It’s been a hot minute since I’ve ventured into this space, as per what seems usual from the past few years. I’ve been thinking about all the whys of that, and I know I’ve mentioned the extended absences before, and how strange that is after so many years of coming here to share, record, process… all the things. Why is it that something I enjoyed so much went by the wayside?
While I was trying to actually get to the point of being able to write this post in WordPress I was reminded of one of the biggest reasons – our internet. Or rather the lack thereof. Yeesh. Friends, I seriously wish you could know how many minutes of my day get sucked up with just waiting for things to load. So many minutes. When we still lived in Pierre Payen we had a great 3G signal that we could hotspot to, and everything worked. Then we moved to Camp Marie, into what is essentially a bowl. When we first moved in we didn’t even have 3G. We were still on Edge. I’m not joking. The year was 2015. Eventually we realized that if we propped our phones up in a certain window, on top of about 5 rolls of toilet paper (hey, you work with what you’ve got), we could get 3G.
Eventually Chris did some more research (I’m sure this was after watching me cry because I was so frustrated with not being able to get work done) and set up this incredibly convoluted system of internet for the mission. It involves a dish, attached to the top of an old cell phone tower, on top of a mountain between our community and the ocean. That feeds the signal to our modem, which is connected to a repeater, also attached to the same tower. The repeater sends the signal down the valley to the other receiver on our house roof, which then sends it to us via wifi. Fun, right? So much. (That was sarcasm)
Don’t get me wrong, we are eternally grateful that we have some kind of internet. For a while the system worked so much better than what we had and we were super excited. Over the past few years though, things have degraded, and in the past few months, things have just plain sucked. We barely get wifi, and while our 3G signal has drastically improved in the past few years, in the last while it’s been less than stellar, so we try bouncing back and forth between the two, hoping that something will work. It’s meant that trying to do anything substantial online feels like running a marathon, so most times we pick the most important things, and everything else gets moved down the pile. I realized that it just became so much easier to do a quick post on Facebook, than it did to log onto the blog, write a post, edit, and publish. That could literally take a couple days.
But, in the last year I’ve realized that I have deeply missed writing. I miss processing things through words. I miss sharing our life with people. I miss recording things that my kids can come back and read later in life. The past few years have been hard in so many ways (I’m planning on unpacking some of this in later posts) and rather than processing in a way that makes sense to me, I’ve been storing it up and letting it dribble out here and there. (Don’t worry, I’ve spoken to a professional when I felt like I really needed to).
The other night Chris and I opened a bottle of wine, and sat on the upstairs deck, as we do sometimes. We were talking about life things and how different things are right now from what we’ve known here over the years. We’ve been through so many hard things, but the hard things from the past few years have felt very different because with them has come loss and loneliness in a way we haven’t experienced before. And grief. So much grief. Grief for Haiti and her struggles, and how those things have affected life for everyone here. How those issues have changed so much about life for everyone. The loss of freedom and security. Don’t get me wrong, Haiti has always had security issues, but they are so much deeper now than they ever have been the entire time either of us has been here. Those issues have led to much of our missionary/expat community leaving the country. It has meant so many days at home because we either couldn’t go anywhere, there hasn’t been gas to go places, or the places and people we would have gone to see are no longer open or here. It’s just a strange, hard season.
As we talked about all of this it led to making a list of deliberate things we could be doing to stay healthy, and get back to a better place of enjoying life in this season. It’s so easy to get behind some device, be it a phone, computer or video game system, and zone out while the world is passing us by. None of us feels good, and we’re losing sight of the things that feed our souls.
For me, writing is one of those things, and Chris encouraged me to get back to it, even if it was only so I could process through the things that had been brewing for the past few years. So here I am.
I know there are other reasons I stopped writing as much that go beyond the internet connection. Some of it was that the blog world was changing, and it felt like there was this pressure to do more, all the time, or no one would read. More content, more pictures, more often. Between my personal blog and writing all the things for Clean Water for Haiti, I think I burned out. When that got paired with internet struggles something had to give, and this was it. Sad fact – I haven’t even been doing much writing for CWH either, and miss that too. I’m thankful that people who know and love us/me spoke up and told me how much they missed this over the years. It means a lot to me to know that people connect with it. In fact, as we sat with our Board of Directors in January at our annual retreat, I was touched by how many of them connected with CWH way, way back because they found my blog first. As they got to know our family, they grew to love CWH and eventually wanted to get involved in other ways.
