Hello Friends,
I hope that you are all well and enjoying the height of Summer wherever you are! I am doing well, and enjoyed this week at Yantar and all of the new events, people, and changes that have occurred.
We got our new group of students this weekend and began classes with them this week. We are team teaching this time and teach 2 classes each morning instead of one. It has been so fun! My new students are all English beginners, so we are doing lots of songs, dialogs, and vocabulary with them. The last few days have been focused on numbers so we have taught them about how to say their birthdays and now we are working on telling time in English. We will be doing more with that today.
Our friend Galina has been here with us this week and we have had a lot of fun with her too. She has been helping us by speaking to the administration as our interpreter and she is in charge of coordinating our new students with classes. We have had lots of fun dancing this week at the 'Disco' at camp with her, going swimming at the river, and even eating a delicious meal that her sister Dinara prepared and brought to camp for us. It's amazing what a little good food can do after you've been eating Russian camp food for 3 weeks! She even brought a cold bottle of Coca-Cola!
It's amazing how aware I have become of my daily luxury by being here. We are in such a rural place, but it is so beautiful and so full of love and life that I only think about what I miss some of the time. I can't go to the store, I can't drink coffee, I can't go shopping, I can't be online every day, but it doesn't matter. I miss it, but it doesn't matter at all. I'm alive and I am here and I have everything I need. I have the same life here that everyone else does and eat the same food and do the same things. We are all happy and know that this temporary season is a gift for all of us.
I feel like a lot of the reason why I'm here is because God is showing me things about myself as a teacher, but also as a person. I feel like I stepped out of the control of my life so that God could lay it out for me and place me back on it when I was ready for it. I am excited to return to Ames and to all of the things that I have to look foward to.
Praise God for sending me to Russia!!!!!
Recently, I have been reading Ecclesiastes and it talks about how "everything is meaningless" without God's purpose and plan. He truly is in everything and every good and perfect gift is from Him. I think for you, you are experiencing a new way that God is relieving his presence in you life through circumstances that lead to you knowing that He is good always and is in everything. This "knowing" is a the greater gift I think for you than anything else from this experience.
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