Leslie Rolling - Part 12

Life Abroad – Hurricane Matthew

I haven’t talked a lot on here about the specifics of life in Haiti. I wrote a lot about things when I was first in country, and over time things just became more normal. That said, there are definitely times where I’m reminded that life here is anything but.

For instance, hurricanes. Natural disasters. Every summer we get excited when there’s a storm brewing in the Atlantic, because it might mean a couple days of overcast weather and rain, dropping the summer’s scorching temps and high humidity. In the 11 years that I’ve been living here full time we’ve had some very active hurricane seasons, and others where we found ourselves in a drought.

Last week we started watching the weather websites that we like. There was a storm brewing south east of Hispaniola, the island that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic. It gradually became a hurricane as it moved west along the south coasts of the island, but still too far away to bring any weather.

Over the weekend things changed. Suddenly it was up to a category 3 storm, and starting to shift north. And the in one night it went up to a category 4, then category 5, and back down to a category 4 and it kept heading north. It was in a direct path to Haiti and the country I’ve come to call home started bracing itself.

This was the low down on my/our particular situation:

~ We were in a new location after our organization had been located on the coast for 14 years, so we weren’t sure what to anticipate with the storm in general.

~ Haiti hasn’t had a category 4 hurricane blast through in over sixty years, so many wouldn’t even remember the damage it can cause.

~ My husband left for the states last Wednesday for two weeks. Yeah.

~ We had friends arrive back in country last Tuesday after a year absence, and they were staying with us while they got their house cleaned up and livable again.

I’m thankful to report that we came through just fine. Our facilities had some damage, actually the most in our area, but it’s nothing we can’t fix. In fact, the guys got at it today and got a ton done. I’m in awe, actually.

Here’s what I want to tell you, all the things that have been running through my brain for the past 5 days.

~ The stress of waiting for this sucker was horrible. Gut wrenching. It was supposed to start dropping weather on us on Sunday. But it slowed right down to a crawl and we didn’t see that weather until early Tuesday morning. Those two days… ugh.

~ I tried to make the best of the situation with my kids. Our friends were using the kids beds in one room, and our kids were sleeping on foamies on the floor in another. I pulled those into our room and told them we were having a sleep over. In reality, I was afraid of the unknown. I didn’t want them waking up in the middle of the night to whipping wind and rattling windows and freaking right out. The weather hit during the day, and our kids were oblivious because the lounged on said foamies and watched movies from morning until night.

~ I was thankful for our friends being here just to have the diversion. They decided they would rather be here than anywhere else because they helped build our house and knew that it was probably one of the most structurally sound in Haiti.

~ Two families in a house for several days when you can’t go outside because of the weather leads to twitchy people. That said, I think we all did amazingly well, especially the kids.

~ I cracked when talking to Chris on Tuesday morning as the weather was moving in. It’s hard single parenting on a good day. It’s harder to do it when a natural disaster is headed your way and your favorite person/best friend/support system isn’t there with you. A few minutes later I got to tell him that our work yard roof just collapsed, so there was that too…

~ After the storm finally moved on it’s way I felt, and still feel exhausted. The let down after several days of waiting and wondering and stressing is exhausting.

And now? Now we rest. Our friends went to their much loved house today for the first night since being back. Our kids have their rooms all sorted and back and were super excited to sleep in their own beds tonight. I am going to put myself to sleep shortly, and forced myself to get off Facebook where all the reports and conversations of what’s going on here have been taking place between fellow expats and missionaries. I just need to be done for my own sanity.

There are so many things that I’m thankful for too, and I think gratitude is a healthy thing, so here’s my list…

~ I’m so thankful that Matthew veered. The damage is devastating, but there is a collective agreement here that it could have been so much worse.

~ I’m thankful for development. Most don’t see what we see in the day to day here, and many say Haiti isn’t developing, but it is. I know it is because in 48 hours a variety of networks pushed out the message that the storm was coming and tried to prepare people as much as possible. Yes, there has been an incredibly loss of physical structures, livestock and agriculture, but the death toll is less than 300. Compare that to the last category 4 hurricane that came through in the 50’s where the death toll was 8,000. Or the earthquake where the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands. Haiti is advancing, and I’m so grateful for that.

