School places, Seatbelts and ‘Material Safety Data Sheets’…

We arrived, we unpacked, and the kids started school… quite a whirlwind really, but Abigail and Hannah have coped really well. They both tried out 2 different grades of school this week - Hannah grade 4 & 5, Abi grade 6 & 7 - to see which ones they were best suited to. We obviously wanted these days to go well and so it was genuinely wonderful when Abigail ran over to whisper in my ear ‘I have 5 friends already!’ And now it seems they are both going to go into the grades they hoped for - Hannah into grade 5 (U.K. equivalent of year 4, so a year above where she was in the UK) and Abigail into grade 6 (equivalent to year 5). They have the rest of this week and next week (half term here) to relax before they start properly.

So that’s school. The other two big things we’re hoping to sort out soon are seatbelts to go in the back of our Landcruiser (as we’re reluctant to take the girls on the main roads without them) and a bit of a glitch with the 31 boxes we tried to send from the U.K. by air freight. We received a message a few days ago to say that batteries had been found in the boxes which were considered potentially hazardous and so everything had come to a standstill. Having already unpacked our boxes once in the U.K. to check for batteries before we left, it was quite disappointing to realise we’d missed something. The culprit, we think, are 2 remote controlled cars that Abigail and Hannah hadn’t wanted to part with. They aren’t big or high powered, and we removed any batteries from them we could get access to, but it seems they each have an internal battery that’s causing the problem. So, having had to contact the manufacturer to get an MSDS (see blog title) and then passed that on to the shipping company, we now have to wait and see if a) the batteries will be considered safe enough to fly or b) someone will need to unpack our boxes to remove the 2 cars, c) the shipment will have to be entirely repacked (please NO) or d) well, who knows!??

On the plus sides - the fact that I was able to contact the manufacturer and can do so much online is amazing - the internet and the access we have to it on our phones is far better than we’d imagined!

And despite no seat belts yet, we do have a vehicle that’s pretty tough and getting us where we need to be. (If you didn’t hear elsewhere, while the girls were trying out school on Tuesday, Gemma and I managed the 8 hour round trip to Ndola and back to get my WORK PERMIT(!) which was processed and printed in record time. We had to go on Tuesday as we’d only officially been given 3 days to be in the country when we arrived at the airport on Friday (I mistakenly thought our passports said ‘30’ but later realised the ‘0’ was actually a ‘D’ for day. (ie: 3D not 30)! So again, much relief when we got back to Mkushi with my permit and all our passports now stamped allowing us an initial 2 years in Zambia. And amazingly we arrived back 5 minutes before the girls needed picking up from school so that was brilliant!

As the kids said when we left the airport last week - “it feels like life on the edge!” - that's probably a bit over dramatic but we’re definitely taking each day as it comes and having to keep trusting God as we go (but that’s always a good place to be!).

Thanks again for all your prayers!