Hey guys! Alli and I have finally finished up our intensive course. Our last day was August 7th. We both made straight A's! We had a little graduation ceremony that Friday also! We feel as though our Spanish has tripled or quadrupled in the short 2 months that we've been studying. Our teachers were excellent! Oscar, my grammar teacher, really understood how to teach an english speaker how to arrange spanish grammar. There are so many more verb tenses in Spanish than there are in English and it sometimes seems like a calculus equation to put together the correct conjugations: conjugate it in the first-person singular form, take off the ending, add this ending, but only if its used in this form following this certain rule. WAY more complicated than I ever thought it could have been!!! But, we're looking forward to a few weeks of break so that our brains can hopefully recover and who knows, maybe we'll begin to remember how to speak English!! Believe it or not, studying spanish vocabulary and grammar so much has extremely negative effects on your ability to speak and write English well! We'll begin the new "regular" semester on August 31st. Pray for us!!
There've been a lot of developments in last few weeks since we've finished up the first semester of language school. We recently learned that our apartment here in San Jose will be ready for moving in a day or two earlier than we were originally told! So, we'll be moving out of the host home and into the apartment this coming Sunday! WOOHOO!!! We're so excited to have our own space where we can relax and feel "at home".
On the housing note, we also recently learned that there was a family, the Dormans, that was coming into Costa Rica in September, who've worked with EMI some in the past. They are coming to Atenas to lead and develop "Hogar de Vida", an orphanage. However, they will not have a place to live at the orphanage officially until January of 2010. So, we are going to be able to offer them our place to live temporarily for those 5 months or so until their place comes available! That's right! We've been blessed to have already found a place to live in Atenas once we finish up language school in December!! We actually had to put in a deposit today to hold it until the Dormans can get here in September. They'll pay rent on the place until January when we return from the States after the holidays. So, this helps us to know that we already have our perminent housing handled and we can relax and enjoy the holidays with family and not have to worry about where we're going to live when we return! What a blessing!!!
We spent this past weekend in Atenas with friends and the office staff. We were helping Micah & Beth build a "rancho" behind their apartment. A rancho in Costa Rica is a lot like what you and I would call a "pavilion". He'd cut down a few trees behind the apartment that had died and were in need of being removed. He then milled those trees into lumber to be used for the rancho. He plans on building a brick pizza oven underneath the rancho! We spent Saturday standing all the posts and Sunday preparing all the beams and rafters to be put into place. Alli and Beth scrubbed and cleaned a bunch of the used roof tiles Micah found that had been removed from an old house. I attached a few photos below.
Micah and I standing the posts (trees that had been debarked)
Alli and Beth hard at work! Looks like she got ALL the dirt from the tiles on herself!
Making progress....
Pray for us as we prepare to begin another semester of language school!
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2 comments:
Love to read the updates. Praying for you guys. We love and miss you.
All I can say is very jealous of the next lot of interns and that rancho
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