~ I’m thankful for our staff. They are amazing. While I was worrying about them, they checked in on me to see how we fared. When they came to work today for the first time and saw the damage, they were eager to get to work and fix stuff and salvage things and get things back to normal. It’s inspiring and challenging.

~ I’m thankful to be part of a beautiful network of missionaries and expats here who are working to support each other. It’s such a beautiful thing.

~ I’m thankful that we know our place as an organization. We’re focused on development, and we aren’t close enough to the areas that were hardest hit to be of any use there. And we’re okay with that. As we communicated with our supporters in the past few days we told them flat out that we couldn’t contribute to the relief work, because we know that’s not where we’re strong. I love that and am thankful for that transparency and freedom to not feel like we need to be everything to everyone.

And now I’m thankful for rest. It’s time to shut down and step back and take a bit of time away from the world wide web.

October 6, 2016 2 Comments

Dropping Pounds – The Challenges

I didn’t mean for there to be more than a few days between posts on this but I’ve been working outside most of this week on getting some stuff done, and was sick yesterday. The first two months of the school year should have extra parent sick days allotted, in my opinion. Our kids go back, and they bring home all these wonderful germs that leave us all feeling a bit bombarded. But, I have noticed a difference this year in how my body is being affected by this stuff, and I think it’s because I’m trying to be healthier overall and my immune system is working better.

The stuff I’ve been working on outside is in an effort to get our house DONE. We moved in last December, 10 days before Christmas. It was crazy, but we did it. There are still a few outstanding projects to finish, which is actually why I still haven’t gotten to doing a full house tour on the blog yet, even though people have been asking to see things since we moved in. The office is mostly finished, just a few little paint touch ups that would really take me about 15 minutes. The kitchen is mostly done, except for the cabinet doors under the sink. We changed our approach to that whole space, and I’ve been putting it off until I do the closet built ins because then we can do all the doors and drawer fronts at the same time, paint, etc – all assembly line. Makes sense, right, but we’re still living with not quite done. And, sadly the bathroom upstairs already needs some TLC. When we installed the tile around the tub and put the tub in we didn’t realize that the tile around the tub wasn’t quite level, so whenever we have showers this trail of water runs along the inside wall and around the end of the tub onto the floor. I think I’ve figured out the fix, but it’s going to take some time and I’m thinking about doing it when Chris is gone in a few weeks because it’s one less person using the shower.

This week it’s been working on closets. Our closet units were put in back in April while Chris was away, but I still need to do all the face frames and trim work on them, and put in drawers and cupboard doors. Our ceilings are about 9′ 6″, and we’ve gone all the way up so we have a ton of storage, but I didn’t want it to be all open like it was at our old house because it’s a pain to dust up that high. Also, I don’t want to walk in and visually feel like our stuff that’s stored up there is going to fall on our heads, even though it literally won’t. I wasn’t working on the units for our bedroom, just giving guidance, so they weren’t built exactly to my specs, so as we’ve been working on the kids closets I’ve been doing a lot more attention to detail and I’m happy with how things are coming together. They have a primer coat on them and either over the weekend or on Monday I’ll start painting the good coats, and then we’ll install them. We’ve taken the paint ahead of time approach because it’s so much easier to do the bulk of that outside in our work spaces than it is to paint inside where I’m worried about getting oil paint on floors, taping things off, etc. I will have to paint all the trim work inside, but that’s not going to be a huge amount and will be much easier than crouching down and trying to get all the undersides of shelves done.

So that’s what I’ve been up to, now let’s get down to business.

In my first post about this whole weight loss thing I talked about why I’m doing this. I’ve been having issues with the way WordPress is pushing these to Facebook, so I know that some of you probably didn’t even see the second post about what I’m doing differently this time. I don’t want to drag this on and on, so I’m going to talk about a few things today. I want to share what I’m doing specifically, and what some of the challenges have been so far.

