q and a.

Okay dear friends.  Because I love you and because this blog is just as much for you as for me, I’m going to do a question-and-answer post.

Several of you have been emailing/facebooking/commenting with questions about our life.  Great questions.  Questions that others are repeating.  So I am gathering them together and will answer them here, for you all.

This is not meant in any way to replace personal responses, but I am a little slow to email these days, and, well, it’s just fun.  Thanks for caring about our life here.

Q. Does Amie get tired of getting passed around to all the locals?

Oh yes.  She doesn’t even really like to be held by her own parents, much less total strangers.  At first she fussed and turned her head from their pinches (Which are hard by the way.  Well, not that I know from experience.  They look hard.), but now she has just started hitting when people come too near.  She’s a fighter.  Poor, sweet Judah just bursts into tears when it happens to him.

Thankfully this kind of attention doesn’t happen quite as often in our city or neighborhood, because people are more used to seeing foreigners.  But when we are in tourist places they usually come in swarms.

Q.  Does Judah have homework?

Well, sort of.  His teachers started sending home workbooks with a page or two of practice from what he learned that morning, which equals maybe five minutes of work.

We are thankful that his preschool has been very laid back about school work so far.  They seem much more concerned with whether he is adjusting well and happy there.

The national education system here is known for being extremely rigorous.  All children are in preschool by age three – actually at least one year of preschool is a requirement to get into kindergarten (or their equivalent) at age five.  An American friend here said they had her daughter doing multiplication in preschool at four.  Yikes!  I am not so excited about the high-pressure learning environment, and honestly, we have a lot of questions about what that will look like when our kids are older.  We are thankful to live in a big city with options, and will eventually research that more.  For now, we are very happy for a fun, low-key place for Judah to make friends and learn some new skills.

Q. What kind of food are you cooking/eating? Are the kids liking it?

I really eased into cooking here thanks to a very patient husband who told me I could take as long as I wanted to start making dinner again.  We did a lot of South Asian take-out in those early days (which, by the way, is delicious and costs about as much as a homemade meal), and have awesome teammates who invited us over often (and still do!).

We eat sandwiches or leftovers for lunch.  For dinners, we have settled into a routine of eating mostly South Asian food with some American-style dinners too.  I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how many of my recipes I can still make here – although some things are hard to find and we have to get creative with substitutions.  Anju has been cooking dinner for us once a week.  She is an amazing cook and makes great, vegetarian South Asian food that is super inexpensive.

As I said before, Amelie basically eats anything and everything – even South Asian food, as long as it’s not too spicy.  Judah basically eats nothing.  Peanut butter and honey sandwiches.  Bananas.  The other day he decided he likes scrambled eggs.  Let’s just say it’s an ongoing sore subject in our house.

Chicken and ground beef and bacon and eggs are all fresh and very tasty here.  And so is the produce.  I could go on and on about the produce.  Tonight our family ate an entire fresh pineapple for dinner that cost fifty cents.

There are many challenging factors involved in cooking (and especially baking), like not having a real oven, and having to make sure to use purified water for everything, but I am slowly adjusting.

Q. Can you get pizza delivery where you are?

Yes, we can get Pizza Hut, Dominos, or Papa Johns.

The person taking your order over the phone speaks “English” but you should give yourself a good half hour to communicate what you want.  I ordered green peppers and onions and was told they didn’t have them.  So I went for the veggie pizza, which arrived with green peppers and onions.