2010 in Review

As the calendar closes on 2010, we have been using the last days between Christmas and New year's Day to look back, spurred on not only by impulses of end of the year reckoning, but also by countless questions from our families and friends here in California about our experiences in Africa.  It has been an amazing year, full of adventure, accomplishment, and sacrifice.  We have grown immensely since we left the USA on September 28, 2009, especially when we compare it with a hypothetical life in which we stayed in the USA and continued working at UCLA and AIDS Project Los Angeles.  Although Luc had already been a high school teacher before this, full-time teaching in a formal school setting was a brand new experience for Janet, and teaching in Africa was like being a first year teacher all over again for Luc.  We pulled off several big extracurricular projects, including student participation in the regional Science Fair, English theater, and REDES/JOMA conferences.  Linguistically we are now both fluent in Portuguese, even though it has come at the cost of our Spanish, which is now hopelessly jumbled with its Romance neighbor in the language processing part of our brains.  We can also communicate in ChiChewa, the local African Bantu language in our town and the national language in Malawi, so even though that skill has no real application outside of the Malawi/Tete Province area and we'll probably forget it as soon as we leave Africa, it is a lot of fun, and brings endless laughs to the locals who hear us garble their tongue.  We've also grown as a married couple.  Considering that we've spent every day and night together for the past 15 months, except for the week each of us went to lead training, and we work together at our school, and we work together in our extracurricular projects, and we do all our domestic work together, and we're together during our vacations and travel, one of our friends commented that this last year of marriage is the rough equivalent of ten years of marriage in the United States.  We've stayed healthy, with only one bout of dysentery between the two of us, but no malaria and no crazy tropical diseases so far.  We both lost between ten and twenty pounds during our year in Africa, but regained the weight during our month back in the United States during the food rich holiday season.  Financially, we had to forgo thousands of dollars of income, and Luc had to put his PhD project on hold. Spiritually we are both in very good places.  Considering the amount of sacrifice and hard work we have put into serving our school and our town, our karma account must be in the positive.  Often times when Janet questions the value of our mission Luc challenges her to think of something more noble or worthwhile than then helping so many AIDS orphans and desperately poor families in Africa?  2010 has been a memorable year for us, full of experiences that will be with us for the rest of our lives.  Let's hope 2011 is equally successful and continues to be full of growth and joy.