Ex Patria

Busy is good

We're keeping busy.  Things we did today:

• Complete clean-up of Alan and David's room - not a speck of dust (or toy) on the floor
• Got the Lego box from the attic
• Got puzzles from Leah from the attic
• Did puzzles with Jacob and Leah for a while
• Had a giant lunch with three helpings for every child
• Swung in the hammock with all kids
• Jumped on the trampoline
• Exclaimed at the witches' ring in the backyard
• Fell helplessly in love with felt food
• Wrote another blog post (heh!)

Things that are on my to-do list now:

• Car caddy for Jacob's birthday in October
• Felt food for Leah for Christmas (like this and I totally need to have this party for her at some point in the next five years or so)
• Also a fabric doll house.  I mean, how could I not?
• And also, this jumper

What do I do about the witches' ring?  That's what we call these:

 

Cool, eh?  I suppose they will go away once I run over them with the lawn mower which is on the to-do list for tomorrow.  I'm a bit freaked because Leah showed great interest and Leah eats everything and I'm pretty sure these are not for consumption.  Too bad, really, since mushrooms of all kinds are about the only things that still grow well in my yard.  Wet summer, thousands of slugs, some kind of tomato rot and grape rot (due to the wet weather).   Not my most successful gardening year.

Btw, the original picture had the rose climbing thingie in it.  I erased it with Photoshop CS5 in about two seconds with the new content-aware feature.  This seriously rocks:

I didn't bother brushing it up, just wanted to see what it could do.  I'm very impressed.

Postponing your life. Not.

In one of those strange coincidences that makes life interesting, I read an article this morning that resonated very strongly with me.

Meg Riley, the still-new senior minister of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (MY church!) wrote in the latest issue of Quest:

We are all coming and going, all the time. Life is a rhythm of transitions held by these two major journeys into infinity, birth and death. If you are like me, though, you miss a great deal of your life telling yourself that real life will begin after a major transition looming ahead—after you graduate from school, find a new job, get rid of a horrible roommate, meet with your parole officer, get married, get divorced—right after that, then life will begin!

That’s how we miss our lives, miss what we are given each morning as a gift, fail to notice the small moments of grace in our coming and going every day. Rumi, a Sufi poet, wrote:

The life gift is given
And then taken away.
It is not for us to know why, or how.
Grace comes with the creation word, Be.
That gate opens without hesitating.
Between the push of Buh
And the smooth launch of ee,
There is an infinite moment
When everything happens.
Grace comes with the creation word, Be.
That gate opens without  hesitating.

Read the whole thing.  It made me cry because it came at a time when this was especially true in our lives.  Thank you, Meg, for expressing my sentiments much better than I ever could.

One day...

... I will boldly go where no woman has gone before! Or something like that.

The waiting game

Sometimes it seems to me that we are spending our lives as if we were sitting in the departure hall of an airport, waiting to board a plane that keeps being delayed, canceled, re-scheduled. Making matters worse, we don't know where the plane is going, once it is actually going.  So we keep repacking our bags, from tropics to arctic, but we can't really unpack the bags, either, even if we get to stay at the airport hotel for some nights. 

It has been this way for almost three years now.

In order to understand this, you have to know a little bit about how AID consultant work, well, works.

USAID is running aid projects all over the world.  Once they decide to run a new project somewhere, they come up with a fancy acronym (like, CLERP or EPT) and put out an RFP - a request for proposals.  Whichever consultancies are interested in running the project now put together a bid - complete with budget, goals, and a team.  Enter Doug.  

He checks with various consultancies for possible projects.  Sometimes, he reminds them of his existence, more often he gets requests from the companies about bidding with them.  It's not easy to decide which company to bid with.  Who has the best chances?  Who is the incumbent, if there is one? Who offers the best package?  He's more or less committed to a company that has had a fabulous string of lost bids - but they do give him regular short term work, so they get dibs on him.  The big consultancies don't like it if you bid with multiple companies for the same position ("non-exclusive" is the technical term) and like you to sign something accordingly.  Smaller companies sometimes do it. (USAID allow this, btw, for non-vital positions.)

Once you decide this, you need to submit a CV, sign papers, promise various things like being available when the project starts.  You negotiate moving allowances and educational expenses.  Sometimes, at this stage, a company pulls out, horrified by the four kids and the school fees they'd have to pay.

[This happened to us, once.  "You homeschool, right?  No?  Oh, sorry."  So we didn't go to Haiti.  Sometimes, refusals can be all the luck.]

You agree to pay for one or two kids out of pocket.  You gamely do your part and after four to six weeks of this, the bid is submitted to USAID.

And then USAID ruminates on the bids.  And you wait for a decision.

USAID is a government agency, which means the wheels turn slowly.  Typically, a bid will be awarded within two to four months but it can also take a lot longer.  Rarely it will take less.