Over the last few days the rain has returned to Sana’a . Though never very serious it creates the most amazing skies. Below is the view from our top floor from yesterday night.
The thing with this kind of blog is that you will have to keep it for people to come back once in a while to check it out. We have now had a small break but here is the latest news. The big news here in Yemen is that both the kids are now finally off the bottle. Liva, being the oldest has now for a while been without milk doing the night and has also now started to be without a diaper all the time (including nights) whereas Joop seemed to have stepped up her milk consumption during the nights. So five days ago we took the big jump and stopped all together with the milk. The transition has been much easier than we had feared though Joop still is waking up. She has however stopped asking for milk so that is great.
Over the weekend we had a couple of parties. On Thursday there was a housewarming for a Dutch-Yemeni couple and Friday we went on a picnic with the whole Dutch community. It was the first time that we took the car off-road and it was a bit stressful – especially going up and down a 40 degree hill with a lot of loose rubble on, but the car did absolutely fine. After this trip it has been a bit easier to get Lieke to understand why we needed a four-wheel drive.
Talking about the car, we have now gotten the first dent in it after a car drove up into the back of our car while we were at a traffic light. So we have now gotten to know the insurance business in Yemen, but it seems to be working fine, though it somewhat time consuming as we have to take the car to two different workshop to get quotes for the repair. It however hurts a bit to already have a dent now with only 1900 kilometer on the odometer, but with the traffic here in Yemen it was bound to happen sometime or another.
Besides that there’s nothing to report from here. We are getting ready to go to Europe for the summer. We will be there from the 6th of July as Lieke has to attend a course in Maastricht and will stay until after my mother turns 70 on the 6th of August, so it will be a nice and long summer holiday. Anyway, below is a picture of the girls showing off their new “pom-poms” that they got from Betty, our young girl, today.
After a week when Lieke was first in Aden (a costal town south of Sana’a) and after that in Dubai to attend a workshop on Girls education and communication we are now finally all at home. Lieke managed some serious shopping while in Dubai. Though we can get most things here in Yemen there are some things that are a bit more difficult, so Lieke took this opportunity to do some shopping. Dubai is of course like any other big city in the developed world so they of course also had an Ikea. Lieke therefore brought home 40 new plates, of 4 different types, so we now can have at least ten visitors over (or at least eight if we want the same plates as the rest). She also brought quite a lot of clothes for herself, me and the kids. Below is a picture of the girls showing off their new t-shirts.
