Fun Times At Home

We finished our time home this week, a whole month has gone by and now that it's over it seems like it went fast. That always seems to be the case with vacations, but at least this time while we were in it we didn't feel rushed or overwhelmed, we enjoyed it very much. We got to see most of our family and friends, sometimes having two or three different get-togethers in a day. Our last week we spent lots of time with our friends who we hung out the most with at home, the Jasperse and beyond clan.

I went ice fishing with Scott, Jonah, and Kevin, it was one of the colder days of our time at home and we weren't terribly successful at catching anything. It was at least fun to hang out despite our freezing toes, fingers, and noses.

We celebrated our last Christmas of the season and Precious enjoyed getting her Sesame Street song book.

Sam and Lexi were excited about their two dollar bills from grandma and grandpa.

Sam and I continue to be best friends, he likes to wrestle and play the racing game on the computer.

Lexi calls Rebecca "my Becka" and still loves to run into her arms.

We had a big brunch before us guys went fishing and the girls played games.

Jonah shows off his new toy.

Jess and Precious show off their new aprons.

Kayleen and her brother Kevin showing their new gifts.

Christine and Scott A try to look normal to make up for Scott J acting like himself.

We had so much fun seeing our friends and playing with our kids, we'll miss them but thankfully there's skype to help us not miss out on everything that's going on.

I couldn't resist putting this picture up of Lexi in her new princess outfit.

Thank you everyone for helping us have such a great time home. We love you all and we will look forward to seeing you again when we come back on our next one year visit this fall.

More Christmas At Home

We had our third Christmas celebration with Mark's mom. We spent the weekend at her place and played games, watched movies and relaxed.

Mom E and Herb

Sandi and Jay

Us

Kevin

We also shared about our mission in Romania at church and asked people to join us there this summer. We had more interest than we expected and some people are already filling out applications with H2H! Praise God!

We also spent a few days in Canada visiting Oma (Grandma) who is 102 years old! Her mind is very sharp and we enjoyed visiting with her, although she currently has bronchitis. We are very thankful to get to visit with her again and share what we do in Romania with her.

Oma looking at our pictures

Us with Oma

My mom, Oma and Me

We have been enjoying our time home with friends and family. But we also have been thinking about the kids we love so much in Romania, we can't wait to see them again!

Christmas At Home

It's good to be home to spend time with our family and friends. God provided for us to make it home in time for Christmas even with flying through the messy situation at Heathrow Airport in London. We went to church on Christmas eve, Christmas day, and Sunday, and enjoyed each unique service.

Our first Christmas celebration was with Rebecca's family.

The second Christmas celebration was with Mark's family.

We still have a couple more Christmas celebrations coming up, since we've done only one each weekend so far. Spending a whole weekend with each part of our family has given us lots of time to spend together. It has been very fun and it is so great to spend time in person.

Our weekdays have been spent visiting friends, most days we see someone for lunch and someone else for dinner. This has kept us really busy but it's great fun seeing everyone again. We are so thankful that we have a longer time at home so we can see so many of our friends.

Here we are with our friend Amanda who has been to Romania twice already. You can see Grand Rapids far off in the background.

We've been able to see our favorite little kids quite a bit too which is a big blessing. They are growing fast but thanks to Skype they still remember us very well. We love playing with them!

We've been able to make it to many great restaurants and are thankful for so many of our friends' generosity. Our number one requirement was to go to San Chez Tapas Bistro, our favorite restaurant. Tapas are small Spanish dishes that are shared by everyone at the table. This allows you to taste many different foods that are all extraordinary!

Two of our favorite foods at San Chez: Blue Cheese Fritters and Potato Empanadas.

We also have eaten Thai, Chineese, Turkish, Mexican, and American food. We are thankful for the variety of food here, something we don't have much of in Romania.

We have also been very blessed by a new partnership between us and Caledonia CRC. God has been providing for us since we decided to go to Romania and it is evident that He still wants us there. He has been very faithful in providing all that we need and this added partnership provides for our longer term needs. We are so thankful and want to ask that you join us in praising God for his unfailing faithfulness. Also we want to say thanks to you for all your support and prayers! We are reminded of what a wonderful support net we have here, and we know we couldn't minister in a foreign country without that.

November - December Newsletter

In October we started the school year teaching english and science. After going through many scheduling changes at first we finally settled into a workable pattern in November. We continued to enjoy teaching, even though it is very challenging.

English lessons at the boys transition house are always fun as the boys try to pronounce words and remember the correct grammar. They really enjoy having us come and work with them and are eager to spend time with us.