The first is how I’m managing what I’m eating. I mentioned some of the things that I’ve tried in the past and even told you that I decided to use SparkPeople.com again. In the past month or so I’ve realized that I do well when I’m tracking my food, and I wanted to be more honest with myself about exactly what I was eating, when I was eating, so I could learn and be able to make better food choices. Knowing approximately how many calories are in a particular food and knowing how many calories I should be aiming for each day helps me plan what I want to eat over the day and make choices about what is most worth my calorie investment. Does that make sense? The tracker on SparkPeople.com also does the breakdown of fat, fiber, and carbs so you can see what your foods are looking like and make choices based on that. I haven’t used that as a guide as much as I do just to see what I tend to gravitate toward and asking myself how I can maybe exchange some of those comfort food carbs for good for me fiber, for example.

Now, I don’t want you to think that I’m a rock star about all of this tracking and that things are going smashingly, because that would be far from reality.

The truth of the past few weeks is that some days/weeks I’m doing really well with tracking, and other days/weeks like this past one, I’ve done not so well with things. I was really in a funk in the past week, which I know was partly because of the lady business where all I want to do is sleep and eat all the carbs while I probably cry or something. Seriously. I went from feeling amazing to feeling like I didn’t want to drag my sorry self out of bed. And I definitely was not wanting the salad and healthy things. No way! I wanted pizza, and all the comfort food.

That said, it was educational for me. Realizing that a) it’s one week or so, and b) that even in the times where I felt like crap, I was still willing to make mostly good choices and when I stepped on the scale I hadn’t gained back all the weight I’d worked hard at losing, even if my body felt like it.

The last thing that has been eye opening is seeing the difference in how I feel depending on what I’ve been eating. That’s been the most interesting, and honestly kind of shocking. I think shocking because in theory I’ve known this about myself, and if I think back to when I was doing less carbs, for example, if I’m honest I was feeling better. As I’ve been going through things and trying to listen to what my body wants more than the theory of a diet/food plan I saw how I started gravitating toward healthier fare, and in turn my metabolism kicked into high gear. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that for several days about a week and a half ago I could not fill myself up. I would eat, and eat good things, and then an hour and a half later I was ravenous. I was tracking my calories and was eating about 2200 calories a day, and yet dropped more than 3 pounds in one week. I was definitely not starving! It was crazy. And a bit uncomfortable. To the point where I deliberately ate pizza one night because I just wanted to feel full for more than 5 minutes. I think the difference was that I was unintentionally not eating unhealthy carbs like pasta, breads, etc. And my body went into burn mode. Then, I indulged myself and let those things in and I directly saw how cruddy I felt.

I’m still coming off of that and working to getting back to tracking every day and trying to eat better again. It’s HARD. It’s a constant battle between my body and my mind and my heart. But, even when it’s been hard I have been still trying to make better choices than when I’ve gotten to this wall in the past, and you know what? The scale is still slowly, but surely going down. And that feels good. I did have a bit of a cry the other day when I was telling Chris that I just felt cruddy and discouraged and he just reminded me that he’s so proud of me and that I have been doing really well. This is just a few days, and it doesn’t change the long term outcome. I needed that reminder from someone outside of my head.

The one thing that I have been consistent with is exercise, which is usually the thing I battle most. Again, I’m not going to lie, it’s been a battlefield this past week. But, even when I might not have been eating as well as I could have, I’ve been making myself keep active, even if it’s the bare minimum. Seriously, when I feel like I have daggers stabbing at my abdomen the last thing I want to do is get on the treadmill and punch out my 20 minutes, but I did it. Today was the first day that I didn’t stick to my schedule because I was sick yesterday and didn’t want to over do it. Last Friday I did actually over do it :( It was a combo of being outside in the heat and sweating a lot and wanting to just do that one more thing. I spent 5 1/2 hours outside weed eating, mowing, and dividing and moving plants around. When I entered all that into the exercise calculator I’m pretty sure I burned more calories than I took in during that part of the day, and I felt it. Headache, exhaustion, etc. Not fun. So, I’ve learned that as much as I might want to keep going, I can’t battle the realities of living here in the heat and humidity and I need to take things in chunks.

