We have been staying in a guest lodge while we look for a home. It’s been a little challenging, but we are okay with it. We’ve had few opportunities for housing, and when we do, someone has usually already placed a deposit on it. We are trusting God for this one. That’s all we can do at this point!

While staying at the guest lodge we’ve enjoyed many things. The first team, consisting of mostly US Ministry of Hope board members, has stayed here along with the second group from Tulsa. It’s been really nice having other English speaking foreigners around. We don’t see them that much while we are at the lodge, but it’s nice hearing voices outside in plain English, and not just in shouting Chichewa.

The other day, actually it’s been about a week ago, I started scratching my lower back. I had been bitten by a mosquito and couldn’t resist the urge to scratch. The next day, that area of my body had a much larger rash-like spot on it. I didn’t think much of it other than to stop using the towel they put in the bathroom. We also switched the sheets back to the ones we brought, thinking that somewhere in their laundry process they had placed the sheets over a bush for drying. I thought this because I’m not usually allergic to chemicals, or many plants for that matter, but Joni is allergic to many of both and she hadn’t gotten it. It was about a day later, maybe two, when she realized she had it too. We didn’t think much of it, during the day it was easy to ignore, and we just thought it would slowly go away. It wasn’t anything we had seen or had gotten before, so we kept researching it as much as we could. When the itching had gotten so badly by Sunday night that Joni was loosing sleep over it, we decided to go to the clinic. We went to African Bible College Clinic, and waited only ten minutes or so before they started our process. It didn’t take long before we saw the doctor and he said, “Yep, it looks like you’ve got some bug bites.” So, he wrote a few prescriptions for us, “body paint”, itch cream and antihistamines. We made it out of there in less than 45 minutes with a total bill including prescriptions of under $40US. We now are the proud owners of two new Malawi Health Passports! They use these instead of keeping files on everyone. You take it with you when you need to see the doctor, he writes in it your diagnosis, prescriptions and instructions on taking meds. They even stamp it “Paid” when you’re done, provided you paid. Anyway, we are on the road to recovery, though it’s a bit slow and has a strong medicine smell.

Justin