For Such a Time as This

Helloooooooo from Florence!

Well, as always, I hardly know where to begin. Our days are filled, and we are always busy doing something. However, when I sit down to write about it, I have the hardest time remembering exactly what I did!

My English lessons are going very well. I have 8 students that come faithfully every week to learn....from me! Sometimes that is hard to believe. I would like to tell you a little about them. I will give you a little portrait of each of them throughout the next several blogs.

I have one girl that comes that is 15 years old, and she always can make me smile. She is pretty quiet at first, but she usually warms up pretty quickly. We have very similar tastes in books, so that has been fun to talk about and discuss. I think she will go to see a movie in English at the Odeon with Jill and me. Also, she is very smart and remembers everything! I will try to quiz her over a Bible passage that we have read, but it's pointless, because she gets every single one correct. (I have found that to be true with most of my students, though.) We are studying Mark together, and it's so fun to be able to see small improvements already. Also, we just started reading The Magician's Nephew, the first book in The Chronicles of Narnia series. She's really liking it so far - although we are only on Chapter 2 - and I'm excited, because I know what a great sense of accomplishment I felt when I read my first book in Italian. And I get to help somebody else do that! Anyway, she is wonderful, and I always look forward to our lessons.

Well, today was our last day of language school. We are official graduates of the Lorenzo dei Medici intermediate 3 and advanced classes. It was sad saying goodbye to our teachers and all the people that work there - we are friends with both of the baristas, as we did our homework in the school bar every morning. It is also kind of liberating having all of our mornings free for other things now though. We are planning on starting to work more at the church building.

We will go tomorrow morning to the Questura Ufficio d'Immigrazione to get our permesso di sogiorno - finally! We had an appointment there on Wednesday, but when we got there the electricity was out! So they told us we had to come back another time. Boh. Beverly, Debbie, and Rachel leave tomorrow for some traveling, so we will drop them at the train station before we go to the Questura.

I'm excited about the youth convegno next weekend in Aprilia! I think it will be a really good experience for Jill and I, and it will give us the chance to get to know some young Italian Christians. We will be full-submersion Italian, that's for sure! The members of the church are going to host us in their homes. Yahooo!

Also, the Florence church (along with the churches nearby, such as Prato and Pistoia), are hosting the women's conference next year! The conference is in early March, so we have been having meetings to discuss the innerworkings on Saturdays. We have decided on Esther as our theme (thus the "for such a time as this" heading), and we are very excited about it!

Let me know if there are things in particular you are curious about, and I will do my best to write a good description! Love you all!

I DID IT!!!

Once more, proof that I am just a little bit nerdy: On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday Rosa cooks lunch for us and has it ready by the time we get home from language school. Very wonderful. Then we all sit down together and chat - always in Italian, because Rosa CLAIMS that she doesn't speak English. I am still skeptical of this. Anyway, last week an amazing thing happened. We were sitting there talking, and I was telling Rosa about something that had happened earlier that day, and.......I correctly used a sentence in the imperfect conjunctive tense!! Weow!! Now, I know that may not seem like a big deal to most of you, but it was a milestone for me. It was the first time it came relatively easily - that is to say without scrunching my nose, lowering my eyebrows, and squeezing it out of my brain.

My school decided that we are improving as well. They permitted us, after completing the intermediate 3 class in september, to sign up for the advanced class this month. We started the class on Monday: Jill, Cecilia, and I are all together again with the new addition of Camilla (Colombia), Isabella (Boulder, CO), and Kamal (Egypt). Also we have one of our teachers from last month again - Luca. He teaches us all four hours this time instead of having two different teachers for two hours apiece. So much fun!

Gramma still hasn't arrived, because of some trouble with her medication. I think everything is worked out now though, and she is planning to arrive Monday. Yay!

We have been having our women's Bible Study every Monday night, and that has been a really good thing. This week Ermenita's birthday was on Monday, so mom and tracey baked her a cake and we surprised her after bible study was over. Also there were flowers!

I have ten Italians studying English with me now. Whoo! And more asking all the time. We're having to tell them that we won't be able to take anymore until November, when we are finished with language school. Haha, in language school today, we also learned some idiomatic expressions that involve animals. I thought it was a fun exercise, so I did the same with one of my more advanced students. It's funny, because they have a lot of the same ones we do! There was one in particular today that really made me laugh. I told her that in English we have the expression "that's a long row to hoe". And she looked it up last week and today she told me that they have an expression that means the same thing: " Che brutto gatto a pellare" - "What a (hard) cat to skin!" Bah hahah.

Some things coming up:

Jill and I are hoping to go to Poland at the end of November/beginning of December to learn the program that Molly and Annabelle Dawidow have developped. We will be teaching English up there for about a week. So exciting!

Also there is a youth retreat (with relief I discovered that we are still considered "youth") for ages 18-25 organized by the young people in Aprilia - a town close to Rome - that I hope we will be able to attend.

We're having fun hanging out some with the HUF students, doing projects at the church (like decorating the bulletin boards ;) ), learning Italian, and going to Bible studies. All is well in Florence!