Category Archives: How To

How to Host 50 People in Your Home

by Rachel

We’ve already had 9 visitors, and we have about 45 more coming to stay in our home in the next few months. It sounds crazy, but this is a part of ministry that we love. Here are some of the things we’ve done to make it work in our house.

 

Mountain of Laundry

1. Get a good washer and dryer.

Thanks to the ladies of Mindset for Missions, we have a great washer/dryer set. They are high-capacity, and we’re putting them to work with mountains of laundry!

 

Half a Cow

2. Buy half a cow.

Yes, we bought half a cow. Someone had given us a quarter of a cow in January 2010 and it took us a year to eat and share it all. With so many people coming, we invested in 104 kgs of beef – that’s 229 pounds. Thankfully it comes processed, so here’s a sampling of what we got: 12 minute steaks, 23 chuck steaks, 28 shins, 32 spare ribs, 78 beef sausages…  A good amount of it is already made into meals or components of meals: empanadas, spaghetti/lasagna sauce, and carne asada.  Our large deep freeze is packed!

 

Guest Bedroom

3. Rearrange your house.

The Lord blessed us with a fabulous house for hosting anyone who comes to visit. It’s a bit big for just the three of us, but we’re putting it to work right now. We have 4 bedrooms with an optional 5th and possible 6th, and 5 bathrooms. It didn’t even feel crowded with 7 seminary guys, which is good because our next team also has 7, and they’re here for 5 weeks. So we play musical beds and match the mosquito nets to the right beds and we’re ready to go!

 

Pantry

4. Shop like you mean it.

We don’t have a Costco here. At times we wish we did, but then we realize that we’d miss out on all the adventures of shopping in Malawi. It goes like this: “If you find the kind of light bulb that we need, buy all they have.” On occasion the same is true of butter, flour, canned tomatoes, and even Coca-cola. The grocery shopping game is interesting when it’s just the three of us at home, but add 7-25 extras and it becomes an extreme sport! We’ve been stockpiling for months to get ready for this, though we’re sure we’ll run out of something and give everyone a good Malawi experience.

 

Biedebach Kids Helping Out

5. Get help.

There’s no way we could do all the normal things in our life and host so many people on our own. We have ladies from the church coming over to help cook, families bringing desserts, and even little decorators giving a helping hand (thanks Biedebach kids!). We’re so thankful for our church here and everyone’s willingness to jump in and share the work and the fun with us!

 

Anyone else want to come visit? We have openings in August… =)

How to Take a Baby on Safari

by Rachel

We had a great little family vacation last month!  Ever wonder how to go on safari with a 6 month old?  Here’s how we did it…

Matt and Abigail at Ntchisi ForestWe went.  Sometimes with a baby it’s tempting to just stay home and keep a routine.  But we just went.  Babies are amazingly flexible.  We gave her naps and food at all the right times, but we WENT.

Rachel and Abigail in the mirrorMake sure the baby is good around cameras.  In our case, no problem.  She’s fine around cameras.  Mom, however, is not so good at juggling baby and camera… It’s got to be one or the other, so mom let dad take all the really good pictures.

Matt and Abigail look at flowersSet your expectations.  We planned to bring Abigail on as many things as we could, but knew that we’d have to go a bit slower, stop and enjoy things with her, and maybe cut a few things short.  We also knew that at times there would be things that one of us could do while the other stayed back with her.  Thinking through those things ahead of time made every experience more enjoyable.

Surf on rough roadTeach your baby to sleep on rough roads.  We had about 11 hours of rough roads on this trip, and Abigail just slept right through it.  She actually woke up if we stopped or the road was suddenly smooth!

