The blog following this is one that I just posted but was written days ago (so you should really read that first) and in re-reading my last blog I fear that I may have painted a bleak picture w/the last paragraph. Although times are frustrating here I have been able to some things. The first is my team job that I briefly mentioned which is cooking. Thank God that I do not cook everyday, but setting up a cooking schedule and making sure everything runs smoothly is something that I do constantly. It was a blessing and exhausting to be cooking for the team the first week and helped me to get to know town more, but I won’t need to be doing that for another week. Pictures of the bazaar, our dinning room and the fruits of some of my labor can be found in the slideshow to the right of the page. I wish I could post pics directly on here but bandwidth is so slow over here I had to do it this way.
Another of the things I get to do here is go to a village about half hour away and assist with English classes (pics on slideshow). This has been a great blessing. For the most part people in the village get around on horseback and tend to their flocks. Most recently we showed up to teach and found out that school was canceled due to the upcoming new year (communication is not great as you can imagine), but we were able to watch a new years school celebration and were welcomed with open arms.
And there have been some developments in the things I have set out to do. There are two families doing the work of the way here that we have been able to assist with. The first is the family that runs a small orphanage: here I have helped set up things to be done with the children as well as work around the house (I cannot imagine the work they do). In fact today I was able to help clear their yard of snow (which took 2hours) and have some soccer games; it was definitely the highlight of the day. With the second family we’ve also been able to establish assistance that will lighten their load to efficiently work with the nationals they’re building into as well as establish network that will be beneficial to both them and future teams that come to what we are attempting to.
Thanks for reading, more next week.