I feel like there are pieces of us stretched across the map. Like we’re spread so thin, that we aren’t really anywhere, or effective at anything.
I’ve been home for a month now, and I’ve barely seen anyone. And when I do, its always in passing — like I’m in the area, solving some problem, or putting out some fire, or dealing with some issue we have to resolve, so I can spend 5-15 minutes with people, but nothing real. Nothing significant.
Ben’s sick right now. Its tough to feel safe, or like we’re doing the right thing for our family, when we don’t even have health care. He had a temperature of 103.5 last night, and rather then taking him to the hospital, we stayed up to see if it got better or worse after another round of tylenol. Any normal parents would just head to emerg, but for us, the magnitude of such a task made us think twice — forced us to wait and see.
We could get medical help if we had to — we’re not totally without. But we’d have to pay for it up front, and Ontario hospitals aren’t really set-up for that. Then we’d have to submit it to our New York health insurance company, and hope that they’d agree to pay for some of it. And of course if you go to a hospital here, you’re looking at at least a 3 hour wait in the ER — and that’s assuming you have Ontario healthcare with all your paperwork in order. So that means we’d have to get Abi to a babysitter — and of course we know almost no one in the area at the moment.
A little over two months living like this left, and then things should get easier.
Then we’ll have a home, in a quiet little neighbourhood, where we can find a nice babysitter.
Then the government will accept our children as citizens and let them have healthcare.
Then we’ll be able to invest our time and energy into ministry and our friends and family again, without being distracted by the million things that we still need to get done before life can return to normal.
Then my paycheck will get deposited into an account in the same country as us, and we won’t have to worry about trying to get money into the right country at the right times, so that none of the balls we’re juggling fall and knock us out…
Of course, it’ll be a lot more boring when all of those things come together. But I think I could be OK with that for a little while.