It has been awhile!

The date of my last post, Nov. 6th, was when everyone started getting sick. Today, we are finally better enough for me to have time to think about blogging. It has been a rough couple of weeks, but we are all on the mend and life is looking better again. Brent reminded me, through email since he is gone to the US currently, that November has always been our month of sickness. I guess I just forgot for a minute. Silly me.

Now for some good news:
We got new clothes from Aunt Heather. She sewed all the girls (including me!) new skirts/dresses. She also got Josh an awesome shirt. It was great getting that package in the mail! Clothing is very hard to find here. Well, I guess I should re-phrase: Quality clothing, with sizes that we understand, is hard to find here. Here are some pictures of the new clothes---with the kids in them:)


Celebration Time:
Our family reached an important milestone last week. We finished the Book of Mormon! It took about 5 years of painstakingly reading a little each day (most days I should say), but we finally did it. This is our celebration picture!
We were planning a trip to Disney World to celebrate the achievement, but it didn't happen while we lived in Maryland, so now we don't know what we are going to do. Any ideas anyone?


In other news:
We were planning a trip to Israel in December, but have changed plans and we are going to visit Alexandria instead. We will save Israel for Spring I think.

I have been filling my "extra time" with substitute teaching at the kids' school. I have really enjoyed my time with the students and realized, again, how much I like kids of all ages and how much I like the learning process in general.

Tomorrow our primary group is picking up trash and painting a mural over some ugly, offensive graffiti on a nearby wall. I am excited to see how it turns out!

That's All Folks:
That was the update. Hope you are all well. We are thinking about how thankful we are for all the wonderful people in our lives! We are so blessed to be part of all of your lives.

Love you and Happy Thanksgiving:)

Halloween and Rebekah and Josh class trips

Halloween was different than in the US....we didn't go trick-or-treating, but the local expat community did have a carnival and the kids got to dress up. Here is my favorite picture....and yes, Brent is dressed up as a WSU Cougar fan:)

Emma is Princess Leah, with a little butterfly action on her cheeks.

Josh was the ball. Don't have a picture of Elisabeth or Rebekah for some reason. Rebekah was a candy corn and Elisabeth a gymnast.

R and J class trips:

They left by bus at 4 in the morning to go to the airport and get on chartered jets....1 to Dahab on the Red Sea and the other to Luxor, in southern Egypt.

Rebekah went to Dahab. She had a blast, did a lot of snorkeling, learned a lot about Red Sea ecology. She came home with a bag full of dirty laundry and a smile on her face:) She didn't call at all in the 4 days she was gone. We missed her.

Josh left to Luxor for 3 days. He learned a lot about Egyptian history and the Valley of the Kings. He bartered for gifts for the girls (and he got someone down from 80 LE to 10 LE---that's my boy!) and brought scarves, necklaces, an ancient Egyptian violin for Elisabeth, and a magnet for me:) He called us on the first night, just a tiny bit homesick he said, and came home safe and sound and with some great stories to tell about the teachers getting "tense" after the first day. 120 6th graders....I wonder why they were tense!

Neither one of them took a camera, but here are some shots of them leaving.

Elisabeth's class trip to Nile-o-meter

We went to the pharonic village, took a nile cruise, learned how to make papyrus and saw the Nile-o-meter. It was pretty cool. The Egyptian culture teacher from the school was extremely knowledgeable and I just saw and took it all in. Below are pictures of the Nile-o-meter and an example of the oldest preserved arabic writing in Egypt. The Nile-o-meter was used to measure how high the Nile would flood, predicting how prosporous the people would be that year. It was incredible technology for that age and it is still used today to predict how the water supply in Egypt is doing.

Beautiful Elisabeth:)

Arabic writing on the ledge of the Nile-o-meter.

The Nile-o-Meter.

The mighty Nile River.