Lake Malawi with dug out canoesGo places that you know YOU will like.  Do you remember when your parents took you to Disneyland when you were 2?  Of course you don’t.  The point: don’t plan your vacation around your baby.  Plan your vacation, then figure out how to do it with a baby.  We went to Ntchisi National (Rain) Forest, Lake Malawi, and Nyika National Park.  None of these places had a playground or even a toy box, but Abigail couldn’t have cared less.  She smiled and played with her 5 toys, and we loved all the beauty and variety we were able to enjoy.

fuel gaugeHave enough diesel so you don’t get stuck on the side of the road.  This is good advice even if you’re not taking a baby on safari.  We didn’t get stuck on the side of the road, but we did use every bit of diesel we had!

road side diesel refillEven the jerry cans we had stocked up on!  When we got to the furthest northern point of our travels, we drove in to the lodge with the fuel light on, 20 litres of diesel remaining in the jerry can, and the knowledge that we had a 5 hour drive before we would reach the next gas station.  But we made it!

zebrasGet to know the locals.  In our case, that meant the wildlife.  We walked up to a herd of zebras…

leopard.. spotted leopards!  …

Abigail with bushbucks…and let Abigail sing songs to the bushbucks off our room’s little balcony.

Abigail in Land RoverBe the only family booked at the lodge.  This one recommendation, though entirely out of our control, might get the most “Amen!”s in our home.  The lodge at Nyika National Park was running a “green season” special because it’s the tourist off-season and it’s rainy which makes it difficult to get around.  So we knew we’d gotten a good package deal, but we didn’t know until we arrived that we were the ONLY people at the lodge.  They treated us like royalty, washing our laundry, babysitting Abigail during dinner, and taking a chatterbox 6 month old on safari.

Rachel and Abigail in Land Rover

We didn’t mind if she was shrieking in delight at the elands, but a nice older bird-watching couple might not have appreciated her joy the way we did.  Thankfully we didn’t have to figure that out, and we went gleefully shrieking at the animals all over the park, from the sunrise safari to the nighttime safari.

LLW km markerEnjoy it and go home refreshed.  We’re busy these days, as we’re starting to describe in our We Love What We Do series, and we’re about to get busier with the summer and short-term teams.  We needed to get away, just for a bit, but on the last day of vacation we realized that we were ready to go home, to do more of what we love.  The vacation had fulfilled its purpose, and we had learned how to take a baby on safari.

An Infrequent Flyer’s Guide to Using Frequent Flyer Miles – Part 1

by Rachel

(Matt) Over the years, I’ve lost hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles.  I imagine that if I could have somehow consolidated them, I could fly around the world… but they’re gone.  I lost some because I didn’t get around to signing up for a membership card with Northwest or Swiss or some other “random” airline.  I lost some because I didn’t have my card when I was at the airport.  And most of them were lost because they expired before I did anything with them.

I think I knew all along that frequent flyer programs were designed for, um, frequent flyers.  And the last several years, I’ve been more of a “take 1-2 really long flights each year” kind of flyer.  Any guesses how many miles we fly from Lilongwe to Nairobi to London to Los Angeles?  (See the bottom of this post for the answer. )

So is there some way to do something with all those miles besides let them expire?  I’ve determined to figure it out, and share the results with you.  Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Set Your Expectations

Again, the people who benefit most from frequent flyers are ones who fly often.  If, like me, you fly far, but not all that often, it’s good to put aside the idea of a free flight to Australia every year.  To get an idea of what you can expect, head over to milecalc.com and guesstimate how many miles you’ll fly in the next year.

Here are a few global landmarks to give you an idea of how many miles you’d earn:

  • LA > NYC and back:  4,924
  • LA > London and back:  10,912
  • LA > Tokyo and back:  10,964
  • LA > Moscow and back:  12,188
  • LA > Sao Paolo and back:  12,306
  • LA > Johannesburg and back:  20,770

Now, here’s approximately what you can redeem them for:

  • 500-5,000 – Magazines, travel accessories, flowers
  • 5,000-30,000 – Upgrade from coach to business class within the US, Caribbean, or Central America
  • 15,000-50,000 – Upgrade from coach to business class from USA > Europe, Asia, or Australia
  • 50,000-100,000 – Free RT flight within the lower 48
  • 70,000-150,000 – Free RT flight to Central America, the Caribbean, or Hawaii
  • 100,000-300,000 – Free RT flight from LA > Australia, Europe, Asia, Africa (be sure to drop by!)

In other words, plan on paying for that trip 8-10 times before you get it for free.  And you’ll need to fly there 2-3 times in coach before you can get that free upgrade to business class.

While it may be discouraging to see that they don’t go as far as we’d like, it is nice to see that most flyer mile collections can be used for something. The trick is to collect enough of them to use them, which we’ll cover in the next post.

