Maya Joy and Elise Ann

Two little blessings arrived on Nov.11 at 3am. Maya Joy and Elise Ann (left to right). They were removed by c-section as they were breach and transverse. Maya came out first and about five minutes later Elise appeared. Maya was 6lbs 1 oz and Elise was 5lbs 4oz. We love them!
We apologize for the tardiness of these photos.

Maya's first passport photo...it seems superhuman to get a shot that includes eyes open, head forward, mouth closed etc. With some cropping this one might work.
This is Maya forgetting that she is not still in the womb.


Uncle Dan and Father Andrew kangarooing the babies to keep them warm after arriving home from the hospital.

Grandpa Sargent with his first grandchild.

If you get our letters, you saw a different version of this picture, but we thought this one was pretty funny since all of us (including the animals) are looking the wrong way.

Having dinner with friends.

Andrew teaching agriculture students about beans. He had met the teacher on the road and gave him some seeds from Canada to try with his classes at the local technical school. A few weeks later Andrew took a friend of ours to the school to show him around and found the class just getting ready to plant the seeds Andrew had given them. The teacher was super excited and asked Andrew to teach the class. There are lots of opportunities at this training school, and Andrew has an "in" with them now, so there's a good chance part of our work in the future will include some time at KTS.

Andrew and our goat. We have lots of property to graze the goat on, but it needs pretty close supervision--it frequently runs away. We met it on the road one night while returning from a walk, we've chased it out of our neighbour's kitchen, etc.

Our farm from the hill behind our orchard. You can't see the apples very well in the small version of this picture, but we've got lots! Andrew and our landlord estimate between 1.5 and 2 tons! We hope to be able to pick, sell, and juice them before we leave for North America. Andrew has started some grafting with different varieties and root stocks to broaden the options available. The only trees available grow huge, take a long time to bear fruit, and are susuptible to lots of diseases. Andrew is doing some experimenting with building trees that won't have these same problems and that will hopefully help apple farmers in the coming years.

Us and our friend David on the bridge in front of our house.

Picking apples with Kamal and some kids from the orphanage across the street.

Me, our new kitten, and the inside of our house. Hopefully by now we have a woodstove in this room as well to help with heating and cooking.

Grinding grain for our goat. So far our goat has been all expenditures and not much for returns, but we should have baby goats and milk soon, so we'll see if it is worth all the work! This is called a jata and is used to grind grain and beans.

Andrew in our attic growing mushrooms. This was his first attempt and was very successful. He's doing some experimenting on growing techniques and ways to reuse the non-natural resources like the plastic so cost and waste are low. There's a good market for mushrooms, and none available, so we hope this will be a good small business for a family one day.

Part of our plum harvest. After coming to Jumla at a season when you could only get rice, dried beans, potatoes, and a type of cooking greens, we were SO thankful to have all the fruit we could eat. Since the plums we've had peaches and an early crop of apples. Now the main crop of apples should be ready.

A top bar bee hive in Jumla. This isn't the traditional hive in this area, but lots of people use them, and for business-level production, this is the way to go--at least right now. A lot of Andrew's time is spent talking with beekeepers about the pros and cons of this hive and learning the way people manage bees in Jumla. He has already designed a honey extractor (which allows the bees to reuse their comb instead of needing to rebuild it all after the honey harvest), attempted variations of local methods for catching swarms of absconding bees, and combined 2 weak hives to get a stronger one that has a chance to survive and produce honey. There are a few men who call themselves beekeeping "addicts" who spend lots of time with Andrew talking about bees and watching his experiments. Selling honey is very profitable, and requires low overhead and very little land--all pluses for helping families support themselves. Andrew's really working hard to test his ideas and inventions on our own bees before trying to pass the ideas along

Tension in Nepal

I am not sure how much of Nepal hits the news in the west so I thought I would do a small update. A week ago several hundred thousand maoists descended on Kathmandu to "topple the government". So far it hasn't toppled but they are working on it. The city has been closed down for the last 6 days and it will continue to be shutdown into the indefinite future. Roads, shops, banks, etc are all closed down so food is getting a bit scarce and more expensive. The economy can't take much more as industry has been steadily declining because of the last few months of power outages, road blocks etc and now the current crisis. I went out on my bike today to have a look at the protests/demonstrations and so below are a few of the pics and videos. The protests and riots are an odd mix- street dance parties in some places and armed gangs in other places. The police and army are in high alert mode and are patrolling streets and supervising the happenings.

