So what are you actually doing?

A glimpse of a unique season for us.  Winter farm days mean wood fires, watching chickadees and juncos and titmouses peck at our birdfeeder.  Listening to the slate-green snow-melt river rush by through the leafless trees.  Sitting on the front porch, or in the kitchen, reading.

Books are perhaps the primary delight of this season of living by a library.  Buechner and Gawande are current favorites.  And I have a stack of novels.

Occasionally, there is the chance to host Luke and a medical-school-mate.

Sundays at our local church, where we receive the grace of unquestioning friendly inclusion.  I even got asked to play the piano a couple of times, which I bombed as I didn't even know the hymns, but everyone thanked me so graciously anyway.

 Long walks and jogs and bike rides through the countryside, now that the snow is melting.

Medical appointments, the long-delayed dental work and that sort of thing.

Farm projects, like clearing brush or fixing a gutter or roof.

Phone/skype/video meetings.  Lots of them.  The world hasn't stopped just because we are on sabbatical, so we still pray for our teams, call them, mentor and listen and hope.  Uganda came through elections without too much disaster.  Burundi has made progress in appointing a Board for the Kibuye hospital, and we're praying for that to enable our evacuated Watts family to settle their work plan.  Our South Sudan team is settling into exile in Arua, studying the Moru language and making connections with the Sudanese community.  In Kenya, we pray for the new families learning language, for ongoing medical miracles, for the hard work of building community. Some weeks we spend an hour a day on this, some weeks it can be several hours a day.

And Swahili study.  Yes, we are trying to put in time every day listening and repeating, reviewing things we never really learned well.

Because later this year we hope to return to Naivasha, Kenya, where we will be posted to the Naivasha District Hospital,  a busy government hospital to provide OB and Neonatal care to the women who work for poverty-level wages in the vast export flower farms.  It will be an opportunity to teach medical officer interns once again, and to support a very needy place.  We still be supported as always through Serge, and continue as Area Directors.  Our organization embraces the player-coach model, so as we coach our 7 teams, this will be our player work.

So this month of February slips by, from snow to sprouting bulbs.  We are surprisingly content with the simplicity of this season.  Perhaps because we know we'll be back to stress-packed days of non-stop need, this long inhale is sweet.