This was new, taking a vacation with infants. We were all tired from the term and the excitement of adopting the twins, so staying for a week on the coast sounded wonderful.

Going to the coast involves an eight hour drive over some of the worst roads you can imagine, and for some reason, people who would normally gladly give us a ride were hesitant about driving with nine month old babies in the car.(One guy asked: `you taking BOTH of them?’) We were going to rent a car, and discovered that it would be cheaper to fly with a special they had going on. Instead of an eight-hour drive, it was an hour flight.

There were two highlights of this trip. You don’t have ANY idea of how much sand you have on you if your skin is white. Ben and Katie looked like they were sugar coated. They loved the sand and they loved the water; they just weren’t wild about cleaning OFF the sand.

The older boys and I went snorkeling one day. We arranged for a local fisherman to take us to the coral reef. We went out in his wooden sailboat, which new cost him about 200 dollars. We had to walk a fair distance in the water to get to the boat (they carried Matthew) and on the way I stepped on a sea urchin, a spiky sea creature whose purpose is to make you bleed.

We got in the boat, and they didn’t have snorkeling equipment, so we sailed for ten minutes, and they found friends that would lend us the masks. As we sailed into the middle of the Indian Ocean with no life jackets in a wooden boat, I thought `I am going to be arrested for being an unfit father.’ But besides the bleeding and the thought that if the boat went down, we would all die, it was a pleasant trip.

We got to the coral reef, and it was shallow enough that the boys could stand in it. We say hundreds of tropical fish and all kinds of shells and starfish. It was spectacular; that was the only word for it. When we were leaving, one of the fishermen showed me the octopus he had caught in the reef. It came up to my waist, and I was very glad I was seeing it in the boat rather than in the reef.

The term has started, and our dorm boys give us grim reminders of what life can be like here. Two of the guys live in Madagascar and during the break at home, they were forced to stay in their houses because of all the riots going on there. One of them saw a machine gun fired on his street. One of the guys came back with malaria, and it’s not the first time he has had it.

This is a beautiful place, but it can be so brutal.

Steve Peifer

Another wedding photo!