We are planning to go to Jumla in 6 days from now but in the current state that isn't going to happen...we'll see how it all goes.

Our new home!!

We have a new home! This is the house and land we are renting in Jumla, beginning May 15th. That means we have just 2 1/2 months left of official language study and then off to the village. I've got about 15 minutes before the power goes off, so this will be short, but we wanted to share these pictures with you all.

Part of the apple orchard and our landlady threshing rice. She's a pretty tough lady and both she and her husband are hard workers. They have other land in another village, so they will move there and rent this place to us.

Our bedroom. It's a bad picture, but you get a little bit of an idea of the inside.

Us in front, actually the side of the house. This is the traditional Jumlian style. Under the white mud is solid stone construction.

Our "livingroom" with our friends John, Ali, and Tristan. The landlord is going to knock out the wall on the left to connect it with the kitchen so we can have a large common room for cooking, eating, etc.

The front view. There is so much more to say about all this and we're SUPER excited to be able to live here. More later!

A brick for you all.

This seems to be our new system--post pictures when we get a flash of internet and come back whenever we get access again to add the captions. I think it works out that we're updating this twice as often if we do it this way. :-)
I'm actually INSIDE the house as I type this. This is the first time we've been able to get internet in our house--usually we have to go up on the roof to catch the signal from our landlord's house across the street. Today, for some reason, the signal is penetrating the concrete... I don't know why, but I sure am thankful.
We also have full strength lights right now--another luxury these days. We don't have power for 5 hours in the morning and 5 hours at night, and lately when we were supposed to have power, we've only had "half line" which is the Nepali-ized English for "brown out." Therefore we've been burning lots of candles and using our headlamps--even when the electricity is on. I'm realizing that getting used to things in stages is sometimes harder than getting the whole deal at the beginning. We had such reliable internet and power for awhile, now we don't have it much at all--and just when I thought that I had a right to these things, I learn again that there are all kinds of opportunities to get cranky and that it isn't worth getting cranky over most of them. I'm seeing again that there are many, many things to be thankful for and that joy shouldn't be based on availability of internet access, but on the privilege of resting in God. Little lessons to be sure, but they make all the difference in living out the gospel in this land where so much doesn't play by the rules that are imbedded in me.
On to the pictures. I never remember what order these get posted in, so if you want the "right" order, you'll have to go down to the bottom of this post and work your way up. . .


Our little Christmas tree. . .this year we "pruned" a shrub in our courtyard and stuck it in a flower pot and brought it inside. Andrew got me a hand crank "old fashioned" sewing machine (with a poinsetta on it) and we were blessed with many other thoughtful gifts from family and friends.
Pete by the toothe ache god. I think we mentioned this in one of our letters awhile ago, but if you have a toothe ache you nail a coin to this "god" and it will go away. Ironically, this is in the stretch of town where all the false teeth sellers have their stores. It is a little disconcerting to walk down the narrow alley and have hundreds of pairs of dentures lined up in windows and glass counters on both sides of you. . .

Our shopping confessions. . . there is an open air bazaar/market close to where we have language class and we wondered in there one day to browse the tables of clothes, shoes, jackets, and cell phone covers. We then discovered you can get nice wool sweaters for $5 and occasionally can even find them in our size (which is significantly larger than most Nepalis). Our second discovery was that many of these clothes are Goodwill or Salvation Army cast-offs that get sent overseas for some reason. Anyway, this is Andrew trying on what has become known as "the Christmas tree sweater" We actually took the picture so he could see how it looked on him, since the open market doesn't have mirrors. The whole market gets picked up every night and re-set out in the morning.