My goals for the rest of this month are:

~ Keep being consistent with my exercise, not just for controlling my weight, but because I feel so much better when I do it and get those workouts and time outside in. My whole outlook is just better, I feel better, I’m less cranky and I like all that. It’s definitely worth it!

~Get back to tracking regularly so I can continue to learn about what my body works well with, what it likes, what makes it feel good and strong, and what doesn’t work well. Being tired and cranky isn’t a good feeling and I know that what I eat directly affects that, so I want to focus on some of that.

~Being more in tune with myself in the sense that I want to pay attention to what feels good in exercise and food choices, what leaves me feeling sluggish and tired, what my body is craving or wanting for exercise, and even what I’m enjoying and not enjoying.

~Being gentle with myself and remembering that it’s okay to be really focused most of the week and then give myself time to enjoy food/life for an evening or even a day, and know that is not going to undo all the work I’m doing the rest of the time.

~Some people say weighing yourself daily is a bad thing because it’s too much focus on the number, but it works for me as a check point through the week. I don’t panic if the number goes up because I know that things like water retention, bowel movements, etc all affect that, and just use it as a guide to think more about choices for that day. I do an “official” weigh in weekly and that’s the number I use to gauge where things are at in the bigger picture. I want to keep checking in with myself like this.

This whole journey is hard, and several of you have let me know that you’re on it yourselves, whether it was in the comments or through personal messages. Thank you for sharing! It was so encouraging to me. And, I want to encourage you too. We have bad/hard days. Life happens and sometimes there are things that come up that need more of our time and attention than what we’re eating that day. That’s okay. Doing well or working at it for 80% of the time is going to show changes, good ones. Giving ourselves a bit of grace and not getting into the shame conversations that like to roll around in our heads during those times is such a key thing that I’m learning, and I realize that this is where I’ve struggled in the past. Instead of being able to look at that as one rough day or week, or even weeks, and getting back up again I would let it define the whole process and give up.

Let’s not give up. Let’s get up the next day and try again. Maybe we’ll do really well. Maybe that bit of exercise is going to feel amazing and we’re going to feel like we can conquer the world. Or maybe it’s going to suck the entire time. I so appreciated a Facebook post by a friend in the past couple of weeks that literally said, “First post baby work out yesterday. It completely sucked.” I’ve had times where I get through my time on the treadmill and my strength training and I feel like Rocky when he runs the stairs. Last week I was almost crying because it sucked so bad and I just wanted it to be done. But I pushed through and finished and felt like I should have gotten a medal just for trying. The part that was soul lifting was not letting those “can’t” voices in my head win and later being able to say “did it”. I have a lot of weight to lose to be at a healthy level and I need to continually remind myself it’s going to take work and that it’s going to happen over time. Over and over and over again.

I’ve been spending time on Pinterest just cruising through the Heatlh and Fitness pins to get inspired, and as cheesy as some of the quotes are, some of them do get me going again. If you’re needing some inspiration here’s a good link for you :)

I would love to hear what’s working for you guys, what’s hard, what you’re learning… Please share!

September 9, 2016 1 Comment

Dropping Pounds – Where I Started

In my last post I put on my big girl britches and put it all out there. Isn’t it amazing how hard it can be for us to talk about personal life issues? And yet we know that there are many others dealing with the same thing and it can feel so good to share and then have other people say me too, that’s me!!!

That’s my hope with these posts, that along with just being a way for me to share and be a bit more accountable, it might be an encouragement to someone else.

So, lets dive in and talk about what I’m doing this time around with losing weight that is different from times past.

Putting It Out There

First of all, this.

Actually writing about it early on, is a big difference. In the past I’ve always felt a lot of shame around this whole issue, so I’ve kept mum, feeling like I needed to reach a certain point before it was okay to share. In hindsight I’ve seen how that’s actually aided in my destruction, and here’s why.

