hefley

I thought you all might like to hear about Kosovo from a 6 year old’s point of view, so here is a short interview with Calem:

Yes, this is the boy who's prespective on life in Kosovo you'll soon get to read. Be prepared!

Me: “What do you like about being in Kosovo?”

Calem: “Well, I like it when I get to work a lot! It’s real fun, it’s been my dream! It’s fun when I get to do my dream.”

Calem getting to help move a well "ring" that accidentally got delivered to the wrong house...

Me: “What kind of work do you get to do?”

Calem clearing the area around the well so that we can put down a cement skirt to keep rainwater from washing dirt back into the well. Mind you, we are not forcing the boy to work, he's very much choosing it himself. This is something else than the city life he's used to!

Calem: “I get to smooth out the cement, and I get to help fix wells. And I get to walk around in the city, and yesterday I got a fishing pole so I got to go fishing.”

(Editors note; his “fishing pole” is a long stick he found laying around with a fishing line attached to it. A local guy formed a hook for him from some wire he cut off a fence, and voila; Calem got a fishing pole like the other boys in the village. One very satisfied boy!)

Calem and the village boys with their fishing poles. Seriously I hope no one eats anything caught in this filthy stream! That seriously can not be very safe!

Me: “Have you made any friends here?”

Calem: “Yes, I have made quite a few friends.”

(Editor’s note; yes, that’s right. This boy sure does not have any trouble making new friends! He is one social little dude!)

Two boys Calem became friends with during the two days we worked on their well.

Calem met a guy with an energy level to match his own! I don't think I've ever seen so much action before!

Me: “What is the most fun thing you’ve done in Kosovo so far?”

Calem: “1st – that I got to work, 2nd – that I got a fishing pole and that I got to try fishing yesterday”

I think half the fun for Calem is that he gets to ride the rental car with the team when they go to work in the mornings. He gets to sit up front, as it is the only seat with a seat belt, and to a boy that's been in the back of the car in a child safety seat his whole life that's a big deal! =)

Me: “We’ve only got 2 more weeks here. Do think you want to come back here in the future?”

Calem: “Yes. My dad will come back here soon, but me and my mom and Emma and Mikayla I don’t think will come back here soon, but pappa will, ‘cause he works here and he’s made friends here.”

(Editor’s note; yes, pappa will be back here for a couple of weeks towards the end of the summer while the rest of us are with my family in Norway. Our next chance at coming back here as a family will probably be next summer.)

The first well Calem got to go help the team repair. Only thing left to do is shock the water with bleach and put the lid on. The pump is installed so there is now no more need to use the old bucket hanging on the post behind the well.

Me: “How was your day today?”

Calem: “It was good. We got to go to church, and it was pretty fun. I met my old friend, and it was pretty fun.”

(Editor’s note; we go to church in a city an hour away from where we live and work. Where we are at there are no churches. Calem has made friends with an English speaking boy at church, and thoroughly enjoys his Sundays when he can meet up with him again.)

We’ve now been in the country of Kosovo for one whole week, and it is time to update you all and let you in on our first impressions of this beautiful country and it’s lovely people.

Our welcome to Kosovo last Wednesday.

As we arrived Skenderaj, our team of three interns from the States welcomed us into our new home that we’ll be sharing for the weeks to come. We have a two bedroom apartment on the 6th floor of a new apartment building, about 15 min drive from the village we work in. The Hefley’s get one bedroom, the two girl interns one, and our male student get to camp out in the living room at night together with our male translator. So far it’s working out great. We’re learning to live with limited access to water and electricity as they both get turned off at odd hours, and there is no telling when it gets turned back on. We’ve already experience having to buy bottled water just to wash our hands, but definitely see ourselves blessed that have the finances to be able to do just that. I don’t doubt a minute that the people in the village would not be able to afford such luxurity, and wouldn’t have that possibility anyways as they live too far away from the stores. They do have their own personal wells that as far as I understand was dug by some aid organization that came to help them right after the war. The only problem is that the wells were never completely finished and thus the water is unsafe, and also some of the wells run dry 3 months of the year which leaves the people at a place where their only water source left is the polluted stream running through the village. This stream I’ve now seen with my own eyes, and my kids have been strictly forbidden to go anywhere near it. It’s the dumping place for the villages trash, and also where a lot of their sewage is piped to.

All the bottles and buckets we had filled with tap water before the water got shut off. Now empty, and we're on to using store bought water to wash in. =)

We’ve had a few days in the village this past week, though most of this week has been more of a prep time for the coming month, and a time of settling in for me and the kids. Our team of students had a long weekend off to go see Greece, thus we only yesterday started getting a full days work in at the village (since our arrival). Calem got to help repair a well today, and I’m so bummed I didn’t have my camera so I could have taken a picture to show you how cute he was smoothing out the cement apron/skirt they were making around the well so the rain wouldn’t wash more contamination into the water. I’m saying “they” when sharing about who does the actual cement work and such, referring to the men. Women in this culture are not doing such physical labor, and thus I get to hang out with the women and the kids, drink tea and try to communicate as best as I can while the men suffer under the burning sun outside trying to secure a safe water source for the families.

Just to give you a visual of how things look like here. This is the view from our apartment in the big town.

Well, I think that’s going to have to be all for now, our you’ll get so tired of reading you won’t even want to open my next blog entries…

As always; we’d love to hear from you! Let us know you’re following our journey, and share yours so we can be a part of your lives too!

Much love from Signy Margrete and the rest of the Hefley crew.

