Trophy Wife of the Week (TWOTW): Shenandoah S.

My bestie S. just inspired a new series of posts with this shot of her "Homecoming Hokie Cupcakes": mini bits of red velvet deliciousness smothered in butter-rich orange frosting. (I'm guessing on the butter, but she's a big Paula Dean fan, so it's probably not too far off the mark. ;) I also enjoyed the peek at her red, Kitchen Aid stand mixer in the background (Remember this post? Kitchen Aid mixers are a trophy wife must.) and the very-obvious cupcake carrier in the foreground. This lady carries her baked goods in style! Way to go, S.!

So from now on, on a quasi-weekly basis/whenever I get submissions, I want to showcase YOUR forays into the world of trophy wifing. (Or trophy wifing-in-training. That counts too.) Outtakes from your tennis lesson? Awesome. The latest craft project? Bring it. Your cat? Show us. We all love the cute, feline children. You, my friend, could be the next Trophy Wife of the Week.

Charity No.3: Chicumbane, MZ

(Here's another story from my time to Mozambique! You can read my previous posts about the trip here, here, and here.)

Between eight team members, two missionaries, and three MKs, we easily had (at the very least) nine cameras and 2,000+ photos of our twelve days in Mozambique and South Africa. There is one day of photos, however (the second Thursday, to be precise) when yours truly mysteriously vanished. Was I on a spiritual walkabout, communing with God amidst the beauty of the African bush?

Haha. I wish.

I was actually sick as a dog, holed up in my tent, and wishing Bert was there to make me toast and tea. (The thought of eating and drinking was revolting, of course, but the idea of having him close by was comforting.) That’s right: I was the team’s lucky and sole recipient of the self-titled “24 Hour Bush Bug.” Go Team Sarah.

After spending a few nights in Maputo, our team camped for a luxurious three days/four nights next to a church in a small town called Chicumbane. We spent one full day there, then drove deeper into the bush the next morning for the day. (This was the day we spent in Manjacaza.) That night, while driving back to camp over teeth-jarring roads that make PENNDOT look like God’s gift to transportation, I started to get a headache.

Now, in and of itself, that is a fairly normal occurrence. I get headaches all the time. I even have an app on my iPod to track them and rank them according to how bad I want to die. On a scale of “Nothing” to “Give Me a Lobotomy,” this was somewhere around “Did I Just Run Into a Brick Wall?,” but given the bumpy ride and the long day we’d spent out in the sun, I brushed it off and tried not to think about it.

Everyone was tired by the time we got back to camp, but I was exhausted. As in, "too exhausted to eat," which is not something I usually suffer from. (They don’t call me Hoover for nothing! And yes, unfortunately, they do call me that…) Upon our arrival, I immediately went to bed and slept straight through till six the next morning, quite the feat considering the roosters start yakking around three and the witchcraft drummers never stop.

I woke up feeling tired, more headache-y, and – fun! fun! – nauseous. I got up and went through the morning routine, hoping I'd feel better if I started moving around, but to no avail. (For some reason, I always think this will work. It never does.)

Well, to shorten a long story full of too much information, we all decided I should just take it easy that day. (Decided? That makes it sound like we sat around and discussed it. No, I physically could not get off my air mattress and they refused to bring it in the 4x4s. So that was kind of the kicker. ;)

One of our resident missionaries, Adrienne, stayed behind with her munchkins to keep an eye on Gimpy and to give the kids a break from the car. (Adrienne is like the African version of the Pioneer Woman, although she is very modest and would never tell you that. ;) She closed my tent when it was cold, opened it when it was hot, and made me sit up and get some fresh air halfway through the day.

And it worked. (Super Moms are the best. I hope I’m like her someday.) My nausea went away sometime mid-morning and I slept till about four (minus my “fresh air break”), despite the bands of children staring into my tent and wondering what was wrong with the white lady in her funny pajamas. The rest of the team did not get back until long after dark, so I spent the rest of the evening in my tent journaling, playing solitaire on my iPod, and munching on bits of Portuguese rolls. (Fun Fact: Mozambique has an amazing supply of carbohydrates. Many thanks to the Portuguese for infusing this bit of Western culture.)

