Fall Classes

Well, after moving into our apartment and settling in, we thought it was about time to disrupt our schedule again for a trip back to Michigan! We are currently back in MI for a month and are visiting family, friends and speaking at 5 churches. So far we have been enjoying our time home, but we miss our kids too. We are really enjoying our schedule this year. We are teaching classes in the apartments of the kids (english and a science/geography class), teaching at the special needs school, tutoring in our apartment (math, english, biology), involved in the youth group, and the Boys Transition House has started up again so we will also be teaching there. Most of our teaching is done in the afternoon, we tutor in the evenings and are at the transition house in the morning-early afternoon one day a week. So we are pretty busy, but we really enjoy our classes and being able to spend the time with the kids. On our one free evening of the work week, usually you will find us hanging out with some of the older kids at our apartment. That is the unique and special part of working in the southern location, Rosiori. The kids live in apartments (just down the street from us) and can get permission to come and visit us. We both have kids that are special to us that are more than just kids we work with, they truly are our friends. It is such a blessing to be able to support and encourage them and also to laugh together and spend time together as friends.

Mark at one of the apartments

We also had our annual Thanksgiving feast early this year. Last Saturday we had around 70 people at the team house for Thanksgiving. All graduates and current transition house "kids" (18 and up, since this is our after high school job and life skills program) are invited as well as some other people who are part of the H2H family. We had a good time and enjoyed lots of good Thanksgiving food!

Cristi, Amy, Haley and Steven

Aurel (who just graduated this spring from our program), Rebecca, Mark, Josh, Missy

Halloween and New Apartment

Who knew we'd still have fun celebrating Halloween in Romania? Halloween isn't very big here, but we're a bunch of Americans and it's still kind of fun to dress up. We went to a party with our friends from church, Amy and Cristi. It was also a birthday party for Amy.

Here we are at the party: Josh - a Jedi, Missy - a fall fairy, Me - a Jedi master, Rebecca - a Flinstone, Haley - little red ridinghood, Steven - the big bad wolf, Amy - Frankenstein's bride, and Cristi - Frankenstein.

There were lots of other people from church there too. We played some fun games and watched a nice video that Amy and Cristi made of their wedding which was just last year.

We continue to have a good time teaching our kids, our classes are going really well and we are enjoying staying in one location and working with so many more kids now.

We had worked with many of the kids only at summer camps, like this little guy here. But just those couple days of camp were enough to start building a wonderful relationship. He is probably one of the most excited and loving kids when we come to his school, he runs up and jumps in my arms every time! It is so great to be able to continue to build on these relationships. It is so great to see the joy on their faces when they see us, so rewarding!

Lately you've heard us talking a lot about our new apartment, and today you're going to be able to see it! The reason we needed an apartment is because we're now working in our southern location the whole week. It is about a two hour drive from Bucharest, and last year we only worked here two days. We only got to work with very few kids out of many, and this year we are working with the majority of them because we're here longer. Now that we are staying there more than anywhere else, we really needed our own space as opposed to sharing an apartment with some other staff like we did last year for the two days we were there.

Here's the entryway.

And the kitchen, not too big but we have it arranged so it's pretty workable now.

Across the hall is our pantry and refrigerator.

This is the living room. We spent the last two weeks putting together all the furniture (from IKEA) and mounting things on the walls. There were no light fixtures in the whole place, just lightbulbs hanging from wires. It would be a lot easier if the walls weren't solid concrete, but hey, that's why they make really big hammer drills.

This is the opposite view of the living room, showing the balcony. It is attached and adds some nice space to the living room.

Here is our bedroom. Rebecca made/ is making the curtains (they weren't quite done at this point).

Here is our bathroom. I put up the mirror and towel hooks, and we put a nice organizer in the corner which you can't see. Try and find the silhouette of George Washington, we noticed it when we were looking at the pictures with some friends!

And here is our new washing machine. The only space that would fit a washing machine is really small, so we had to get this kind, it is a top loader but the drum is the same as a front loader. The drum actually opens up so clothes can be loaded in there. It is pretty slick, and it works great.

