Finally!

Well after some travel delays, cancellations and lost baggage (which was retrieved finally!), we are here in our home city! God has been good to us through all of it, and now it is time to go to work!

We are staying at another GCC’s house temporarily while they are stateside, though they are with a different company. It is fully furnished, but we are still living out of suitcases for now. However, we have located and seen some apartments here with the help of our team members, who have been an incredible blessing to us regarding us getting set up to survive life here early. I knew that God had a place to stay for us long before we even chose to follow His plan to come here, and in a matter of days we have signed a contract on a brand new apartment. It will be ready in 2-4 weeks for us to move in because the electricity, cabinets and cleaning needs to be finished. God is showing us His provision right at the start.

The kids have been doing fine, no bad signs of culture shock, other than jet-lag waking them up at 3AM for about a week, but we are pretty much over that now. The other part of culture shock is the fact that they cannot just go outside to play, or play with the national kids. These kids are not around much because they are in school 6 days a week and when they get home from school they are doing homework for the afternoon. Our team members have 2 kids, and my daughter and their daughter, only 2 years apart, have become very quick friends. My 4 year old son just likes to play video games or eat, which is a close match to their 15 year old son, the only difference is age!

We will be traveling as a family for some intensive language training in another city next week. It ought to be fun, because we’ll be traveling by train. We then come back and find someone for our one on one language teaching, which is called “barefoot learning”. That means that there is no formal classroom, but we are to use our language teacher for a couple hours per day and then we are on our own to practice what we learn. That is our primary task now for the next 4 months, as the company will pay for our teacher for that long. We are on our own to learn what we can from there. I realize that it is very important to know the language to be affective, because we have been very dependent on our team members to help us get things done. Hopefully we will be able to learn enough to survive on our own soon enough.

I hope that I have not bored anyone, but this is definitely a process more than we had ever expected, and sometimes seems very overwhelming. However, we know that God is with us, and He has been working here long before we arrived, and just as Joseph told Pharoah that he could not do it himself, but God could. We know that we must rely on God for all of our needs. Pray that we can incorporate ourselves into the culture and the community to show Christ to those who have never heard of Him.