I realized that when I keep this journey very personal and private not only do I not have the encouragement I need, it’s also a lot easier for me to make exceptions for myself and call them one thing or another. If no one knows that I’m working to lose weight then I feel like I need to explain why I’m not going to have x, y, or z at a get together. If no one knows that I’m tracking my food then when I overeat on a particular day I can just pretend that I don’t need to track, because no one will be asking about it. Does that make sense?

This time around I knew I needed to bring other people along with me mostly for my own success. I will say this – it’s been a huge help and encouragement that Chris has been running regularly since March. Because he’s been setting time aside for exercise and working at eating better I don’t feel like I’m on my own. We might go about it differently, but we’re working toward the same goal of being healthier. I can be excited for him when he pushes himself and breaks his time record, and he can be encouraging and excited for me when I have a good work out or have done really well at tracking my progress. That’s definitely a big help this time around.

Two weeks ago was our regular Missionary Fellowship get together. We do this every other Sunday with a group of local missionary friends. It’s a time to gather, visit, do a bit of Bible study, and pray for each other. We do what we like to call “check in” where we can share what’s been going on in the past couple of weeks and how people can be praying for us. For the first time ever I sucked it up and shared that I was working at losing weight and asked people for prayer that I would be able to stick with it when it was hard. I’ve shared with friends privately before, but this was the first time doing it in a bigger group.

You know what? It was freeing. This is our social circle. These are the people we spend time with during non-work hours. We have them over for meals and go out to hang out. These are our people. If there was anyone that needed to know, it was this group. And I’m so thankful that I did it. After the meeting while we were visiting one sweet friend came to me and told me she was so proud of me for sharing and thanked me for my courage, then told me to let her know how she could specifically be supporting me, whether it was walking together or whatever. It was so nice to have that!

The really nice thing is that now that everyone knows, I don’t feel like it has to be an elephant in the room that only I’m aware of. Hey you, yeah, I see you lurking in the corner over there. When we’re together I don’t have to feel like I need to give explanations if I say no to something or feel that I’m making offhanded comments about why I might not want something. I can share my progress and know that people are cheering me on.

Having Chris be part of this, and having our friends know, has been a big boost for me this time around. At home, if I’ve had a really good day Chris is cheering me on and telling me how proud he is, and if it’s been a hard day or one where I know I could have done it differently, then he listens and encourages. It’s just nice to know that I’m not alone. If you’re considering or are in the process of trying to lose weight I would encourage you to be brave and tell people that are in your circle. You might be surprised at how excited and supportive they are, and the ways that they’ll come along side you.

Start Small & Listen Well

This has probably been the biggest difference for me this time. In the past when I’ve worked at losing weight I’ve felt like I needed to jump in and go whole hog, to figure it all out right from the start and to be awesome the whole way along. Eventually that whole exercise gets exhausting. This time I knew I needed to take baby steps.

In all honesty I haven’t had a solid plan this time around. I just knew I was tired of feeling crappy and not fitting into clothes and was just done. When I thought about the other times I’d tried to lose weight it was a bit discouraging. The first thing I did when I got back from vacation at the end of July was weigh myself, fight back tears, and then move on. The number was just the cold hard truth and I needed to accept that without reasoning it away and having a pity party. It was a place to start. The goal was to make it go down.

I started paying more attention to what I was eating. I will be the first to tell you that I love food. All the foods. I love cooking and eating out and tasting all the wonderful things there are to eat in this world. And, as a blessing and a curse, I’ve been gifted with extra taste buds in my mouth, so food just tastes extra good to me, and I really enjoy it. My favorites are all the comfort foods like pasta and bread and cheese… I try to eat a balanced diet, but portion control is my big issue, especially if something is delicious. Rather than enjoying it and then moving on I’ll just keep eating it.

Once I started paying attention to what I was eating I knew I also needed to start paying attention to how much. I typically make bigger meals so we can have left overs for lunch and what not, but that means it’s also easier for me to take seconds. So I started there, and tried to cut back on taking seconds.