We are really enjoying our new place, we feel like we finally have a place to call our own again after quite some time. We are so thankful to God for providing this place to us and thankful to you for all of your prayers!

Two Full Weeks

Wow, these last two weeks have been so packed with things happening and God working. We've been falling behind on our blogging lately, it would be easy to blame it on all the business but it always comes back to time management, doesn't it? The good thing is that we have a mostly established schedule now, it always takes a few weeks to get everything arranged. There are still kids who don't fit into our schedule because of class time conflicts that want to learn English so we are working on figuring that out.

Youth group continues to go well, we've had around 25 kids so far, it's a lot for one apartment living room, but we make it work. Our amazing race challenges continue, this week they had to find matching pairs of socks from a big pile.

We are working on creating posters of the kid's dreams, by drawing and using magazines. We are trying to encourage them to think more about their futures and to realize that they can do a lot with their lives.

With the younger kids we have many classes, like character development and craft time.

In the spirit of fall we had the kids do colorful tracings of leaves.

Rebecca and Sanda teach a combined class about geography and biology.

Then of course we have many english classes, we are going through the alphabet and having the kids draw pictures of things that start with each letter.

They always want to write on the white boards so we thought it would be a good teaching tool if we could use it in class.

Here is a very interesting elephant!

The other business has come from our apartment search. Praise God that he has provided one for us! We moved in this week and have been working on cleaning it up and putting together all of our new furniture. We had to go on a shopping spree to furnish the apartment (ouch!) but we're thankful that God has provided for us so we were able to do it. We really like our new apartment and it is like a burden has been lifted from our shoulders. We are so thankful and want to thank you for your prayers and support! God has really provided for us and we know now that this is the place he had in store for us from the beginning. It is awesome how He works.

God also provided for us on another front. When we are home soon we will be traveling quite a bit so we need to borrow a car from someone. Up until Sunday we hadn't heard of any car being available. We were talking with some family about it and were saying that even though the time is getting near and we didn't have a car yet, we knew God would provide one for us in His timing. Right after that conversation we got an e-mail from some friends saying that they had a car we could borrow. Their mom doesn't use her car anymore and it is just being stored and she offered it to us to use. How awesome is that?! We can tangibly feel the joy that God is giving us through his providence. Truly wonderful. When you trust in God he is faithful, we have seen that in our lives time and time again!

Start Of The Year

Wow, it's the middle of October already, and now we know it's fall because our beloved nice warm weather has left and the cold has come in it's place. But I guess that is to be expected in October. Eight years ago when we got married it was pretty cold already, dare I say nearly snowing that day. We celebrated our anniversary with our new couples, and amazingly Steven and Haley's is the same exact day.

Josh and Missy made us chicken parmesan and apple crisp, and I made the second dessert of cinnamon rolls.

The hours it takes to make these are worth it, they are sooo good, if I do say so myself.

We started our programming this week and worked a lot on scheduling. We started with a plan and knew that it would change a lot, but it actually didn't too much.

We are working in all of the locations in this area now, with many more kids than we worked with last year. Since we are staying the whole week we have much more opportunity. We are teaching English, math, biology and character to kids of all ages. The hope is that this will not only help them do well in school but get to know us better, and through that will be pointed to God.

At youth group we did Amazing Race games and challenges, complete with authentic looking envelopes and clue cards.

The kids had to put together a puzzle according to the picture...

...Solve a word search with each person missing one of the senses...

...And keep drinking pop until they found the one with the X in the bottom. They all had a lot of fun. It was pretty crowded in the small living room with 30 of us in total, but we're used to that from last year. We hope to be able to have an impact on these kids even though we have been forbidden by their director to talk about God. We know that God will work in spite of that and will do amazing things.

The last three weeks have been an emotional roller coaster with the apartment search. We have been so close to finding a few but each time something hasn't worked out. Right now we have a great prospect, one that is very nice and the price is right and everything seems to be in order, except that the owner lives in Italy and he didn't leave the legal papers with his brother-in-law who is in charge of the apartment. We would love to move in there but need to have some sort of contract with them, so we're trying to figure out how to do that. Please continue praying for this to be resolved. We know God will provide as he always has up to this point. It's just hard to put aside our worries and stresses after having such a hard time finding anything. We appreciate all of your support and prayers as we go through this, thanks!

