Pre-Burundi Purge

Just one week ago--last Sunday--we spent the afternoon clearing out the last bit of stuff from our flat. Thanks to Jeremy's parents who visited in the last couple of weeks, the cleaning was mostly taken care of and we didn't have to stay late into the night to do that!

Have you ever thought about what you would do in the case of moving overseas long-term? Put yourself in this scenario...
A container would cost thousands of dollars so it is out of the question. You must decide for this initial move how you will do it in a practical way. What will you take with you? What will you box up and have your family or friends store for you? What will you get rid of?

For me, it wasn't entirely sad. I've been planning on this for years. Since high-school I've envisioned myself living overseas. None of my family have tons of space to store everything nor is it practical (or even Biblical?) So the time came to begin our Pre-Burundi Purge. Although the actual physical actions of deciding and sorting didn't happen until recently, in my mind I've been thinking about it for several months. Once we made the decision to leave our flat in April in order to save money over the next months as we'll be traveling A LOT (more about that in my next post), my mind began ticking, ticking, ticking. I began to envision the things I wanted to keep. I was able to envision the items I wanted to keep fitting into 3 plastic bins. And you know what? That's exactly how it worked out.

The purge wasn't completely without emotion. There were several times I stood there, holding something, and saying to myself: "Is this item special enough to keep and store?" Some items were easy--like the couple of items that are sentimental to me--they were my dear Grandma's, of course I'm keeping those! So yes, I had my emotional moments and my times of feeling "bittersweet".

This flat was our first home together after leaving the Bible college. At Bible college we went from living in the singles dorms as students, to living in an apartment as a married staff couple. It was different. This flat was our first "real" home. So that in itself brought it's own little bit of emotion. We had put time, energy, and money into living here and we loved it. We loved our upstairs neighbor, too! A wonderful man who we got along splendidly with! I mean, who wouldn't like a neighbor that left little gifts in front of your door on occasion!

Our Pre-Burundi Purge is complete. We got rid of mostly everything, met some neat people along the way, boxed up the few things we wanted to keep, and moved what we need for the year and what we are taking to Burundi over to our friends house, where we will be staying in the basement until we leave for Burundi in January.