Quite a Week!

School is school, full of its usual stresses and joys. One of Teresa’s students had a tough beginning of the week, but after some discipline and encouragement, he has turned around well and was all smiles by the end of the week. She will also be getting a new student who was here last year and was going to move to the States with her mom, but she’s still here and going to start school now. This brings the number up to 19. Quite different than the 11 she had at the beginning of last year. Her new student also has a brother in 7^th grade who will be in my math class.

Another addition to the busy schedule is that Teresa is currently tutoring a high school student 1.5 hours after school on Mondays and Tuesdays. This will only last for 6 weeks, and she is enjoying it. On Wed. and Thurs. evenings, we will be meeting with a Dominican couple for one hour each time: 1 hour to work on Spanish, and one to help them on English. We are looking forward to it!

Our mail just came last week, and with it a bunch of things for our house. The most exciting is a rug we mailed down and sits wonderfully in the main living room. To me, the next most exciting thing is a large battery-powered light in our pantry so we can see what’s there when the power’s out. We also now have more books and school supplies. It was like Christmas opening it all!

Because of the mail delay, I wasn’t able to start one of my grad classes until a week late. It made last week pretty hectic trying to catch up, but it’s all good now. One of our teachers is not going to be staying at JCS, so the two 2^nd grade classes are being combined (to make 22). The combining included tearing down the wall between them and reorganizing the whole room. Teresa helped the two teachers on Saturday, while I made Teresa more cubbies to hopefully make it easier on her students packing up after school. So Saturday ended up being: get up at 7:00, run from 8-9, spend our personal time with God, do grocery shopping and the week’s baking, eat lunch, work at school from 1-6, go out to dinner with some other teachers, and then Teresa hung out with a new teacher while I did grad work. Sunday was much more relaxing. We went to church, had lunch with some friends, and then spent the afternoon and dinner together relaxing (and Teresa made granola), and had our first Sunday-night couples Bible study of the year.

More interesting news- we are very seriously considering buying a new motorbike. It belonged to one of last year’s teachers who bought it new, so it seems to be in good shape. It has a much bigger motor and a transmission, so it’s really a motorbike and not a pasola (mo-ped). On top of that, ours is not in good shape at all and seems to be dying under heavier loads and turning into a money drain. We also want to buy a new mattress to save ourselves from back pain and discomfort and, at the moment, we’re not sure we can afford both. Please pray for wisdom and a clear sense of God’s will.

Tonight we’re going out to the new Chinese restaurant for our date night. Our first trial was far from extraordinary, but we think we know the better menu items now (and they didn’t have any egg rolls then).

Feel free to post or e-mail us any prayer requests or praises!