Yes! Thanks to our friend Martha from Spain, who is also our neighbor for some time now...! She did interior decorating and alot of other great stuff, and wanted to bless us with materials and a new style in our brick - concrete home :o) It's great when another is just as excited as you to see your house made over... usually people aren't to concerned with your house. It could be the decorator in her, but anyhow it was nice. Above, Isai and Martha are sponging the wall; originally I was doing it too, but could use a bit more experience as I made alot of mistakes. I remember at one point, to be honest, I couldn't stand this house! I focused on cracks, dirt and so on. We looked for months at different houses that were the same size as our house, but people were asking at least triple the price of rent. It wasn't going to happen. One day I went to one of our staff's houses that was made out of dirt and stick and was immediately humbled. I came home and fell in love with our house and appreciated the comfort we find in rainy nights as we stay warm. Its clean, simple and decorated in a beautiful way, what more can one ask for? Better yet, I spoke with our landlord about a year ago about decreasing our rent price; a few months later he agreed to reduce our rent 25%. It was a God thing, as most of our neighbors and friends are paying more and more for rent as the years pass.
Isai is home for the week re-structuring all things with his workers to prepare to begin building the first house around the 1st of July. We are also moving one of our staff from caring for all the animals to being the responsible over our land and keeping an eye on materials and such. It's vital to have a few good people that you can trust (to an extent) helping you to oversee things and Zefirino is one of those people. As for the animals, our 25+ rabbits will be given to the children's houses and our staff (... and eaten :o), our dogs will transition with us and other responsibilities will be delegated between all our staff. We are in a time of transition and it feels great. All our love...
P.S. Malaki got a phone (a play one), and loves it! Thanks to his Nana...
Malaki got his first haircut yesterday, for just 13 cents! I would have loved to cut it myself, but Isai took the voltage converter (the thing that's helps our electronics work here in Burundi) to work and our clippers are American... The young man with a simple haircutting place did a good job and was excited to cut such smooth hair! As for Malaki, he just sat there patiently as the buzzers ran through his hair. Prior to going, I was thinking how he would respond to the clippers and the possibility of holding him down in the midst of crying... sometimes, just sometimes we get too ahead of ourselves; he did great!
I know this is one of the only ways for our family and friends to stay connected with us... with that said, I am convinced this blog is way overdue! Today for example, we celebrated together in church with the children the Ascension of Jesus, our Lord. Afterwards, Isai took 4 of the boys to go play basketball and the rest came with me to our house. We played, folded clothes and got food for the rabbits before lunch. A nice time, really. For lunch we had rice, beans and greens with some sweet potatoes that are cooked in a similar style to french fries. In the past days we had our friends "The Anderson's" come stay with us and spent sometime at our land in Bukeye. I learned recently that German's call us Amis for short... 
