Getting caught up on a week's worth of missed French classwork and also email, laundry, sleep, etc. led to a pretty packed week last week, so yesterday Sarah, Carlan, and I headed out on an adventure away from the to-do lists. And what a gift of a day it was exploring the region on one of our last weekends in France!
Started off the bike ride with a breakdown a few kilometers from Albertville - thankfully it was easily fixed with just some greasy hands as a consequence.
Nice paved bike path for most of the ride - with gorgeous views!
Advantages to being the three singles on the McCropder team - we truly love spending time with the team kids and being their missionary aunts and uncle, but we also enjoy the freedom to spend 8 hours biking to Annecy and back without the responsibilities of family life - best of both worlds!
I can now say I've climbed a bale of hay!
We made it to Lake Annecy! (approx 40 kilometers each way)
How cool is it to ride a bike through a tunnel carved into a mountain!
And of course no adventure would be complete without ice cream which we enjoyed just as the rain began! Thankfully the rain didn't last long and we had an uneventful ride back to Albertville.
After dinner, the McCropder doctors had another meeting to discuss the long term hospital development plan for Kibuye. The engineering team who visited Burundi twice this spring is finalizing their master plan for developing Kibuye into a 300 bed hospital (currently ~100 beds). It's been fascinating to consider how many variables go into such a plan - where to put the bathrooms, how traffic flow will look in the outpatient department, making hospital wards wide enough to wheel a stretcher between the beds, strategically placing windows to let in natural light when the power is out but to not compromise privacy in exam rooms, etc.
The Master Plan (below) will likely take 15+ years to be realized completely, but our hope is that considering many variables on the front end will result in more efficient and effective placement of hospital wards and other facilities as the development occurs. We're so thankful for the intense work the EMI team has put into this over the last several months. We're also realizing more and more what a gift our two years at Tenwek Hospital in Kenya were as we have a picture in our mind of what a 300 bed African hospital can look like and have some ideas on how to troubleshoot placement of buildings, traffic flow, etc. through that experience as well. Read more about masterplanning at Kibuye here.
Below is the first diagram of the nursery for Kibuye. I'm super excited about this and enjoyed being part of the planning of it. Currently no nursery exists at the hospital, so I look forward to seeing this ward come to fruition to benefit the babies and families in the region.
Well, yesterday was definitely not a "typical" Saturday here in French language school, but it was certainly a blessing - friendship, exercise, & beauty in the present and hope for the future. "Further in and further up!" (C.S. Lewis - in "The Last Battle")