Around The Blocks

As we move closer to the start of our fall program we've been busy doing many different things. We put together proposals to send to the directors of the orphanages and we came up with new ideas for our classes. This year we will be spending the whole week working in our southern location which is where we've been seeing so much fruit in the young people's lives. This will be good for us because we'll be able to focus on and work with all the kids there instead of just a few like last year. It will also cut down on all the traveling to and from different places like we did last year.

Since we'll be spending most of the week there we spent much of this week looking for an apartment where we can stay. It turned out to be way harder than we thought to find something. After walking around for hours the first day and looking at the front doors of every single block building we saw, we hadn't found a single apartment for rent. The second day we finally found an announcement for a one bedroom apartment that sounded good, so we checked it out and it would be perfect for us. The problem was that the owner is in Spain and the person managing it was trying to take advantage of us because we're Americans so we must be rich! We had our Romanian director call him later and he made an offer so we are waiting to hear back if it accepted by the owner or not. Please pray for this, being the only apartment we found in three days of searching it is really important that we can rent it. We are trusting that God will provide and we would really appreciate your prayers for just that.

By the third day of searching everything started looking the same and we found ourselves going in circles and looking at the same places twice, it just took us a while to figure that out. The city isn't even that big but there are so many blocks that look nearly identical.

We found this fighter jet in one of the parks we walked through.

Another thing we did was hand out school kits to all the kids at the local orphanages, even ones we don't get to work with full time. The teachers were especially thankful for this help since supplies like crayons, notebooks, pens, and pencils are hard to come by for them.

Our partner Mariana handing off one of the kits, we gave one to every classroom.

Of course we were immediately greeted with lots of hugs and happiness from the girls we know from summer camps.

There were also some meetings with directors to go over our programs which leads to the next big prayer request. We had a problem with one of them over the summer because some of "his" kids were baptized, and he is still trying to keep us from talking about God at all. Please pray for God to lead us and give us wisdom in how to deal with this and how to be creative in how we share about him. Please pray for God to soften this man's heart so he lets us openly share about Jesus again. Please pray for the meetings with other directors that will happen soon and pray that we will have a great program that will lead these kids to Christ. Please pray for us and the rest of our staff and especially the two new couples here who will be starting language lessons soon.

Thanks so much for lifting us up in your prayers, we are so thankful that God honors the prayers of his children!

New Couples On Staff!

This week has brought the much anticipated arrival of two new couples who have joined our staff. We are so excited to welcome them and have been helping prepare their new place to stay, which is with us. We are all staying at the house formerly known as the girls transition house, since we won't be having that program again this year.

We went to the orphanage yesterday to play with the kids. School has started again so they were all there, it was a much different experience than going there over the summer when so many were at home.

We were welcomed by a huge crowd of kids and had so many hugs and kisses we felt like celebrities. The kids really missed us over the summer as we were away at camps. Here are Rebecca and Haley hanging out with some of the kids.

And here is Steven, the one with the red hair, Haley's husband and one of my two new guys on staff. I hope you can understand how exciting it is to have two more guys after I've been the only one on staff for two years. Let's just say I'm really, really happy!

Here are Josh and Missy, the other new couple. We go way back with them to our long summer here in 2008. They were interns then and we got to work with them at camp.

God has truly answered our prayers by sending these great new couples here to work with us. We are looking forward to getting to know them better. God has provided for each of them as they raised their support and prepared to come here. He brought them both here at the same time which is really neat. They will be great editions to our staff. Please pray that God will bless their transition here and bless them especially as they start language lessons soon.

This week we will be also be finding out what our fall program will be like. We know already that we will be working more in our southern location which is where we feel there is a revival coming. Please pray that God will lead us in all of our planning and that he will bless us with another fruitful year. We have already put the word out that we are looking for an apartment there, please pray that God will provide just the right one.