Hello all,
We’ve had a few friendly reminders lately that we haven’t been doing a very good job of blogging or of replying to emails, so I’ll try to make up for it today. If you’ve sent us an email lately and haven’t gotten a reply, we are working on it and will be sending you an email soon!

Life here has been very up and down lately, but at least there have been ups! Some of the good things that have happened lately: We finally got an oven! We’re very excited to have homemade bread, cookies, pizza, etc. We got to use it a few times this week, but unfortunately a stray dog came into the kitchen and ate the huge loaf of bread that I made, so we are waiting for this Saturday to go to town and get more flour so that we can have bread! Another positive is that we should be getting our porch screened in soon (they told us it would happen on Tuesday, so maybe sometime this week). This will be really nice because our house will be a little more connected, we will be able to use our porch at night without having tons of moths crowding around our lights and we will be able to leave our many doors open without having dogs, bugs, people, etc. coming in!

School has been going pretty well, although it definitely has its ups and downs, too. They finally found a music teacher last week, so we have two more free periods a week than we did before! We’ve had some people asking us to tell a little more about what our everyday life is like at school and home, so I’ll run through it for you. I am now teaching just the second-graders, no middle schoolers. I teach my kids math, reading, phonics, language/English, penmanship and spelling. Aren teaches his 5th graders three subjects (language, reading and science) and teaches 6th 7th and 8th grade science. We teach on average about 6 40 minute periods a day and have around 3 periods off for planning etc. One really nice thing about our house is that it is only a 2 minute walk away from school, so we can come home during our free periods to plan, catch up on housework, etc. After school, we usually have to catch up on dishes or laundry or cleaning or something, and we spend quite a bit of time cooking most nights since we make almost everything from scratch. Before we got the new oven, we ate a lot of rice and pasta dishes, but now we have a lot more that we can do for dinner. In our free time, we read a lot and watch DVDs. Aren has also been into collecting butterflies, as you can see from his last post. We’ve also been doing some decorating in our house to try to make things homier.

We only go down to town once a week (Saturdays) because we have to walk about 4 miles down the mountain to get there, and then we have to pay to take a “mototaxi” (a little 3 wheeled golf cart type thing) back up again. When we are in town, we usually have to make at least 5 stops: the market for produce, several different small “minisuper” markets to get other food and things, a restaurant to eat lunch and use the wireless internet, the laundromat if we have laundry to pick up (we’ve been doing it all here lately, though, because the weather has been good), etc. There are no mega stores like Target or Meijer here. Instead, there are tons of little stores that are often unlabelled and have random things, so you just have to explore or ask until you learn what is sold where, and then you have to go to each place to get all the different things you need.

On Sunday, we usually try to have some downtime, and we also try to get ahead on our chores for the week (washing, baking, etc.). We haven’t been going to a church here because they are all a long walk away and we are usually very tired on Sundays after such a full week, and because the predominant evangelical theology here is “health and wealth” (if you believe in God, he will bless you with material riches and good health). I found last time I was in Honduras that going to church made me really cynical, so we haven’t been too motivated to try to find a church here. It has been good to be confronted with this kind of Christianity in the sense that it really makes us think about and talk about our own beliefs and thoughts often. We miss our churches at home a lot and are looking forward to going to both at Christmas time. We are very encouraged knowing how many people are thinking of us and praying for us while we are here; it’s really been helping us get through some of the rougher times.

So that pretty much sums up our everyday lives right now. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments and we will answer them. That might motivate us to write a little more often, too, if we have questions to answer!

