Getting ready to sell off most of our things tomorrow.
It’s kind of sad and a little scary, but mostly just draining.
No time to write, gotta get back to organizing.
But I wanted to say “hi”.
Hi.
Until a calmer day…
Tag: moving
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The Teeny Tiny Human Dilemma
Moving has forced me to deal with my life and my future with head on brutal honesty. In this “moving space” I have to answer for everything I own. It all needs to be justified and categorized and color coded (ok, not really… but if my friend Trish were here, she’d have different colored post-its all over the place).Sell it or give it away.
Store it.
Move it to Burundi.Sometimes this categorizing feels freeing, like a chance at a new pared down way of life. At other times it makes me mad. Mad that I have to categorize at all. Mad that I can’t just own something because it’s beautiful. I am tired of justifying the endless uses of a potato masher to myself before packing it in the “going to Burundi” box. I don’t get a moving truck, just the back of a vehicle and a couple of suitcases. There is simply no room for things that can’t prove their purpose to me. Which means you can usually find me following Ben around the house like a puppy with before mentioned potato masher in hand, waving it while yelling, “Do they have potatoes there?” “What about pasta, did you see any pasta?”
My boys, like all tiny humans, grow like absolute weeds and today I confronted the growing pile of itsy bitsy baby clothes that no longer fit my rolly poly 16 month old. They have been sitting there, staring at me, for months. Do I place them in storage in the hopes of having another teeny tiny human someday? Or, do I part with them here and now. Buying new clothes for a perfectly similar baby boy (just assuming, considering my track record) seems like a waste with all these cute baby clothes staring up at me. So does storing them if there’s never going to be another little man. Then there’s the additional, but unthinkable, variable… what if it’s a girl. That’s when my brain went into a tailspin and I began following Ben around, not with a potato masher, but with one big question… “Hunny, do you think we are going to have more kids?” Poor Coffee Guy, he just gave me a look like I had stabbed him in the side. Ok, so maybe that was a little too much pressure, but what am I supposed to do about this teeny tiny clothing dilemma?
You see, I already know what it’s like, opening those forgotten boxes. Staring at things you don’t remember ever owning and thinking to yourself, “Why on earth did I ever think this was worth keeping?” “How old IS this?” “Does this even work?” I’ve been there, I was the bride who stored her wedding gifts in her parents basement, never used, and took off for a faraway land. Is that kind of bride even in a category? Maybe like “Adventure Bride” or “Faraway Bride” or “Other Continent Bride.” Anyway, before I start coming up with even stranger bride categories, it’s here I stop, except to tell you that most of my little boy’s teeny tiny things now reside at the center for abandoned babies, Shepherd’s Keep, just two minutes from our house. I think they will be put to a much better, truer more beautiful use there. Letting go is a beautiful thing.
Luv,
Kristy (the mother of a toddler not a newborn)
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supper time
Every night around the supper table we ask each other about the day. The goal being that the meal becomes more than just a battle to get the kids fed, it becomes instead our time to connect and “debrief”. Our time to teach our kids about what it means to take an interest in one other, care for each another, and look out for each other.
It’s our way of changing the focus of the meal from “getting the kids fed” and “shovelling it in” to appreciating the beauty of good food and a shared meal. We try to slow down and make eye contact, and not focus on our kid’s plates and our plates and the glasses being tipped over… with a four year old and a one year old this is a work in progress, but that’s ok, because the message of the meal will be the same for years to come.
I always smile when four year old Myles straightens his back, looks around and pronounces in a grown up voice, “Mommy how was your day today?” Today I spent most of my day in worry and anxiety, and I couldn’t help but wish for a “do over.” A chance to go back and fully embrace the words below. To live them. To understand the beauty of trust. A chance to have a different answer at the supper table.
Don’t fret or worry.
Instead of worrying, pray.
Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, letting God know your concerns.
Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down.
It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life.
Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things
true,
noble,
reputable,
authentic,
compelling,
gracious—
the best, not the worst;
the beautiful, not the ugly;
things to praise, not things to curse.
Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard and saw and realized.
Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies.
~Philippians 4:6-9 (The Message)
The thing about a harmony is, it involves trusting others, and it involves more than just one voice. Here’s to letting go of fear and anxiety, and embracing one excellent harmony.