I told Chris that while I loved things like fried fish and fried chicken I love the fried things that he needed to be okay with that not happening for a while because while it tasted good, it wasn’t good for any of us. I started putting more effort into making healthier meals. We always have salad on hand, which I’m glad for because for many that’s a big transition. It was the other stuff that was going with the salad. Basically I just started cutting out some of the unhealthy stuff and replacing it with healthier stuff. Instead of normal lasagne I made eggplant lasagne and replaced the noodles with slices of eggplant. Chris, who doesn’t like cooked veggies, has been harassing me to make this again :)

As I started taking steps to make healthier dishes for the family I started to notice that I was wanting healthier lunches, so I listened to my body and obliged. When I realized I was craving something crunchy and fresh I would eat a dinner plate full of salad and it was so satisfying.

While I was listening to what my body wanted food wise, I started to notice that I was wanting to be more active too. A part of that actually happened unintentionally.

Back in April I had a patio built off the side of our house, and then me and a couple of our employees put flower beds in all around the house. There are 8 of them all together, and they’re all big. Whose crazy idea was that??? Then I planted things. They’re my flower beds, so they’re my responsibility to look after. Do you know what happens when you’re gone for 6 weeks during the rainy season? Things grow. They grow a lot. Including the weeds. When we got back I was shocked at how big my plants had gotten in such a short time, and I cringed at how much weeding there was to do. Mostly just this grass that likes to keep reseeding itself.

I knew it wasn’t going to go away, so one day I put on my work clothes and got out my new gardening gloves and knee mat and got to work. I worked as much as I could until the sun got too hot and I had bad blisters on my hands. The next day I told Chris I would love it if he would weld up a garden “claw” for me that I could use to turn over the dirt so the weeding was easier, and before I could say boo he was working on it. As I started making progress on the weeding things started to look nicer, and it was incentive to keep going. Then I wanted to move some things around, and other things needed clipping and trimming to get cleaned up.

Before I knew it a week had gone by and I had been working outside for several hours each day. The kids even joined me in the mornings and evenings when they were able, and I enjoyed their help and enthusiasm. Chris has a whole yard full of fruit trees that are starting to give us delicious things, so now I guess we’re a family of gardeners. Most of all it feels good to be nurturing something and putting the work in and seeing the benefits.

While the yard is looking good the biggest thing I realized is that I enjoy the exercise I get while gardening. And let me tell you, it burns a TON of calories. I started to feel my body responding to the work, and it felt good. Rather than being sore, I was feeling stronger. Rather than feeling stiff, I was starting to feel more flexible. That was enough to encourage me to get back on the treadmill and to start a regular exercise plan. I’ll talk more about that in another post.

So the take away is this – pay attention to your body. Rather than trying to cram my body into a plan, whether it was eating or exercise, I went the other way around this time. I started paying attention to what left me feeling good after meals, how much, how often. This is a constant process, but because of it I’m feeling less deprived, so it’s been easier to stick with things. Because I’ve been working to find exercise I enjoy I haven’t started hating it. In fact, I’ve been enjoying it so much I feel a bit angry that it’s taken me this long to figure things out. I just feel better when I’ve been active in a day, as opposed to when I haven’t. When I’m feeling cranky now I think through my day and more times than not it’s been a day where I haven’t worked out or been outside doing yard work.

More to come! Thanks for following along with me :)

September 2, 2016 No Comments

I’m Leslie. I started my blog back in 2005 when I was fresh off the plane in Haiti. I lived in Haiti for over 17 years as a missionary, wife, and eventually mom. My husband and I ran Clean Water for Haiti together, day in and day out. We carved out a life we loved doing something important to us. Sadly, in the fall of 2022 we had to make the difficult decision to leave Haiti because of the insecurity. We’re now settling into life in the US. I’m thankful that I get to continue my work with CWH as the Executive Director for Canada and the US.

Life Abroad – Hurricane Matthew

Dropping Pounds – The Challenges

Dropping Pounds – Where I Started

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Life Abroad – Hurricane Matthew

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Dropping Pounds – The Challenges

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Dropping Pounds – Where I Started

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