Race for the Cure

On Oct. 24th, me and the girls headed out to Giza to run in The Race for the Cure, Egypt. It was a pretty interesting experience. The race itself was only 1.2 K (a laughable 3/4th of a mile), but it was historic in that it promoted women and was around the pyramids. The organization was typically egyptian: chaos. The race course was NOT closed to tour buses, so they were trying to drive down the road while all 7,000 of us were trying to run by:) The start began with people behind and in front of the "start line", there were no water stops and there were no course boundaries.....but there were amazing women with pink head scarves, crying over the freedom of the experience. There were sufi dancers with bright skirts spinning, people helping others and encouraging others along (someone even picked up my camera that fell out of my bag and returned it to me) and a great feeling of commraderie among all the different races/cultures represented.

We got to walk/run with the US Ambassador and Embassy crew and with the NAMRU-3 crowd. It was great:)

Emma's class trip to the Pyramids

View from the Pizza Hut...wow, huh:) Cheapest meal for best view around. This is where an entire wall soap dispenser fell on Emma (picture 20 1st graders trying to wash their hands all at the same time) and she was literally covered in pink soap. Not super happy, but glad it was at the end of the day instead of the beginning.

Class picture.

Sphinx, close up.

Emma poking the sphinx in the nose (or lack of, as it were).

Emma "touching" the top of the great pyramid at Giza.

Rebekah tries her hand at blogging

Hey! How is everyone? Well, here it's okay. I have tons of homework. That's for sure. I really miss you all and hope you all are okay and having fun in the states with snow on the way or already falling. I wish there was snow here, but that won't happen maybe until a few hundred years or so. I took a few pics. I want to be a photographer, well, I like taking pics like my aunt Heather. I love your pics Heather! I really miss my cousins! I wish I could babysit all the youngsters or play with my older cousins. Obviously, I can't do all that stuff, so just imagine me there(but don't leave your kids at home imagining I'm there watching them). I am excited to go on my trip to the Red sea. I get to stay in a VERY nice hotel, and get to go snorkling there. I'm sooooooo excited about that. My family is great, as usual. My dad still makes weird jokes at the dinner table, my mom is still stressed as ever over everything, but she is REALLY trying to help me through my struggles, my brother is still teasing us girls 24/7, Elisabeth is, I think, having fun in third grade, Emma had a weird thing happen today, a whole soap(you know the ones on the wall in a public bathroom) fell all over Emma,in her hair, mouth,body,ect., Sarah is singing her head off still, and I am AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!! School is really getting harder, but if you have a testimony of God, and are willing to serve and follow God, you can live through any hardship.

Elisabeth and I are wanting BADLY to do gymnastics. I was in a good class, in a nice level, a high level, and now it's all gone! There's no gymnastics here or at the school, so that stinks like diarea.

Hey Cahoon family! I want to hear from you! you all look too old to be true! How are you? Everyone! How are you?

I don't want to disclude anyone, but there are soooooooooooooo many people to talk to and say hi to, so I can only name a few. But please, everyone I know, tell me waz going on by emailing me or my mom! I want to know!
I want to know how everyone is, so email me.

Thanks! I love you all and miss you!
Rebekah

I Spy....going to the date farm

On our way to the date farm for the kindergarten field trip. 1 1/2 hour bus ride each way. We spy a pyramid (Saqqara) in the background?


We are almost there, how can you tell? We spy dates growing in the trees (hint: they are not brown yet).


We spy a man harvesting dates. He climbs up, wraps a rope around the tree so the basket can be hoisted up. His helper holds the rope tight so he can shake the dates into the hanging basket, then they crate the dates to deliver to various markets around Cairo.

We spy a drying mat, weaved from the date palm leaves. Dates, orange in color, are laid to dry. The drying sun causes them to release their natural sugars, which means you get a sweet, brown, shriveled, yummy date to eat when the process is complete.

We spy two different examples of public waterfountain in the local villages that we drove through:) Rere told me that as a child she used to take a drink and THEN wash her hands in these.....not thinking about others who would be thirsty after her. YUCK!

We spy a happy kindergartener who gets to ride on a donkey:) Lucky girl....not so lucky donkey (who had to carry about 80 students that day!).

We spy a bunch of Egyptian school kids who swarmed us as we looked around the farm and the irrigation system. They all wanted a picture before they would go away:) The bigger boy on the far left hand side was the "ring leader".


Well, now you have completed the "I Spy: Journey to the Date Farm". Hope you liked it:)