One Year Anniversary

September 9 marked our one year anniversary in Romania! We can hardly believe how quickly the time has gone by. We are humbled at how the Lord has blessed us through this "transition year" going from deputation and life on the road to living in a different culture and studying a new language. Looking back we can honestly say we have made tremendous progress in our ability to communicate in Romanian. We really wondered how this would happen, but the Lord has graciously helped us along the way, and He brings encouragement to us when we get discouraged.

Ministry Update

We are now less than a week away from our team meeting in Budapest. We are looking forward to having all our families together for the first time since Candidate Seminar in 2006. We do converse with one another regularly via email and telephone, and we hold a Skype conference call about once a month, but we are looking forward to being in the same room for these important meetings. During the week we are together we plan to formalize our field council and participate in strategic planning sessions.

Our time in Timisoara is drawing to a close. We are praying that we will find a house to rent near where will be working. Our plan is to move in either in December or January. We should know more after our team meeting. This will allow the girls to stay in school for most if not all of the first semester, which ends in January. This also gives Ruth and me the additional time we need to study the language.

Romanian School

In our last letter we shared how we were praying about enrolling the girls in a Romanian Christian school to give them more opportunities to learn Romanian and be with other children. School started September 13. Both girls have adjusted very well and love their new school.

We placed our 5th grader (Celeste) and 2nd grader (Amber) in lower grades in order to help them better adjust to language and educational differences, as well as homework in another language. (Celeste’s homework has actually been good homework for us, too!) Both classes have only about 11 students and their teachers are wonderful. Recently Celeste told us that she realized she is spending almost half the day speaking Romanian! That’s exactly what we were hoping would happen. Amber is also understanding more, and she is learning Romanian handwriting, which children learn first.

There are many differences between school at home and school in a building, but among them is the strict schedule of 8:00 a.m. to either 12:00 or 1:00 p.m. No lunch is served, but they receive a small loaf called ‘corn’ that looks like a croissant and either milk or yogurt for a snack.

Thank you for praying. We would love to hear from you, too!

Dave, Ruth, Celeste, and Amber