Well, it has been a very busy last couple of weeks, it's not long now until we are back online at home and so will be able to write more regular updates, but to fill you in on what has happened over the last few weeks..
A few weeks ago we had an amazing working bee at our new home, we had approximately 20 volunteers come through from Swanson Street Church of Christ to help clean up, and they did an amazing job. The clean up was so effective that we were able to bring forward our moving date, which happened on the 5th and we had a small but dedicated team and we had all our furniture, boxes and junk moved in by the early afternoon. Since then, we have been working hard at getting settled in as well as cleaning up our old place (which was also done with a working bee of amazing UNOH workers and locals - thanks guys!), and getting familiar with our new neighbourhood.
The welcome we have received from the local UNOH workers and members of "Open Hands" church has been amazing - I think in the time that we have been moved in we have had dinner at our house once or maybe twice!
Springvale itself is a much different place to Noble Park, even though they are neighbouring suburbs Springvale is a much larger suburb and as many of you would know, very Asian in flavour, the town centre has the real hustle and bustle of an Asian city, and you could almost think that you were walking down a street in Bangkok... if you had a really vivid imagination.
Drugs, and everything that comes with them seem to be a much larger problem here, there are definite signs of drug use, we have already found a number of syringes in and around our front yard, there are discarded "chroming bags" along the sides of the alleyway behind our house, and probably the most disturbing of all for us was finding someone shooting up in our front yard. The main reason that this person was shooting up there was because we had an easily accessible source of fresh water in our driveway, and it is not uncommon to come home and find that the tap had been used. The scary thing about this encounter was the realisation of any fresh paraphernalia being left behind... fortunately this individual took his syringe with him, however there was a fair amount of blood left on one of the boxes that he was sitting on.
I was struck once again with the opposing forces of fear for my family and trusting in the Lord, I think that this is a struggle that all Christian parents go through... some respond to this fear by trying to pull their children out of any danger or negative influence... we have tried another response, a response that unfortunately means that we need to face this battle between fear and trust sometimes on a daily basis... I probably need to reflect of this topic a bit more at a later date... but having said this I did change the tap head in our front yard over to one of those ones with the removable handle, so hopefully this will reduce the really in-your-face encounters that we have.
It has been great to be so close to many of the Burmese that we have been getting to know, I have been privileged to be able to play some volley ball with some of them, and have had regular visits from one of our closer and more out going friends... As we get more settled in, the week to come will hopefully be more intentional with our visiting our Burmese friends and making new contacts, as well as familiarising ourselves with the exciting town centre and all its sights, sounds and smells.
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