Rebecca's science experiments continue to amaze the kids. In Romania it isn't common to use experiments to reinforce teaching, it is all based on memorization. These experiments draw the kids in and make it fun to learn new things.

We continued to build up some wonderful relationships with the kids. Our teaching, while it is designed to enrich the kids' lives, is really a vehicle for us to get to know the kids. Mihaela is my special little girl, she is super sweet and loves to cuddle. I love her as my own and pray that she will come to know Christ through our love and testimonies.

Georgiana is Rebecca's special little girl, and is also Mihaela's sister. She calls Rebecca mommy.

We also have classes for some of the special needs kids where we read books and do crafts. They are some of the sweetest kids we work with.

Luci shows off her leaf tracing, a craft we did with the 1-4th graders as part of a science lesson.

Our youth groups have been a highlight of our ministry this year. We have three, one in each location that we work. We are allowed to say and talk about whatever we want, so we've been able to focus on biblical teachings. Many of our kids made decisions to follow Christ over the summer and we have the privilege of discipling them now. It has been exciting watching them grow in their faith and encouraging them.

The locals in the village where the boys transition house is are always so welcoming and friendly. It is a nice change of pace being there one day a week after living in a big, busy city.

We enjoyed spending Thanksgiving with our transition house graduates, we had 65 people in total.

The Christmas celebrations at the orphanages were lots of fun, we felt like proud parents as we watched. The kids put lots of work into their programs and were so happy to see that we were there watching them.

It is always fun to see kids waving to their parents when they're performing like this, but most of these kids don't have parents who come to watch them. Knowing that there was someone in the audience watching them made them feel so special.

We enjoyed seeing the lights in Bucharest and spending time with our friends as Christmas approached. At the end of the month we flew home, experiencing many miracles to fly through London and arrive home on time. We enjoyed spending Christmas with our family and have been enjoying seeing friends. One highlight has been that our friends' son who is around 6 or 7 came up to us before bed and told us that he would be praying for us. How precious that was and our hearts were really touched.

Thank you so much for your prayers and support. We certainly wouldn't be able to minister to kids on the other side of the world without so many people praying for us and sustaining us financially. Please continue to pray for safety and wisdom and for God to bless the kids we work with. We thank God for you and wish you a happy new year!

From Bucharest To London To Home

Last week was another action packed time as we continued to celebrate the birth of our savior. That is what Christmas is all about, isn't it? We went downtown Bucharest with some of our friends and ate out at a nice place called Chocolat. After a great meal we walked to a nearby park to see the lights and sights. We love spending time with our friends so it was a really fun night.

Our housemates in Snagov: Krysten, Dorothy, Mariana, and Shannon.

And our friends from church Amy and Cristi.

The next morning we went to the Christmas celebration at one of the orphanages close by. We enjoyed all the singing and dancing acts and the newest act, the band.

Rebecca snuggles with Alina.

Mark became the impromptu Mos Craciun, or Santa Claus as we know him. It was so fun handing out presents to all the kids and seeing their faces as they got their toys. Thanks so much to everyone who donated money and toys this holiday season so that we could do this.

At our staff Christmas party we sang songs, ate great food, and unwrapped our presents from our secret person. That night Rebecca checked our flight status and found out that our flight from Bucharest to London on Thursday was canceled already. We scrambled to find out what to do, thankfully Jodi at H2H was able to find out that there was a flight scheduled on Wednesday. So we went to the airport early in the morning to try to get on that flight, and by God's grace there were some seats for us! So we flew to London a day early. We met up with our friend Jenny who had been stranded in London more than half a week already, and she helped us find a reasonable place to stay and a taxi out there. She was so glad to have some company after standing in line by herself for days on end at the airport. In case you hadn't heard, there was some "bad" weather in London which caused thousands of people to be stranded there for days.

We decided that since we had a whole day in London that we should see some sights, and our cab driver recommended Windsor Castle, where the queen usually stays on weekends. We had a wonderful time there, it is huge and beautiful and was really worth seeing. The town of Windsor was really nice too, with lots of restaurants and neat little shops.

The cathedral inside the castle walls was particularly impressive with its massive size and many stained glass windows.

Here we are with Jenny standing in front of the castle, which was outlined in neon. Oh wait, that's just a cool effect I found in my new photoshop program.

All of our travels from London went really well, thank you all so much for your prayers! Now that we're home we've been spending the weekend with Rebecca's family for Christmas. It has been nice to see everyone again. We are looking forward to seeing more friends and family as our time goes on here, we'll be here for about a month. Please continue to keep us in your prayers as we travel a lot in the coming weeks.