Hey all,
Sorry it has been so long, it is hard to get to town do our shopping and errands and catch a mototaxi by 4:00, so sometimes our blog suffers (more often than not). A lot has happenend in the last month, including a much needed vacation with my parents to Tela, on the north coast. They rented a truck and spent Wednesday and Thursday night in Gracias, and got to see our house and school (my dad saw me teach the 6th graders about planets). Friday afternoon we quickly packed up and headed to Tela! It was a crazy ride, but by 11:00 we got to our hotel where all rooms have a view of the ocean! The next day we went to a botanical garden, 2nd biggest in the world, and got to see cool plants, trees, birds and insects.
We went to the beach after that, which was amazing! Then my parents treated us to a lobster dinner (it's really cheap there). Sunday we went to a Garifuna village. Garifuna people are descended from shipwrecked slaves and they have a very distinct culture, language and food. We spent the whole day there playing dominoes with the locals, eating fried fish and collecting shells and sand dollars. Monday was rainy so we explored the town a bit and then Leah and I finished our thank you notes from the wedding, so my parents could take them home and mail them. Tuesday was a whole day of traveling by a pick up, taxi, 2 buses and a mototaxi. On Wednesday, it was really hard to go back to school!

Last weekend I got to talk to by brothers for a while and it occured to me that I haven't said anything about catching butterflies on here. There are a ton of butterflies here in both number and type, so I got to thinking how I could catch them. I went around our yard and found some things I could make a net with. I found some stiff black tubing, fishing line, a piece of stiff but flexible plastic (that you take off a 5 gallon bucket of paint to open it) and a plastic shopping bag. I attachd the plastic bag to a loop of the long piece of plastic. I tied fishing line to the end of the loop and put it through the black tubing, then tied a wooden handle to the end, tadaa! a draw-string butterfly net! Here is some proof that it works wonderfully.

I folded them up in paper envelopes and put them in my freezer until I can do something with them when I get home. If anyone has tips on how to keep them and mount them, please let me know! I have been finding the species on neotropicalbutterflies.com if you want to help me identify them (the thing in the middle is a toenail clippers to hold the wings down so I could take a picture).

Yesterday was Halloween, which we celebrated by carving an overgrown acorn squash, lighting "harvest scented" candles and putting around the leaves and candy that Leah's parents sent.

Thanks for all of your prayers and encouragement, it's very much needed and we really appreciate it!

The School

We don't have a lot of battery on our computer and we forgot to bring the cord down, but we'll post a few pictures of the school:

Here's a view of a few of the school buildings. There are 4 in all and each has 3 classrooms in it.

This is the courtyard/playground, with mount Celaque in the background.

Here are a couple of shots of Leah's second grade classroom.

Here is Aren's 5th grade classroom.

And here is Aren demonstrating the iron bars trapping students into all of the classrooms.

Alright, battery's almost gone...just want to let you all know we're doing well, we keep getting more and more used to being here. Let us know how you all are!

Home Sweet Home

It has been brought to our attention that we haven't been posting much on here lately, and that we still haven't put up many pictures of where we are living and working yet. So we'll start with the house today, and stay tuned for pictures of school coming next week (on our next visit to town).

We are living in a house about four miles up the base of the Celaque mountain. Our house is about a 5 minute walk to the school, which is very convenient in the morning and during our free periods. There's not really much else besides the school, our house and two others in the area, though, so other important things (buying groceries, getting to a place that has internet access, etc.) are less convenient. We'll be making the 4 mile walk down to Gracias about once a week to do all of those things.

Our house used to just be two rooms, but it has recently been "renovated" and now has a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen and a spare room. When we moved in, we just had a bed, a table with two chairs, and some storage shelves in the kitchen (there's absolutely NO built-in storage anywhere in the house). We've been gradually collecting things and they've been working on the house, too, so it's starting to feel a little bit homey now, although there's still a little ways to go. Right now, we get a little wet when it rains hard and we have a lot of dirt and leaves blow through the clay tiles on our roof and on to our bed. Sometime this week, they are supposed to do something to our roof to hopefully make it a little more sealed, so that will be really nice.

Alright, now for the tour:

Here's Leah showing off the front porch. The door way to the left is to the spare room, the middle door leads to the bathroom and bedroom, and the door on the right is to the kitchen. So we have not one but three front doors!