Us and our friends at a lodge on our Christmas trek. We were pretty excited to have this fire to huddle around at night.

New Year's Eve in Tadapani, Nepal. We all ate rice and lentils and celebrated by eating chocolate and going to bed by 8pm.

Making bricks on the land. The brick maker is the contraption in the middle of the picture. When we all get going, it is a pretty smooth system--one scoops dirt, one sprinkles sand inside the machine so the bricks don't stick, one person closes the press and throws their body weight on the lever to compress the brick, one person opens the press and hands the brick to the person carrying the bricks to the drying spot.

Pete and Andrew felting wool slippers. The art needs some refining, but the slippers came out pretty well.

Not the most flattering picture of anyone, but it is the only one I have of us making and eating momos at my language teacher's house. (she's the one on the far right). Momos are like a pierogi but with either meat or veggies and cheese inside and you serve them with a tomato seasme sauce that is AMAZING. My teacher is famous for her momos and it is always a treat to get an invite to her house.

Hmmm, again not the most flattering picture. This is the three of us at our "chowmein place"--a small restaurant up the road where all three of us can eat for $2 (total). Not all restaurants are like this, but it is really handy to have somewhere close by to eat lunch if I don't have time or don't feel like cooking. This is all that is available for convenient/fast food--everything else has to be made from scratch.

My favorite picture that I had tried to place at the top of this post to catch your attention right away. This is Andrew on his 29th birthday, sporting his "birthday mustache". Mind you I really like his beard, his gotee (it only lasted a few weeks) and clean shaven face, but after a 3 second trial run after a long hiking trip awhile ago, I vetoed him ever having a mustache. This of course, made him very determined to have one, so for his birthday, I "gave" him a mustache. We just happened to be at our organization's yearly conference on his birthday, so we got lots of attention :-) It only lasted a day. . .thankfully.

A bunch of us from conference going to see the mountains one early morning. . .

Christmas break

The following are a few pictures from our week long trek in the Annapurna area that we did with some friends from Tibet and Pete (Colleen's brother). We had an amazing time getting into the mountains for a bit and enjoying friends.

We actually weren't here when our friend took this picture, but it's a good one and typical of life in the middle hills in Nepal--in several spots we saw wild monkeys near the trail.
Our main destination on our trek was Poon Hill--from there you get a beautiful view of the Annapurna range. We got snow the night before we went up Poon Hill for the sunrise and hiked through it the next day as well. It was beautiful, but sure made for a slippery trail!

Just before sunrise on Poon Hill.

Back home in the lowlands of Kathmandu. . . our puppy and kitten enjoying a nap together. 3 weeks later our pets still sleep in the box, but they completely fill it now.

Back to our trek. . . several places in Nepal have natural hotsprings--after a few long days of walking, it felt really good to relax!

Poon Hill as the sun rises. Sorry for the lack of chronology in this post. . . :-)

ab&c loving the cold and beautiful mountains

Pete, and a goat wondering why this human is attempting to eat grass. This is just down the hill from our house--for only being 10 km out of the city, things become "village-y" pretty quickly.

Our house is the closest house past the trees. The line of houses behind us are on the main road, but ours is set down in a little valley with a river at the bottom. We crossed the river and went up the next hill and discovered this beautiful view of our house.

Petey and our cat attempting to share his hot drink. Living in a cement house with no heat (except a little space heater) we are always dressed like we're outside (hence the scarf and hat) Hot drinks are on the menu several times a day as well.

Our adorable puppy, Karis. She and the cat both live outside now (which we've decided was one of the best decisions of our lives), but we still have a lot of fun with them. Here she is enjoying the wrapping paper leftover after Christmas.