All this has been a very long explanation to explain why I was in my tent, alone and in the dark, when choir practice started.

Now, I've said before how much I love African music. I don’t think I need to explain that much further. So when choir practice started up a mere twenty feet from my tent, I was glad. The chorus of foreign female voices permeating through the dark and quiet camp was beautiful and calming. And strangely familiar.

Where have I heard this before? (And yes, that question is as crazy as it sounds considering I was sitting alone in the dark on a continent I had spent a grand total of three weeks on. But it is not crazy when you remember I was kind of sick. ;) Technically speaking, I had not heard it before.

But then it came to me. When I lived in the Berkshires, my friends and I spent several weekends at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Regina Laudis is a Benedictine community famous for – among other things – their Gregorian chants. The Abbey observes the full, eight hour Divine Office, which begins with Matins at 1:50 in the morning and ends with Compline sometime around 9.

Over the span of two weekends, I think I made it to Matins only once – must be in the middle of an REM cycle ;) – but it was well worth it. Even though the chants are in a different language (Latin), the sonorous chorus of women praising God in the quiet dark is not something you easily forget. Nor is it something I expected to find thousands of miles away smack dab in the middle of a culture equally as far removed from the hills of New England.

There is no moral to this story and I have no punchy point to end on. Only the thought that as I lay in my tent and listened to these women sing in the dark of the light, I marveled at how true worship sounds the same in pretty much any language. And that is an awesome, awesome thing.

Culture No. 30: Winning!

I have terrible luck when it comes to winning contests. During my entire childhood career, I won exactly one coloring contest, which Sister V. won as well - there's a photo somewhere of us touting our respective Crayola prizes – and to this day I question the legitimacy of my victory. Did Mama V. swing by Ames on the way home and pick up an extra set of crayons to keep me quiet? Quite possibly.

Last year, I won my first blog giveaway: a toddler’s bathrobe, which – while super cute – was obviously not something I had any use for. So I gave it to my cousin for his daughter and stopped entering giveaways for things I didn't need. It worked. My bad luck returned and my blog giveaway winning streak ended at one. Until now.

Giveaways for things I can use (or really, really want ;) are totally still fair game, so recently I entered a contest on one of my favorite blogs, Design Mom, and won a mural from Modern Murals. Sweet! I knew just the place for it!

While the wall at the foot of our bed continues to rock this photo collage I put up in June, the opposite wall was still really, really bare - the perfect spot for a new piece of art. Bert and I spent a few hours on the Modern Mural website agonizing between something Foster-esque (his favorite architect) versus something warmer, and eventually decided on the later. We chose #4301, which sports yellow gingko leaves on a dark, wood plank background. The mural was here within a week (Our UPS man was so impressed I got a package from Cali. Ah, NEPA…) and unboxed in minutes. And then it sat on the floor. For a week or so. Or more. Go me.

Finally I got tired of tripping over it, so last night I conscripted Bert and his drill for an hour of hanging fun. Usually I try to hang pictures around 57” on center – the “museum standard,” so I’ve googled, although I’ve never asked any of my museum friends if it’s true, so take that with a grain of salt – but because our headboard takes up the lower portion of the wall, Bert pointed out that it might be better to center the mural between the top of the headboard and the bottom of the molding. So I made a ‘mural mock-up’ out of newspaper and went to town:

The consensus? To stick with the 57" mark. It's hard to tell from the itty-bitty photo, but centering the mural between the headboard and the ceiling made the room feel really small. And it's small enough as it is. ;) A few off-the-mark holes later - if you have to spackle one, you might as well spackle three, right? - and we were in business! (And on a side note, that baseball bat is a souvenir Bert and I picked up on our 'engagement weekend' in Cooperstown, NY. Not a reflection on the safety of our neighborhood! ;)

I love it. The scale is perfect and the extra color is very, very welcome. We still may be curtain-less, but at least the walls are done, right? :) I'd like to buy a pair of clip-on lights for the headboard so we don't have to get up and down at night to turn off the lights, but I struggled to find something reasonable that doesn't scream "college student!" or "architect!" (No offense to my fellow archies, I've had enough of those tensor lights for about five lifetimes.) Any ideas? Other than the Clapper? ;)

(And a big thank you to Modern Mural and Design Mom. You totally made our week! :D)

Top 100 Ways You Know You Live In NEPA No.98

98. Your pastor refers to the Court of the Gentiles in the second Jewish temple as "the size of two Beaver Stadiums." You know it's football season when... (Fun Fact: Beaver Stadium, with an official capacity of 106,572, is the second largest stadium in the Western Hemisphere and the fourth in the world. Yeah! Go Pennsylvania!)

