Ben and Katie turned one on Sunday. It was a festive day, with them eating their first piece of cake (Katie put her finger in the frosting and licked them; Ben ate his cake and then started looking at Katie’s with heightened interest.)

Katie is pulling up but not quite walking; Ben is crawling but not as ambitiously curious as Katie is. He is content to thoroughly examine one toy for a long time; she needs to see everything.

Perhaps the biggest difference is how they view Cheerios. If you can find them here, they are very expensive, but they are a good food for little fingers, and a friend gave us some. Katie then displayed a new facet of her personality:

She will not eat broken Cheerios. Somehow, I don’t think that it would be out of line in saying that broken Cheerios OFFEND her. Ben, on the other hand, thinks of her pickiness as manna from heaven. We have not seen the bottom limit of how much Ben might be able to eat. They complement each other.

The funnest part of the twins may be the older boys, who continue to enjoy them and add a unique fabric to the relationship. Whenever JT calls Katie `hey pretty girl’ I get choked up. Matthew loves them and is getting quite good at putting Ben down for naps. I’ve said it before, but it has just seemed so natural. (When I get woken up at 2am, that is the small exception to that rule)

When we were in Africa before, we came for a year and left. I knew we were returning to the same house, the same church and all our family and friends. This year is different.

There was a staff tea today for the staff that are leaving. There are over forty people leaving; almost 40% of the staff. Some are just going for a year, some are leaving the missionary field for good, and some are retiring.

This is a small community; that has lots of good and some bad. A single neighbor has almost every move under scrutiny as he attempts to date another single here. If I had a problem with a kid in a class, the whole community knew about it.

But the small problems are dwarfed by the wonder of most of the folks here. It may just be that we are united by the difficulties of life in Africa, or our common purpose puts petty concerns where they belong, but I really feel a great deal of love for most of the staff here, and it was hard to say goodbye.

One of them in particular has inspired me this year. She was at RVA when she was a little girl for one year while her doctor father was a volunteer at the hospital. She had always wanted to come back, and made plans to come back in August of 2001. Her plans were somewhat altered when her boyfriend proposed to her just a few days before she was planning to come out.

And she came out anyway. I just can’t quite imagine being engaged and leaving for a year, but she did it. Her fiancee ended coming here for the second and third term, and I thought about the sacrifice and hard work they did being here rather being home and planning their October wedding.

This is a tiring place, and they leave in a week with lots and lots to do and fatigue instead of energy planning their big event. I hope they don’t, but I can imagine they sometimes wonder if they did the right thing.

When you see someone sacrifice for the cause, it just makes you want to be better. I just hope they know that their sacrifice has made me want to be better. But it’s hard to see people like that leave.

Goodbyes hurt.

Steve Peifer

PS. The New York Times puts their corrections on page 27. Not me!! Here are my latest errors:

1. I wrote about the phenomena of someone putting frozen peas on their shoulder. It turns out that my mother in law has done that, one of my best friends in high school has done that, and basically everyone I have ever known wrote about frozen peas. I don’t know HOW I missed it.
2. There are pythons in Kenya. There was a 12-foot python killed a mile from one of the schools we are going to be working with I wrote recently about a student who had a python killing people in Uganda, and I remarked how I was glad I was in Kenya and not Uganda. Now I’m not sure what I would write.