It’s dry season in Malawi, so dry that the land cracks open and layers of dust settle on everything. We’ve had days without power and weeks without warm showers. We have just a bit of green stubble on the surrounding hill leftover from one unexpected October rain. It will be a long time before the rains come, and longer still before the crops start to go again. They call this hunger season, and we're deep into it. There are some days that we don't know if we're are going to make it, if we can handle another couple months waking up to a 4:30 am sunrise or a temperature of 100 degrees by 10 am. But there is beauty, too. As soon as the purple jacarandas faded we saw violet bogenvilla and then bright red Erythrina trees erupted in what people here call a Flamboyance. Some of it seems so miraculous that anything can survive in so much dryness. At first we were furious with the team that chopped our giant plumeria tree down to use as fence posts. Now we can hardly believe the number of new blooming plumeria trees growing from our fence. Those cut and dry posts are shooting out leaves and thriving even better than the original big tree. We hope they will make it until the rains come. Sometimes we feel like that - can we make it through this dry season? We have bursts of encouragement - a sermon or Bible study, or fellowship with old friends or new visitors - they come and lift our spirits, but like the flowers on treesthe know they won't sustain us or ever. So far, we have plenty of things to look forward to each week, each month. We wonder if it will be enough to get us through the difficult times the short staffing at the hospital, Greg's long drives to work. We pray the rains will come soon, and trust God to sustain us in the dry, hungry time s in the meantime.