Kristy
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Packing for Burundi
I can’t say this has been an exceptional week. I was on the phone with Wesley from Cooked in Africa Films and he could pick it up over the phone. “You don’t sound your positive self Ben.” And I haven’t. It’s not so much the sheer mountain of logistics and details to organize, though the little things like visa’s for the five country-11 day road trip to Burundi do add up. It’s an all-round atmosphere thing.
Tension in the house with so many big decisions on our shoulders, and no more time to procrastinate has put the pressure on. Four year old Boy Adventurer picks up on this and cranks up the whining to level 7.5. Then teething Boy Biter adds in with non-stop whimpering and crying as four teeth try to break through his poor little gums all at once. Ending nearly a decade of life in Durban South Africa seems to be filled with frustration and a time-bomb of anxiety and pressure dangling just above our heads.
With all this boiling over frustration the best thing for me to do is go to Burundi, and leave Camera Girl with our two little darling boys and all the packing (hoping this blog post go’s unread by Kristy). Reality is that I need to set up our business in Burundi and open a bank account so that we can get a work visa to live in the country. Good news is that the ex-prime minister of the country and I have been talking and met a couple of times and he has his best lawyer working on this for us. Then I need to travel into the hills to make initial contact with all the washing stations, convincing them to send me daily samples of their parchment coffee and find a person who can help me start to collect these samples, label them and make sure the washing stations follow through on any agreements we make. Oh, yes, and the only other non-Burundian doing this just got death threats against him (don’t tell grandma). To add to the legal stuff there is the “find a house” issue. I don’t say issue lightly. Burundi is a country with no real-estate agents or websites with video walk through tours and emails inquiry buttons to find out more details. It’s a “drive around at night looking for dark windows because those are the houses no-one is living in and might be rentable” sort of place. I’m going to be doing a lot of night driving next week.
On the lighter side…. I do get to fly with a suitcase full of the first things we can leave in Bujumbura next week. And with that added pressure/joy, the packing for Burundi begins.
Coffee Guy
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Home is…
At the risk of sounding vain, I am going to share with you that one of my highest values is aesthetics. Just staring at beautiful things… man made or made by God fills my soul. The mountains, the lakes, the palm trees, the veins of a leaf, the sun light through the trees… and the cute dress, the lovingly hand knit blanket, the beautifully bound book, the amazing DIY project. It’s what makes me… me.
Having an appreciation for these “things” makes me a better wife, a better mom, a better photographer… and it grows my love for God. That might sound funny, but it’s true. When I look at something beautiful He’s made “WOW” my heart goes pitter pat. And when I watch someone at work, doing what they do best, creating something beautiful, I am in awe of how God places visions and gifts inside people that just, when nurtured… grow. The truth is… I am inspired by beautiful things, the bought and the not.
Soon I will be placing everything pretty I own, just about, into a vehicle headed for Burundi. That vehicle needs to travel 4,052 Kilometers through 3 or 4 border patrols over dirt, mud, tar and rock before it reaches Bujumbura. Once it’s there, if things don’t work out in our new home country… we have no clue how we would get our things out again. The same goes for the dog. Once we bring her in, I have no clue if we can get her out. The only thing I know we can get out is us. The thing that matters most… us.
It is a fragmented feeling to put everything that makes a house a “home” to you inside a vehicle traveling an insane distance through dangerous territory with no back up. By everything, I especially mean the driver. Ben is the heartbeat of this family and the love of my life. Sending him on such a volatile journey just so that we can have a few our “things” in Burundi could be something I deeply regret if it doesn’t go as planned. Scratch that, of course it won’t go as planned, it never does in Africa. What I meant is… if something happened to him how in the world would I cope?
So what if the curtains and towels and pots and pans and baking utensils and cookbooks and pillows and bedding and blankets and kids toys and kids books and even the medical supplies don’t make it? So nothin’. We would be fine, but having those things that remind us all that we are “home now” would bring us a whole lot of ease and comfort.
My nervousness about this trip is not being helped by my hubby who tonight said, “Oh… FOOD! We should probably pack some of that to eat on the way.” Yeah… let’s just say Coffee Guy is not into details, unless that detail involves coffee. Luckily for us, Ben had to delay his vehicle trip for a few weeks while we pray, on our knees, for all the vehicle funding to come though. In the meantime, he will have to fly up next week to house hunt and visit all the coffee farms he can. Oh, that reminds me… what should go up in that fist suitcase with Ben? Gotta think about that.