As a few of you already know Daniel and I are teaching our children at home this year – by our selves! Well, in reality I, Miss Mom, am teaching the children most of the time, though the one that actually has a teachers degree, their dad, has made room in his schedule to teach them one day a week. Yeah! That will definitely be great both for the children and him.

Well, as of now we’ve had 1 week of schooling, and I already have a few confessions to make:

Wednesday Aug 18^th - 1^st day of school:

My thoughts after school: “This is going great! If it’s going to be like this it’s going to be EASY!!” Ach, no! Pride comes before the fall, right?

Fast forward to Monday Aug 23^rd – only 4^th day of school:

We were having dinner guests that evening, we spent the weekend away and we never did get fully unpacked after our Norway trip, so our house was a mess, my time to get it under control short and I was getting stressed! No school… I tried, but there is no way I could have taught the children well being the mess I was that day.

Today, Wednesday Aug 25^th:

We started off great! At our first break however, only 20 minutes ago, Emma peed all over the bathroom floor, and after I got the floor cleaned and her placed in the bathtub Calem came and placed himself on the toilet, thus blocking the tub so I can’t get Emma cleaned. So as I’m waiting to get ourselves back on track so we can continue today’s lessons I’m writing this blog to share my adventures with you.

Now for all of you that are wondering why on earth I’m doing such a drastic thing as teaching my kids at home, the answer is simple; I prayed and God answered me. He made it clear that this is what we needed to do, and despite the controversial thoughts and feelings about this issue my first and foremost goal in life is to follow God. Therefore I’m jumping into this new challenge with both feet and hope to God that I will be able to walk through it. Right now it feels more like I’m on my nose than my feet, but I know that God will guide us through it.

So stay tuned and I’m sure you’ll get to hear more of the interesting things that can happen when you try to be not only mom, but also a teacher to your little monkeys!!

Simply put, this summer was fantastic.  I thrive by being out in some random part of the world, eating something god-awful, working with people whose language makes about as much sense to me as the intricacies of rocket science, and sleeping on the floor on some random mattress that is almost assuredly better than my own bed. Being in Kosovo was energizing beyond my feeble attempt at verbalizing it.

By the time this month ends, we will have helped around 8-10 households. I use household instead of family because family over there doesn’t mean the same as it does here. Well, instead of sharing a bunch of stats of how many wells we repaired and how many people we helped, I thought it would be a lot funner to share some stories of things that have happened there, and introduce some of the people that I rub shoulders with over there.

THE RED CROSS VEHICLE

So in a post from earlier this summer, I wrote about destroying America’s image in Kosovo by being the biggest dummy ever by leaving our vehicle parked in the middle of the road, leaving the lights on, and pushing it down the middle of busiest street in this city with everyone watching me. So here it is folks.

PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, TURN OFF YOUR LIGHTS!!!

After a summer of driving this thing, I totally want one! I don’t know how it will ever happen, but owning one is definitely on my to do list. Maybe it ought to be on my bucket list. Anyway, this thing was tough and awesome, as long as you didn’t go over 60 kilometers per hour. Yes folks, that is a whopping 38 MPH!!! I certainly didn’t win any races with this thing except when I took it off road and then I was suddenly in my element!

Arben Hoti

You guys definitely need to meet this friend of mine because he is one cool cat. Over the last 2 years, Arben has been working with me to help the village in Tushile. I will be blunt, without Arben, I couldn’t get jack squat done in that country. The success we have had so far can be attributed to him, his loyalty, and his faithfulness to Jesus, and his willingness to help those in need. He is one of maybe 2500-3000 evangelical Christians in a country of 2.1 million, 90% being Muslim. He is a college graduate, a humble young man, and a born leader. I trust him completely.

Arben and Denis, a little boy that got LOVED TO DEATH by everybody.

BUTTs (Big Underground Thick Tanks)

I like big BUTTs and I can not lie . . . .   Ok, that’s a bit cheesy, and I wish I could take credit for the acronym, but I can’t. My colleague Nick Greener coined the phrase after he started building these BUTTs in Rwanda. The thing with Nick though, where as i like my BUTTs big and square, he prefers his BUTTs big and round. Ok, this is probably terrible, but I am kind of laughing. Of course I am talking about underground tanks that we build with people so that they can have water storage during the dry seasons they face. For example in Kosovo, they have a major dry spell from the end of June to sometime in September. It’s like clock work. Ironically, the clock was off this year and we got so much rain this year, we had trouble getting the work completed.

My first BUTT in Kosovo. Big and square.

Apparently there are other BIG BUTTS in Kosovo as well.

We built two of these tanks this summer, each able to hold 40,000 liters (10,000 gallons) of rain water. This water will be use to expand their meager gardens which they use to grow almost all of the food they have. It is the hope and vision that with this extra water, they will be able to irrigate more crops, sell the extra crops at market, and generate extra income that is needed.

Kaltrina Ademi

This girl has become the little sister that I never had. So yes, I do terrorize and tease her pretty much endlessly. What is awesome, she has learned to dish it right back! Kaltrina is part of a local Muslim family from the village that I have become quite close with. I hired her this summer to be our second translator and to work with the women interns. She is a funny girl with an insatiable love for every child she lays her eyes on. In fact, she already likes my kids more than she does me. Wait a sec, that seems to be happening a lot to me . . . .   Kaltrina is a dear friend and has been a TREMENDOUS blessing to us this summer and someone I hope we can have working for us in the future.

Kaltrina and one of the THOUSANDS of babies she loves

Keep your eyes out for more stories in the upcoming weeks and months.