Life on the Edge: Our First Packages Arrived!!!! :)

Thanks for the ideas for future posts...we're in the process of working on making some of those happen. But beware: the grounding of beef looks pretty disgusting if you ask me.

At the risk of seeming materialistic, we want to share with you some of the treasures that have recently come our way. It's really hard to express in an e-mail, FB post, or even a phone call how excited we are to receive boxes of love from people in the States. So, we'll do everything we can, including possibly embarrassing them on the internet, to let people know how much we appreciate the time, effort, love, and finances that they put into shipping us a box of goodies. Until a hug, squeeze, and smile can happen face-to-face, this will hopefully at least partially do the job.

As soon as we got to country, we learned that the water filter that a group of wonderful ladies donated to us arrived at my parents' house. So inside, we also requested a few other necessities that we could not find here at the time: index cards, (colorful!) permanent markers, contact solution, and rubberbands (which have since been found, but the more the merrier and we know that we'll use them all). Thanks to my parents for sending all of this our way!!! :)

What started as this...

...contained these (hooray for clean contacts and language learning!) and...

FILTERED WATER in large portions!!! We were using our hiking filter, a bucket, and a scoop. This is much more convenient!

THANK YOU TO CINDY'S PARENTS!!!

Mailed exactly one week later, but arriving at our place on the same trip from the capital due to the generosity of some friends there, was a package from Matt's brother in Texas. Boy, does he know Matt's tastes well! He told us he was mailing a Christmas gift, which will be the one we will be able to open on Christmas day (some others from other loving family members should be meeting us when we go in to the capital just after Christmas day). But he decided to fill the rest of the space with light food items. So now we can have flavored water, spice up our food with chiles (Matt was SUPER pumped about this), and enjoy some more salad dressings (which may be used for things other than salads since the salad selection is minimal to none...hooray for chicken flavorings!).