Luv,
Kristy
image via Pintrest
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Why Burundi, Pt. 2
In my last post I told you that as a family, we needed some change. But of all the places in the whole of the world, why Burundi?
Well, because we needed to face our fears and do it anyway! Because it would be easy to stay in Durban, grow old in Durban doing the same thing the rest of our lives (we’re good at it and it is oh, so comfortable for us here!). We knew that if we did that we would never experience the best life out there waiting for our family. The kind of life where you put your foot forward in the morning and don’t know what’s about to happen.
Burundi fit that description for us and when we came face to face with the needs of the coffee farmers, we knew we had the skills to help… if we could just risk normality. We never would have chosen Burundi if we had been given a choice of a random three countries (it’s the 2nd poorest country in the world, fresh out of civil war and rebel conflict and still in shock over decades of genocide and ethnic conflict). When I first told Kristy that Burundi might be the right place for us, she replied with, “Is that a city?”
But Burundi did have exactly what we needed. Coffee, people and potential. I live for potential. It’s one of my driving motivators. This place has more potential then any other african country to produce the best quality coffee on the continent. It’s a country that derives 96% of its foreign income through coffee. It’s population has the lowest GDP of any country in the world and my eyes were opened to an amazing opportunity. Long Miles Coffee Project is not just about me being a coffee guy, but its a chance to help an entire country through cupping coffee and showing it to the world. For our whole family to step out together into adventure, risk, faith, and turn our world view on it’s head. It’s revealing hidden treasure and rewarding the farmers who precariously grew this treasure never knowing if they would live to see the fruits of their labor. It’s about transforming whole communities. We are starting with their coffee but our hope is to change their lives holistically.
I want to see these farmers live a better life. Get a fair price for their coffee. Give them a hope that trying harder will pay dividends. Walk with them as communities as they become self sufficient, caring, grace filled places of hope. Connect farmers to agronomists whom I have invested in and mentored to share a greater hope then just more money and better crops. To show my boys that they can do anything they set their mind to. To live facing our fears. To be adventurers. Never hold back, especially when you want to. Stop living a life of “I should.”
Long Miles Coffee Project is my way to change our lives while attempting to change a nation. It has the potential to be “too hard”, to break us, to burn us out…. but I think it will do just the opposite.
Coffee Guy
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The Stress-O-Meter
Warning: These images have nothing to do with this blog post, except that looking at early morning moments with my boys makes me less stressed. You? Hmmm… doesn’t have the same effect on you? That’s weird.
Once I took a crazy spring break trip with four cars worth of college students on their way to Florida for some sun. When you live in Minnesota, where winter barely ever ends, a trip to sunny Florida is the stuff dreams are made of. On the 24 hour drive we had walkie-talkies between the cars, and we traveled in a pack. Traveling was tricky with so many people who all have bladders, bladders that can only hold so much. Our four cars equaled over 20 bladders with very individual needs.
That’s when my friend Amy, always ingenious, devised the Bladder Ladder. One being “We barely gotta go”, five being “Stop if the place doesn’t look too scuzzy”, and ten being “Oh boy, pull over before someone explodes”. Conversations between the cars went something like this, “Breaker-breaker-one-niner we’ve got an eight on the Bladder Ladder here. Over.” “Rodger that Green Monster and ten-four, that sounds BAD. We’ll find a ditch. Over.” To which a trucker, usually listening in, would reply, “You damn kids should get off this radio, what are you talkin’ about?”
I now use the Bladder Ladder with my four year old hooligan Myles and it works like a charm, except that his answer is always a “one”. Always. I have also introduced a new gauge to our family life, the Stress-O-Meter. At one you’re sittin’ pretty, at five you feel like you can hang on to all things sane without banging your hands in repetition against the sides of your head, at eight your heart is palpitating wildly and your pupils are dilated and you are sweating bullets, and at ten it’s over. At ten you’ve crunched up into a tiny weeping ball on the floor. No tens… yet. I have visions that this lovely little “o-meter” of mine will be an excellent gauge for the health of our family. Ok, probably not, but it will hopefully take the edge off… of someone.