Like I mentioned earlier, we’ve been through a lot of hard things over the years. During some of those times, there was a lot going on that not only affected the mission, but also our family, in very real and very hard ways. But, for the sake of doing what was right, I couldn’t share them. I still know that was the right thing and am grateful that I/we made that decision because we can now see the fruit of it in ourselves and the mission, but it was SO hard to come to this space and feel like I couldn’t share as openly as I wanted to about life. It felt false in some ways. It got harder and harder to try and share about life while many days we felt like we were being crushed. Some of those situations involved security things, some involved other people, and some we couldn’t share simply because we love Haiti and the Haitian people, and always want to be sensitive about how we talk about things here. Our perspective isn’t the only one, or the right one, and we don’t want anyone accusing us of being a voice of authority. I want to be able to share my experiences respectfully, and with love, so that it lifts the country up. It can be very hard to do that when we have to deal with corruption and the systemic issues here, because people can misconstrue those experiences. It just makes me second guess everything, so it often feels easier to not share.
Back in 2019 we started homeschooling the kids. Or rather, I started homeschooling the kids. They had been attending a local English speaking school, but the system and curriculum the school used wasn’t working for our kids anymore, and after several months of frustration for all of us, many tears from most of us (the homework!), meetings with teachers, and all the things, we made a very quick decision (literally in about 30 minutes) that it was time to bring them home. Going from being able to work full time 5 days a week and having about 7 hours each day to do other things, and going to not having those 7 hours, created a big life shift for me. I went down to part-time with CWH, and started figuring out how to educate my kids.
We’re now three years in, and I think we’ve figured some things out. It has meant that my time has been spread out though, so it was harder to pick and choose what to do and when, and it’s taken us a while to figure out what schedule works best for our entire family, but mostly me. What that means now, is that I do CWH work in the morning, school with the kids from mid-morning until mid-afternoon, then have a couple hours before we eat supper. Those are some of the lesser amazing internet hours of the day… See! It’s complicated!
Anyway… Those are all reasons why this whole blogging thing got harder and fell off the to-do list. But I miss it, so I want to give it another go. And fun thing! The morning after Chris and I had our chat about life, he asked if I would be willing to let him post too. Like me, he has a lot of thoughts, and he has the ability to put those into words in ways people find interesting. People have asked why he doesn’t do it more often, but the thought of starting his own blog made his head spin because he hates having to figure computer related things out. Ask him how to set up a battery bank and solar system, or anything vehicle related, and he’s fine. Computers? No. Just no. So, he asked if I’d be willing to share my space and I said yes! He didn’t even have to bat his eyelashes at me**. He wants to be able to share about life from his perspective, talk about our family, some of his Haiti thoughts… really whatever strikes his fancy. And he gave me the right to veto if needed, LOL. I’ve set him up with his own profile, so you’ll be able to see which posts are from him and which are mine. I hope you enjoy his thoughts. He has a lot of good ones. In fact, I’d probably get more done in a day if we didn’t share and office because we spend so much time talking.
So that’s where we’re at. I think I’m back. Chris is here. Hopefully you’ll be hearing more about life with the Rollings again. Haiti is never boring, so it’s not like we don’t have content…
The magical hour has arrived where I go educate my children, so I’m signing off and will see you soon!
~Leslie
**When Alex was about 2 I had a moment where I needed to discipline him about something. I can’t even remember what. What I DO remember is crouching down so I could be eye level with him, and telling him what needed to be said. He just looked at me and said, “It’s okay Mom. I just look at you, and I go like this with my eyes.” He then proceeded to bat his eyelashes at me, and I proceeded to bite the insides of my cheeks so I wouldn’t burst out laughing while also thinking many things about his father who he clearly learned this from.
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