And while we're on the schedule of college football, yay Virginia Tech for getting back into the Top 20! Is Penn State even up there? Hmmm... No, I think not. ;)

Culture No. 29: Fall Decorating

In the NEPA spirit of over-the-top decorating, I went out yesterday and bought not one, but THREE pumpkins for our front porch. (I also took down the baskets of impatiens that have been dead for about a month ago now. Whoops. I always miss that unofficial day when it's okay to switch over to mums. Like when I secretly listen to Christmas music in July, I live in fear that I'll switch flowers too early and be summarily ostracized and excommunicated for lack of proper seasonal observance. So I just didn't buy any this year. C'est la vie. I digress.)

Bert and I tried to get pumpkins at a local super-farm (aka corn mazes, hay rides, cider donuts, the whole shebang) this weekend, but as soon as we pulled into the overflow parking lot and I saw the line to get on the school bus to take you to the farm that was still miles away, I was overcome by a sudden fit of stroller-induced claustrophobia and decreed that I did not want a pumpkin that bad. So we ended up doing a little leaf-peeping and drinking pumpkin spice lattes at Dunk's instead. An acceptable substitute, methinks.

These pumpkins came from the 'flower tent' that springs up seasonally in an abandoned lot across the street from the grocery store. (Mid-summer, it is the 'fireworks tent.' ;) I went there after my dentist appointment, and even though I had this weird novocaine-induced Elvis thing going on with the left side of my face, the guys there were still really nice and even helped me carry the pumpkins to the car. But when I got home, I realized we had four front steps instead of three (Who's observant? This girl!) and now I feel one pumpkin short of a whole patch. (Seems like that's been the story a lot lately...)

This is how it starts. It's one little white pumpkin now, and before you know it, we'll be like that crazy house on Route 11 that has no less than six blow-up monstrosities in the front yard. Even now, it's all I can do to keep myself from buying corn stalks for our porch columns. Oy vey. This time of year does funny things to people...

Culture No. 28: Heynabonics

In college, I took a linguistics course that I absolutely LOVED, even though I was the only one in the class who could appreciate Boston accents. (All the Southerners thought they were "obnoxious.") It was both amazing and revealing to see how attached people are to their local dialects and how thoroughly they identify with them. I'll be the first to admit: I always say "Wilkes BERRY" in lieu of "Wilkes BAR" for fear that people will think I'm from NEPA and treat me accordingly. I can't help it. It's the New England snob in me. ;)

So in the spirit of furthering our linguistical education, I'd like to share this little introduction to "Heynabonics," courtesy of my friend T. It doesn't get more Pensyltucky than this. <3 it.

Charity No.2: Manjacaza, MZ

Between my previous trip to Uganda and this past month’s trip to Mozambique, I’ve been vaccinated for everything from Hep A to Yellow Fever, yet I still managed to come home with a doozy of a cold. Excepting a fever, I've had all the symptoms of malaria, so my psychosomaticism has been in crazy mode the past week or so. (Confession: I went out last Tuesday – braving all malarial symptoms – solely to buy a thermometer. And I may have checked my temperature hourly. JUST TO BE SURE!) But my temperature has stayed consistently normal for me (usually not higher than 97°), so I think I’ll probably survive. Huzzah!

In the meantime, it’s been frighteningly easy to slip right back into the old PA routine, like nothing ever happened. I’m generally not one prone to large swings of any type of emotion – I’m not expecting a Hallelujah Chorus to start following me around or anything – but I do think it’s important to reflect on my time in Mozambique. What did happen and how does it change things?

