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!