Did you know that in just over a week Ben is hoping to drive our household goods through the heart of Africa to Burundi with our crazy neighbor Adrien as his side-kick? Did you know we still don’t have all the money we need for the vehicle they are supposed to “drive forth” in? Did you know I have no clue what to pack into that vehicle? Did you know that I worry that they will get hijacked or worse if they make this trip? Did you know that this week a cockroach crawled up my arm? It did! I flicked it off while screaming and running and doing a wacky string bean dance across the house. Then I laughed until I cried, along with everyone who witnessed it. Ben might not ever let me live that down. Ever. Did you know I sweat buckets when I’m stressed? Buckets. And I pace, I’m a pacer, I admit it. At least I don’t fart when I’m stressed. I’d never tell you that’s what my brother Brett does. Never ever.
I’m sitting at about a 5 right now on the fancy dancy brand spankin’ new Stress-O-Meter. No a 6, yeah… definitely a 6.
Wish me luck,
Kristy
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Why Burundi?
Twice in the last 24 hours I have had friends ask me “why Burundi?” It wasn’t the sort of “why?” that we get from scared relatives or rural-Africa-phobic types. It’s a deep question rooted in an intrinsic desire to understand this whole Long Miles Coffee Project thing. This post is my way of facing fears of mine about our move, my job, our complete change of life, and our relational upheaval. So in a sense, by answering the question “Why Burundi?” I’m going to try to understand this Long Miles Coffee Project myself.
Four years ago we knew a change was needed. The result was a journey of discovery of who we are as individuals. Kristy discovered “camera girl,” my discovery was coffee. Duh. I knew this, Kristy knew this, friends knew this, but there was way too much risk to say it out loud. Then one day we took the risk. We faced our fears and said “what if…” What if we leave our safe Durban job, change our way of life, and just jump into coffee (figuratively, though it would be interesting) and Kristy into photography? We said yes to a new way of life and had no idea what that would mean.
Kristy is meeting with a group of women every Friday to figure out how they can “feel the fear and do it anyway,” they call themselves The Awesome Pants Club. The goal? To stop dreaming of the life you want to live, but rather live the life of your dreams. Justifying doing what we love has been a way of life for us for years. “We would like too BUT… “it doesn’t fit our job description,” “it costs too much money,” “what if people don’t ‘get it’”… and then we stopped. We’ve struck that out. No more “I can’t” “I should” “I hope”. We’ve replaced those words with more empowering ones like, “I won’t” “I could” and “I know.” It makes a difference. Trust us! It has allowed us to make a leap and say, We could follow a big dream to help coffee farmers, and live in Burundi.” It’s our choice, and we’ve made it. When we stood up and said, “This is our choice, we’re going, no matter who’s on board or what the outcome is” a whole new world of possibility opened before us.
Until the next chapter,
Coffee Guy
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Shakin’ in my boots.
A guy with a whole lotsa fame to his name, Justin Bonello, looked me in the eyes this week and asked, “Aren’t you scared?” I had to think about it for a minute, and then I said “no.” It shocked me that I said no, I didn’t want to say no, and suddenly I got a little scared that I wasn’t scared. I wanted to say, “Getting ready to meet you, Mr. Superstar, had me shakin’ in my boots far more than the thought of moving to Burundi.”
I should be scared, for cryin’ out loud, I’m moving my kids to the middle of nowhere Africa… but I’m not. Maybe I need a slap in the face (please don’t). I don’t think it’s because I am extra brave or anything, but the truth is… I am scared not to go.
What would happen if we didn’t follow our dreams and just stayed in a place that was comfortable for us? I think that we would die a slow death. Risk is worth it, if it’s in pursuit of a dream that makes you “tick”. We were made for this, meant for this, we belong there. It doesn’t scare me, but the honest truth is… it totally overwhelms me. Right now I find myself unable to face the packing, the decisions, the “what to bring” lists, and the uncertainty of the months ahead. I’m tired and right now, it feels like too much for my heart to handle. I just want all the boxes packed, the goodbyes said, and the move finished…
…and I want French to somehow inject itself into my brain and stick there, magically!
Luckily for me I have three men in my life, two of them tiny, that make me follow rule #6 from The Art of Possibility (on my top 10 list for best reads of all time). What’s rule #6 you ask? Well, it’s “Quit taking yourself so damn seriously.” What are the other rules you want to know? There aren’t any.
This afternoon I am hoping to apply rule #6 and have a little fun in “the now” just like we did on the beach last week…
Luv,me
Moving has forced me to deal with my life and my future with head on brutal honesty. In this “moving space” I have to answer for everything I own. It all needs to be justified and categorized and color coded (ok, not really… but if my friend Trish were here, she’d have different colored post-its all over the place).
Luv,