ANSWER FROM ABOVE: Our most recent flight to LA: Lilongwe to Nairobi to London to Los Angeles was 21,166 miles round trip.  To fly through South Africa adds 1,500 more.  (Compare your latest trip at milecalc.com.  Got a longer trip coming up?  Commiserate with us in the comments.)

Home

by Rachel

(Rachel) For us, coming back to Malawi last September was coming home. During our summer in the US, we both missed things about Malawi… and were glad to return.

For missionaries, diplomats, and other expatriates, “home” can be hard to define. We make our home in a foreign country that is not our own, but we still have our “home country” where people welcome us every few years.

Which is why the IRS says our home address is Matt’s parent’s house in California. But our water bill goes to Area 47, Sector 5 in Lilongwe.

Making “Area 47” feel like home is something we’ve been working on since even before we moved here in May 2009. Our goal is to help our church grow into a self-sustaining, reproducing group of Christ-loving people – and that doesn’t happen overnight. So we didn’t want to come partially committed, camping out for a couple years or until something else came along. We want to be 100% invested here, with the marathon approach, until we’ve worked ourselves out of a job. To do that, we needed to plan to be in Malawi for a while.

Here’s a few ways we’ve been deliberately making Malawi our home:

1. We call it home. It seems like a small thing, but referring to Malawi as “home” reinforces it in our minds. Our vocabulary need to reflect our values, and it also helps remind us of our values.

Matt Studying at Desk

2. We made our house a place where we actually enjoy living. An experienced missionary advised us to bring our furniture from the States, and we’re glad we listened. (Thanks, Todd!) When you have a hard day and nothing goes the way you planned, sometimes it’s just nice to sit on a comfortable couch while you pray about your attitude. =) And we put pictures up on the walls. We’ve both moved around a lot, and it’s a big thing for us to finally put pictures of our families on the walls and know that they’ll be there for a while. All those things make our home a place where we can truly rest, and where we love inviting people.

3. We’ve made friends. We have people involved in our lives here. We’ve let people see the “real us” and we’ve shared life with them. Similarly, we also work harder to remember people we run into in the course of a day because we’ll likely be seeing them again, for many years to come – the cashier at the grocery store, the guy at the gas station who makes reed baskets, etc.

Ladies in Our Home

4. We make long-term decisions. Given the choice of a quick patch for our water heater or investing in a new one that will last for years to come, we’ll buy a new water heater. Or when we buy plane tickets to the US, they’re round trip flights originating from Malawi. We know that there are no guarantees (especially with water heaters!), but in general, we try to make decisions based on the assumption that we’ll be here for a long time.

5. We accept difficulties as challenges. We make a conscious determination that we won’t complain about the place that we live, as it’s our home now. It can be a struggle to find the best way to deal with corrupt government officials, what happens if one of our neighbors has a funeral, and how to live in a country that has malaria. But those are real issues our Malawian friends struggle with too, and we embrace those challenges as part of life here.

A World Lit Only by Fire

We temper all these things with the knowledge that this world is not our home and everything about life here could be taken from us at any moment. Africa has a way of reminding you of the uncertainty of this life. Our friends the Pretoriuses help us remember this. They were farmers in Zimbabwe and they had their farm taken from them by the government. They were given mere hours to gather up personal belongings and leave the property where they had invested everything. And this happened to them twice. Today, they have a farm an hour outside of town, with a cosy house and a beautiful garden. One day I asked Rene how she feels about investing time in the garden when she knows that it could be gone in an instant. She said that she can’t live in fear of being deported. Instead, she’ll do what she can to make their home a place where they can comfortably host people until they move, by their choice or the choice of another. Like the Pretoriuses, we hold this concept of home in an open hand.

We do plan to be in Malawi for as long as we can be useful here. And the end goal is not our comfort, but to be better servants. We long for our eternal home, the better city, where all things are made new and we see our Savior face to face. And yet, those eternal desires manifest themselves in earthly ways – like buying a big dinner table and a 4×4. We’re so thankful for the house, neighborhood, and friends the Lord has given us as a platform from which to serve. It’s good to be home.