Well, to be honest with you, I am still figuring that out. That’s why I’ve been home for two weeks and barely written a peep about it. ;) So rather than give you a day-by-day journal account of the trip - I tried to write one of those for Bert and only made it to Day Three! - I've decided to do an experience-by-experience account instead. A “highlight reel,” if you will, of moments that really stuck out to me and are somewhat indicative of the trip as a whole.

(If you need a quick brush-up on where and why I went, you can read some background here and here. I am going to assume you’ve read those and jump right into things. ;)

I’ll start with the photo I posted early last week. This was taken in a small village called Manjacaza. Manjacaza is in the bush. The way-far-away bush. The “only place that didn’t serve us Coca-Cola” bush. That's how remote they are. Even the American capitalists can't find them. ;)

We were camping in a not-quite-so-remote part of the bush (i.e. Coke was aplenty) about three hours away and arrived in Manjacaza via our two Speed the Light 4x4s sometime around midday. (Time is mostly irrelevant in these places, so I judged things by mealtimes. It was before lunch. ;) We’d come for a church service, which started when we arrived and was held underneath a large shade tree in the center of the village. As the guests, we were given molded plastic lawn chairs. Everyone else sat on bamboo mats.

Like church services in the States, theirs started with music – my favorite part of any African service. I love how they sing. I love that they sing. I love that everyone – boy, girl, man, woman – belts each song out as loud as they can – regardless of skill – with absolutely no sign of embarrassment or self-consciousness. I wish we sang like that here.

And I love that they dance. Let me tell you: the older women in this town could really break it down. And they did. All the time. For every song and for any reason. It was absolutely fabulous.

At each village and church we visited in Mozambique, three of our musically inclined team members played through a small set of Portuguese worship songs they’d learned ahead of time. Most of the villagers in Manjacaza only spoke Shangaan – the local dialect – but when they started playing one lone woman still got up to dance. And while I watched her dance, I felt God say to me, “Get up. Dance with her.”

Uh, what? (Why, yes. I am that unbelievably well spoken when I talk back to God. You'd think if I was going to be sassy at least I'd be smooth about it.) Sure, I love that they dance, but I’m not really a “get up and dance” person myself. That’s my mother. Surely you must have us confused.

“No. You were okay with coming halfway around the world and now you won’t do this one simple thing for me? Get up and dance.”

It was a complete and utter Namaan Moment. Do you know that story from the Bible? It’s one of my favorites because it’s a situation I find myself in all the freakin’ time. (Slow learner? You could say that...) Namaan was an army commander who suffered from leprosy. He traveled miles and miles to ask Elisha to heal him, then got all cranky-pants when Elisha told him to go jump in the Jordan seven times.

“I could’ve jumped in a river at home, Elisha,” he said. “Thanks for wasting my time.” (This is the Unofficial Sarah Paraphrased Version, of course. The USPV? Sounds like a disease… Maybe that’s what I caught.)

Fortunately for the Nam-ster, his servants pointed out that he was being ridiculous. “My father, if the prophet had told you to do some great thing, would you not have done it? How much more, then, when he tells you, ‘Wash and be cleansed’!” (That is from the NIV, just to give this some sort of legitimate edge. The whole story’s in 2 Kings 5, if you’re interested.)

So I hedged that God had a point. I was all up for long plane rides and sketchy border crossings and brushing my teeth with bottled water, but I wouldn't dance? Like Namaan, I suddenly felt kind of ridiculous. What was I doing besides saving up pride for some sort of nebulous, Super Christian feat that would mean nothing to no one but me? Bah.

So I got off my buns and danced. Is it possible to look cool while dancing in Tevas? Absolutely not. (Do I still love them? Absolutely yes.) Do I dance as well as Mama V.? Not on your life. But was I obedient? Yes. And I'm glad I was because it was surprisingly fun. (And they gave me a bag of fresh cashews for my skillz. That was nice. :) For a brief moment - regardless of language and culture and everything else that makes us different - my lady friend and I worshipped our God together. And that was pretty cool. I'm glad he pulled me out of my seat.