I'ts the little things....

We have realized that living in Africa has helped us be more thankful even for the "little things" We have been having power outages for months now. At the beginning they were very frequent and unpredictable. That made life very frustrating to say the least! The past few months the outages have been predictable, every wed. night we can count on an outage. We never know exactly when or how long it will be off but we know it's going to happen. So we make sure we get candles ready, have dinner cooked and hopefully eaten and have as much homework has possible done.
Last night as usual the lights went out. It was actually a bit earlier than usual and stayed off quite a bit longer. It was 100 degrees here yesterday and did not cool down much by evening so we were using the ceiling fans to help cool it down. It was a bummer when the power cut! We were sweating and only have 1 window in our living area to open. It doesn't have a screen and since we saw a rat climb down the bars over the window, there was no way we were opening it up in the dark! We played Uno by candle light until we put the kids to bed. They fussed a bit about being hot and not having the fan but fell asleep fast after a long day at a game reserve.
Matt and I stayed up, talked, and sweated about an hour longer and decided to head to bed. I made sure all the light were off and all the fans were on before we got in bed. As we layed there and talked, trying to fall asleep but too hot and sticky to, the ceiling fan started to whirl!! It was such a wonderful feeling! A feeling of pure joy and thankfulness! I told Matt how crazy it was that something so simple could evoke such feelings. It felt wonderful to be so content with something so simple and yet something that would seem extremely luxurious to so many living here in Africa also.