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.