Here's Leah again eating some comida tipica at the kitchen/dining room table, which is actually on the front porch. Notice the nice view of Lake Michigan outside our "window"...the school had an artist do some murals in the library and bathrooms, and she had some extra time, so she came to our house and did some murals there, too! We asked her to paint Lake MI, showed her a couple of pictures, and here's what she came up with:

Pretty cool, huh? It's definitely one of our favorite things about the house.

Alright, while we're outside, we might as well take a look at our "washing machine":
Leah just can't wait to get in there and scrub! Actually, we soak our laundry in detergent overnight, and we usually don't have to do much scrubbing at all. It's still a bit more labor intensive than using a machine though, and takes a lot of time!

Moving onto the first room...

Here's Aren having fun in the spare room, as you can see from his face, it's a pretty exciting place. This is where we keep our odds and ends and hang our laundry to dry. Eventually, this will be our walk-in closet, when we get around to unpacking our suitcases...
Here's our beautiful bathroom. This picture is taken from our bedroom. It's a good thing we're married, cause there isn't exactly a lot of privacy... no door between the toilet and the bathroom or between the bathroom and the bedroom. It works though, and we even have a hot shower thanks to our electroducha.
Moving on to the bedroom...here's our bed and mosquito net that we were given after a few nights of termites raining down on us. It's been relatively bug-free lately, though, thanks to the net and some liberal insecticide sprayage.

Behind our bed, there's another mural that the artist painted for us. This was her own design, which she came up with after finding out that we are newlyweds:

And last but not least, we'll show you around our kitchen. We went shopping in Santa Rosa (a bigger town about 1 1/2 hrs away) earlier this week, so it's much better stocked than it was before that:
On this side of the kitchen, you can see our storage shelves, kitchen sink (complete with dirty dishes), our fridge, and our cherry paintings.
Here's the other side, with our 2-burner propane stove and water dispenser on top of a desk we stole from the school.

Alright, that completes the tour of our house. We leave you with this inspiring message:

Another update

Things are looking up a little since last time we wrote, or at least are attitudes are getting a little better. There have been a lot of things that are different than what we expected and that are challenging, but we are learning to just take things as they are and try to make the most out of them. Our house is slowly but surely being improved, we even got a door on our kitchen today! We will put up some pictures of the house soon, once we´re a little bit more settled.

Things are going okay at the school, too. Aren really likes teaching science (although he could pass on the language classes he has to teach). I´m struggling with the second graders still, but I talked to the administration and will probably be able to change classes after this week if I want. So things are getting better, but we´re learning patience, because everything happens a little slower around here, and not always in the way we are told it will happen. Please keep praying for us, especially for our attitudes, and that we will be able to keep things in perspective!

Quick Update

Hey everyone,
A lot has happened since last time we wrote. We´ve started school, and we´ve also moved into our house. It´s been a very busy and stressful week. At school, all of our students are very behind the curriculum and a lot of Leah´s students have behavior problems. Also, our house is not really finished, so we are living in very rustic conditions right now. Because of these things and some other issues with the school, we aren´t sure where we should go from here. Please keep us in your prayers as we try to figure out what direction to take.

A little more...

Hey all, here's what we've been doing this week.
We've had to get up pretty early to get up to the school by 8 am to decorate our classrooms, but two of them are locked and others have a lot of stuff in them...we've done as much as possible so far. We usually have to stay until 3, so we've been pretty bored up at the school. There's so much that needs to be done before we start teaching, but it's really hard to know where to begin. For lunch we usually eat at a "comedor," which is someone's house across the street from the school. Then we go down the road, check how our house is coming and go down to the river. We're getting really anxious/excited to move into our house because we're still at the hotel eating at the hotel restaurant. It's been good, but we're ready to move on.

Sometimes I feel like a naturalist in the 19th century looking at new plants and insects and trying to learn what they are, but some things are really familiar, like straight and tall pine trees that look like red pines, oak trees that remind me of burr oak and even monarch butterflies among the cornfields. There are a lot of new sights, too. Outside of the classroom windows, there is a wall of green, and the school yard has an amazing view of green mountains with clouds swirling around the peaks and a waterfall in the distance.

