Subscriber First Name, they say when you first move to a new country, the first few months are known as “the honeymoon phase”.

It’s full of all the initial excitement of moving, the curiosity of a whole new way of life, the novelty of new surroundings and customs - everything is intriguing! 

It’s different for different people, but they say at around three months of living somewhere new, you start to lose a bit of that initial novelty and encounter more challenges with your new way of life. Thus begins the next phase of cultural adaptation, known as the “frustration phase”.

A we enter into our fourth month here in Kenya, I think we are beginning to dip our toes in that next phase a bit now. Things are less new and exciting, and just start to feel a bit harder. For example:

• Language Learning. In the beginning, you gain so much new vocabulary each day, so each day you feel like your Swahili skills double! As you progress, your rate of learning seems to slow down a bit as you move beyond the basics. Grammar becomes harder and more complex. You become more frustrated that you still can only make it through two sentences of Swahili before getting lost in a conversation.

• Sickness. I don’t know if getting sick is ever exciting, but it begins to wear on you when you’re sick one week. And the next week. And the next week. Sage has had five ear infections since our arrival, and I’ve lost count of how many colds we all have had.

• Cultural Misses. When you first arrive, you are blissfully ignorant of a culture, simply assuming many things happen as they do in your own culture. For example, I started meeting with a group of women for a business training group. We were planning to talk about their side businesses (i.e. selling fish, growing vegetables) and ways they could grow their small businesses through planning and saving. Simple enough, right? Well, we had our first meeting on a Sunday with ten women and by Monday morning several of the the women house helpers here on our station were upset. Rumors in town had started that I was giving away money to this select group of women, and other women were upset they were not invited. In short - it was a hot mess that I eventually helped untangle. America is a very individualistic culture - my business is my business. When you do something here, the whole community needs to be in on it rather than select individuals. It takes lots of involvement from those higher up before you just “do” something. So trying to understand how to accomplish something simple like holding a meeting is a lot more complex than you initially assume.

• The Expected Unexpected. Often a challenge arises here that would simply not even be a factor you would have ever considered back home. For example, we bought a dining room table. Looked good to me. This past week, we found a random hole appear in it one day, and another one a week later. Turns out, it has termites. Didn’t see that one coming.

Now, before you start to think, “Wow, the Strutners are having a terrible time” - be assured, we are not!  All these learning curves were expected (thank you cross-cultural training!) and there is still so much beauty and purpose and joy in being here that makes it all worth it. Here are some joys from this month:

We celebrated birthdays!

We had an awesome birthday week this month, celebrating Jack and Micah’s birthdays on August 21 and 24. Micah’s friends celebrated him all day long, making him homemade cards and singing “Happy Birthday” whenever he was in sight. His party started with about 20 kids and ended with about 60. 😂 We played games in the field outside our house like hot potato, water balloon toss, and had a piñata. I don’t think a piñata has been done here before so the kids really enjoyed the new game - and MAN did they move fast to get that candy when it fell out! It was a really special birthday and fun to have it in a new context, despite missing our family and friends back home. 

We have a garden!

Jack has always really loved gardening, but we’ve never really lived in a space where it was possible or had the time to devote to it. But in Kenya, everyone has a garden (called a shamba) and everything grows! Our days still felt too busy to dig up our yard, so we hired one of Beatrice’s neighbors, Wesley, to help us. He has done an outstanding job by creating seed beds for spinach, kale, onions, carrots and tomatos. He is a father of three kids and didn’t have employment before despite his best efforts in searching, so he happily shows up every day with a big smile and tends the backyard for us.

We’ve wrapped up our house projects!

We were able to check off many of the things we were hoping to complete with the house. A quick run down of all the projects we’ve done in the past three months:

• Painted the interior of our entire house

• Painted all the metal window frames in our house

• Furnished and decorated our entire house

• Replace all the lightbulbs in our house

• Built skylight diffusers for our ceiling so that we didn’t get sunburned at home

• Had a pathway built around the house to keep mud from getting tracked inside

• Had a fence built around the house to keep animals out

• Had our entire kitchen cabinets painted

• Built wooden gates from scratch for our fence

• Had our porch sealed with epoxy 

• Had a garden built

• Fixed the solar power batteries

• Repaired the toilet and sink leaks several times

• Hung mosquito nets (which involved climbing into a very sketchy attic to anchor the hooks!)

• Repaired kitchen counter cracks

• Had a 6ft deep septic tank pit dug

Phew. I feel tired just writing that list. Finding the supplies and how to get them here makes each of these quite an effort. (What I would do for a local Home Depot these days…)

Check out these before and after pictures below of how far our house has come!

We’ve also wrapped up our three months of intensive language learning, and Jack’s work permit is just about approved so he is ready to start full time at the hospital any day. In the meantime, he’s been able to help out a few weekends on some tougher cases. He wrote this absolutely beautiful story about a baby in the newborn unit. Stories like these make all of the above absolutely worth it.

Now, we realize we did not come to Kenya to decorate a house, ha! But, we are grateful to have had time and space to make this place our home now. There is enough stress living cross-culturally that it makes a world of a difference to have a place you can feel settled and comfortable in.

So as we turn the corner from more focused language learning and completing house projects, we are are SO excited to launch into the work we came to do this month! I (Regan) have been meeting with the hospital marketing team as we begin to plan the stories we want to share - and there are many! I’ve also been working with a couple other expat moms in starting up a morning preschool for our little ones. More on that later!

The more we dive into understanding the hospital, its vision, and the community, the more confident we feel that this is exactly where God wants us to be. Simply close your eyes and point in any direction and there is a need. And despite the big and small challenges or stressors we have here, we are encouraged that Jesus is using it all to form us into his likeness as we move deeper into dependency in him each day.

Thank you for joining us on this journey!

As always, so many thanks for your prayers, support, and love. We want to stay connected with YOUR life as well - so feel free to reply to this email and tell us something fun you did this summer :)