Window guards for the CEC screens

So football (um... soccer) has become quite popular after church of late with the lovely weather... but there are also two newly broken screens.

So...

a solution.

Gogol

Crazy interesting and hard Russian lessons this week. We actually read some Gogol in Russian. Pretty dang cool. But hard. I said every third word wrong (mostly stress in the wrong place, or then there's the soft and hard consonants.

Here's a funny example.

The word in Russian for soul is dooSHA (душа) Stress on the capital letters.
If you don't have a soul, you say soul like this dooSHE (души). But the plural of soul (souls) is spelled exactly the same way, but pronounced DOOshe (души). Well, needless to say our tutor, Irina, was super patient with me and I'm amazed she didn't break out in tears and how I was ruining some wonderful Russian literature.

You know, our Russian is really okay. People understand us and complement us. But, we make about .5 mistakes for every sentence we speak. Russian is just THAT hard. We're really thankful that we're doing as well as we are, that we're still making progress after FOUR years and that we were advised at Missionary Training International during our PILAT training that we should study as long as we live here. It's hard, but people really respect us for trying.

I woke up in the middle of the night a few weeks ago (after tent camp) and picked up Amy's arm. I said to her in Russian, "Who's there (кто это)?" and then, "Whose arm is this (чья рука)? Then I fell back asleep. I didn't remember a word. But Amy got a kick out of it.

A Wrinkle in Time

Last summer we had our first ever Book Club with our advanced speakers from English Discussion Club. Maybe you even remember that we read the book, "The Giver" by Lois Lowry (highly recommended). It won the Newbery Medal and is really in fashion right now as it's a Teen Dystopia novel (a la Hunger Games, only written earlier).

Well, this year we decided to read "A Wrinkle in Time." And what a wrinkle it was. Like time travel all the way back to 6th grade. I gotta tell you, it was awesome to read this book again. I think the third book in the series is really my biggest favorite, but I loved them all.

Well, the conversations that we had ranged from "What does it mean to be normal?" "Do you want to be normal or unique?" "Is there really such a thing as good and evil?" "What does it mean to love someone?" (meaning, are there different kinds of love besides just romantic love). We talked of angels, of heaven, of eternity, of fighting against evil and a host of other questions.

We had a great time and really began to bond together as a smaller group (in the summer our Discussion Club goes from a regular group of about 35 people to about 15).

Here are some photos from our closing picnic together:new topics for D-Club brainstorming game.

more of the brainstorming competition

what? Jeff telling a story?

the picnic had so much food, and it was delicious!