Tonight we got to spend the evening at some hot springs just outside the city with all of the foreign teachers plus Honduran teachers and administrators. We got to play volleyball in the pool and have a potluck with steak on the grill; it felt almost like a family gathering, so that was fun. It was cool to see fireflies, stars and lightening in the distance all at the same time as we sat in natural hot tubs.

Oh, and one more thing. We found our wedding pictures online, so you can take a look if you'd like. Go to http://www.kleinphotography.com/, click online ordering, weddings, then Leah and Aren. You have to put in your email address, and then you should be able to see our pictures. We're pretty happy with how they turned out, there are some really nice ones.

First impressions

It's been a few days now and we've had the chance to explore and get some questions answered (although there are still quite a few more!). There are so many things that I want to update you all on, so I guess I'll do it in categories.

Luggage: We're still waiting on Aren's luggage, but we got an email that it is in San Pedro Sula at the airport, so at least we know where it is. Some more teachers came in today, so we are hoping that they will be bringing his suitcase with them to Gracias tonight. Aren's excited to change his pants finally! **Edit: We got the suitcase! Yay!

Housing: We know for sure where we are going to be living this year now. The bad news is that it's not quite finished being built yet (they've said it will take about 5 days to finish, so we're hoping for under 2 weeks). There's a lot of good news, though. Our house will be brand new with all new furniture (we think), it's right next to the school so we can sleep in a little later in the morning, it has a beautiful yard with coffee and banana tress, and just down the road there is an incredible mountain river. Here are some pictures of the house and the surrounding areas (you can click on pictures to make them a little bigger):














Our front porch
















Our yard







Aren doing what he does best














The river


School: On Thursday and Friday, we had orientation. We found out that Aren will be teaching 5th grade plus 6-8th grade science, and I will be teaching 2nd grade plus 6-8th grade Bible and 6th grade language arts. It sounds like we'll be pretty busy! The school year starts on Sept. 3, and it sounds like we'll have a day of orientation with the parents the day before that, so we have a little over a week to prepare.

For those of you who don't know, the school changed hands recently and is now being run by a church in Tegucigalpa. A lot of changes are being made, and for the most part, they are all very good: they are fixing up the school yard and buildings, providing better housing for the teachers (the house Aren and I were originally set to live in had a pigsty for a back yard!), and generally organizing everything much better. Here's a picture of the school from the street:










Gracias: We've been having a lot of fun doing some exploring in the city and up the mountain near the school. Of all of the places I've been in Honduras, this is one of the most beautiful, natural, clean and temperate places I have been, so we are really excited about living here. There are tons of bugs, some beautiful (we saw around 20 different kinds of butterflies on a walk to the school today) and some not-so-pretty:




























Strange and creepy moldy moth bug thing

Etc: Two other things that don't really fit anywhere else...First, when we got to the school, there was another American teacher there for orientation who will be teaching in La Union, and it just so happened that it was Jake Compaan, who we graduated from high school with. How crazy is that? Holland Christian is taking over the world, apparently.

Also, today Aren got a genuine Honduran haircut for a grand total of 30 lempiras (around $1.50). It turned out pretty well, especially considering the price, and he even got the experience of being trimmed with a straight razor:





















Well, that's about all for now. We miss you all, and we'll update again as soon as we have more to talk about!

We made it!

And so our adventure begins...

We've made it so far through two full days of traveling, and we are now at a hotel in Gracias, the nearest city to the school where we will be teaching. We've had a few setbacks along the way, most notably Aren's suitcase with all his clothes in it not arriving to the airport with the rest of our luggage. It sounds like we will get his luggage back by Saturday though, we hope!
Tomorrow we have orientation and we will hopefully find out more about the school and about where we are going to live. We will let you all know more when we find it out, but for now, we're super tired, so good-night!