21), K (from the US), Brianna(11), L (from the US), Me (from the US), and Esther(7)

This is Ellen, who took the first picture.

Here in K land, K, L, and I live with a national K family that includes the mother (Life) and father (Edmund), and 6 daughters.  They are very kind people and have even taken us with them on their picnics, one of which included over 500 people.  The younger children are often up in our part of the house, just wanting to hang out and see what we are doing.  Ew, the 7 year old, helped me write a children's song the other day in K-ish.

They are all very sweet and kind to us, although we sometimes get a little frustrated that they don't seem to understand or care that we live a different way of life, even though we live in their house. Even though Mary is one of the younger ones, she seems a little more understanding and more willing to talk to us about this with us.  I think maybe she's kind of bored and lonely.  L has been able to have some good conversations with her recently.  We especially like talking about the history of this region, because we've read a particular ancient story about this area that's pretty cool.  You've probably read it too.  I mean, a story about someone who survives being swallowed whole is pretty cool.  His story was even a lesson for later generations of people.  I really hope that the people of this land learn about all the cool things that have happened here in history, because it seems like a lot of them just don't care to know anything outside of what they do in daily life.

On a completely different topic, I would like to leave you all with a picture my language teacher drew me.  She saw pictures of a prank pulled on my mom for my mom's 50th birthday and wanted to know what "Over the hill" meant.  This picture is what resulted:

Mom, you are the stick figure on the right.

Actually, she told me that you are really beautiful (hence the "gelek can" written on the right) and that you and I look a lot alike.

P.S. Prz Gd, my name is no longer Mud.  Now, I have a forecast for warm (sometimes hot) weather, sunny skies, and occasional dust.

P.P.S.  The meal in the first picture was rice wrapped in lamb brains and lamb intestines.  I kid you not!

Dust + Water = Mud

This being K-land and all, dust wasn't too surprising to me, but the reality is that the dust in K-land isn't always from here.  It gets blown here from the south of us.  The following picture is of a very abnormal dust storm:

That's not a sunset.  That's allllllll dust.

Dust in K-land is not orange, it's tan.  This was definitely from the south of us.  It was pretty gross.  But Dad has actually created a unique way to take care of the dust in K-land.  It's called rain.  BUT rain can also lead to some gross stuff.  You see, when you have the air filled with dust and it rains, what do you get?

Answer: Raining Mud!

I truly didn't understand mud until I moved here.  Mud, what can i say?  I never knew you until now.  You now fill my life with so many new experiences.

When it rains mud, you make sure to wear dark colored clothes so your light colored stuff doesn't get tie-dyed in dirt swirls.  It's incredibly ironic, but cleanliness is truly next to gdliness for this culture.  One must be clean in order to be close to Dad.  Also, it is very inappropriate to have a dirty car if you are offering a ride to any acquaintance.  So that means you should try to find a way to clean your car after it gets all muddy.  Unfortunately for me, it's culturally inappropriate for girls to wash cars, or even to take them to the car wash.  We have to get a guy to do it.  Also, our neighborhood isn't paved and our street never dries out, so our car is always dirty.  Because our street is nearly always muddy, it leads to our beautiful feet sometimes looking like this:

(However, this was an extreme circumstance.)

Normally, mud would never be this bad in our neighborhood, but we thought we knew mud well enough and chose to drive through some in a nearby area.  This is what resulted:

L and I and our little red Kia spent almost 2 hours in that mud pit, until finally the police came with a large truck and pulled us out (our friend in the green truck would have pulled us out, but his 4-wheel drive wasn't working that day.)

Recently, I've been conversing with a new acquaintance (that we picked up for lunch in our dirty car, by the way).  K and I talked a lot with this receptive lady, but one thing we ended up talking about is that it's more important to clean the inside of a cup and a dish, so that the outside of it may become clean also. (Mt 23)  I mean, I can't drink out of a water bottle filled with muddy water, but if the water inside is clean, and there's some dirt on the outside, I can still drink it.  Plus, it's a heck of a lot easier to wipe off the outside once the inside is already clean.  Cleaning the inside of a water bottle is a heck of a lot harder than the outside.  Well, for many people here, they seem to care much more about their reputations and their outward cleanliness than what they are really like on the inside.  I really hope they can see that what's on the inside is what truly matters in the long run.

Anyways, at least until summertime, my name is mud.

Sincerely yours,

Mud