Leadership

Recently I found myself saying to Curtis that I wish I could just be a person who follows instead of someone who leads...

Leading is one of the hardest things. Leading in a cross-cultural environment can seem impossible at times.

But it's not, especially with Gsus. More specifically because His ways are higher than our ways.

His way says go lower to be lifted higher. His way says to be first you must be last. His way says serve the least of these. His way says if someone slaps you on one cheek turn the other cheek for them slap also. 

I was able to witness some of these truths in my own work. It was so very hard. But I got through it and did it His way and I am so very satisfied.

All glory to the king who makes it possible for me to work and even thrive in this sometimes foreign environment.

Funk

Sorry to be silent for so long. Things have been busy and when they aren't I feel like there are too many things that I want to write about and can't decide on just one. Sometimes when there are so many things going on, I think "I'll just wait until I have time for a complete update." But I never have time for that and who wants to sit and scroll through endless pictures and a list of things that has happened in the past couple of months. 

I would however like to highlight a few things that happened since I wrote last since they were pretty significant events. 

There was a little event called a 'handover.' Basically the organization that was running our site/center handed the work that they were doing over to the local organization that was already overseeing things there. Because of this, and because our good friends who were running the organization under it's old title have left, as well as a change in leadership, we have been going through tons of changes as an organization and as a team. It's all really wonderful and exciting. It was so very difficult to say goodbye to our closest friends in the city. But we have already seen how much this is Papa's plan and it's good. 

Saying goodbye :(

I've also taken charge of the monthly newsletter that we send out as an organization, so if you want to subscribe for that please let me know. It's a really short and sweet monthly update on the things going on at our site. I will let you know when our website is up and running, I will be involved in the blog and photo updates as well. My involvement in the communications part of the work there may have caused me to lose a bit of interest in updating my personal blog as well, but I hope this doesn't continue to be the case.

Okay here comes the quick part with pictures and just a few quick explanations....

Spring came and went along with some very lovely guests :) 

We got some new furniture from our friends that moved away 

and a new barista at the Cafe

We had an amazing time in the village with these wonderful people

Curtis turned 29!

A successful 'staycation' - essentially a vacation without the vacating part :) 

I started going to the Children's home for children with disabilities once a month 

and I think their smiles are contagious :) 

I'm starting to learn this truth

For now we are at home enjoying this unusually cool, rainy, summer day! 

an education

Thanks to all that responded to my last post. A lot of people asked to hear more about what I am learning and it just so happens that I will be writing specifically about that, with a little bit of every day life mixed in :)  

I really appreciated what my sister-in-law said, “I really think you should write what you want to write. It should be a reflection of you, whatever you are going through, feeling, enjoying.” 

It made me realize that as I looked back over my previous posts they were a reminder of the things that papa has been doing in and around me on my journey here. It is also a great way to process what is happening and how I am feeling while allowing me to share life with those of you who are so far away.

Right now I realize that papa is giving me some amazing gifts that I never expected. I am learning so many things that I never even imagined would be a part of my life. 

A couple things...

The first unbelievable thing that I am learning is the art of verbal translation. I would have never imagined just a year ago that I would be in this position. But right now there are not many native english speakers on our team who can translate from Russian to English in our team meetings, so I have started to do this. 

It is a disconcerting experience because when I hear Russian the first thing that comes to my mind is Russian. 

The first time I translated it was so difficult to get the english words out of my mouth. I knew this before, but at that point I truly understood that my brain switches to Russian when I hear and understand it. It is quite the stretch to get it to hear Russian words and then quickly translate into English what the person is saying and make it sound halfway decent because if you translate directly it will sound strange.

A few weeks ago I was translating for our feeding the homeless event. They were giving directions on how to divide the food and the word for divide in russian sounds like ‘delete,’ so I said “we are going to delete the food.’ It was funny, we all laughed, and I realized how sharp I must stay when I am translating, it’s definitely not second nature yet. Language is a crazy thing. 

The second thing that I am really excited to be learning is story writing. I took a couple screen writing classes in film school and I really enjoyed them, but aside from that I haven’t studied the art of story telling. 

One of the main things I am part of right now with our organization is the communications team. We have a newsletter that goes out quarterly and we would like to push that up to once a month eventually. In the newsletter we always share a story about people who have been blessed by goods given by our organization. 

The man who usually writes these stories is a really great writer, but he will be leaving in a few months and won’t be returning. Right now he is teaching me to develop into a better writer through writing stories and trying out different methods, writing from different view points etc. 

It may sound boring to some, but to me it is quite exciting and has really stirred up a passion inside of me for the lives that are being effected through what we do. 

I am so excited about what Papa has had me involved in lately. I am learning such a wide variety of skills here, managing a cafe, baking and developing recipes, writing, translating and so many more life skills.

I could write for days about what I am learning and I will continue to try to share more of it since that is what encourages me and apparently others as well :) 

Stuff we do

Lots of people ask me what we do here, I try to explain, but in reality it's difficult to encompass everything that we do in a few words or even paragraphs at times. We are both involved in a very wide range of things at the English Centre where we work. One of the purposes of this blog is to help you to understand the wider range of things that we do. So here are some random things that both of us have been involved in the past month or so. 

Prepping for the Aids-Experience opening by making ribbons to remind the people who walk through the experience about what they learned and what they felt as they went through it.

(Aids-Experience is another simulation game where people walk through the story of someone who thinks that they might have contracted the aids virus. In the end they must wait for their results. It is another way to educate and build empathy) 

January 16th

Working towards 'warmifying and visifying' the cafe with these boards for the students. One is made for them to put up things that inspire them and the other is just for them to post pictures of them and their friends.  

January 17th

 Curtis ran a conversation club teaching the students how to use the boards and getting them to use the inspire board for the first time by making collages with things that inspire them. One of the students told me he made this for me because my cookies inspire him ;) 

January 18th

 Decorating for holidays in the cafe. 

January 23rd

Hearts everywhere. 

January 30th

 Adding a little warmth to the cafe with this bookshelf.

February 5th

 Curtis ran the 'basti life' experience game for the first time last week. This is a simulation game in which the students are put 'in the shoes' of a person who lives in the slums of India. They are taught about poverty and how complex it is. The goal of the game is to educate and to build empathy and to empower. Read more about it here: 'Basti Life Post'

February 7th

Had a lot of fun this friday learning about and celebrating the Chinese/Korean New Year in the Cafe for the first time ever!

February 8th 

Prosto Tak

Prosto Tak means “Just Because” in Russian. Prosto Tak is the name of our site’s monthly community service day. The name is based on a soviet cartoon with just that name “Просто Так.” (Prosto Tak) The Cartoon story is simple, a donkey receives a bouquet of flowers from a little boy and decides to pass them on. Yet it beautiful portrays the transforming power of kindness. You can watch it on youtube: Просто Так.

Our first Prosto Tak took place in October. This event was started to get us all involved in the community and we allow the students to be a part of it as well. We believe that this is just the beginning of our involvement in the community. We hope to have many more activities like this connected with our center in the future.

In October Prosto Tak took place in a local orphanage for kids with special needs, literally down the street from where our center is located. We have supported this orphanage in the past with goods- toys, clothing, furniture etc. But this time we were able to serve them by giving them quality time. We provided the kids with a morning of fun with some love and cuddles thrown in.

This is Maria, she is 15 years old, but plays with kids all day. She is so smart, but has little hope for her future because of her condition

A few other Prosto Tak events have included: Visiting men at a local rehabilitation center, feeding the homeless a warm meal on a cold winter day, visiting single moms, widows and women with disabilities for Women’s Day, a very important holiday for the women of this country, and our most recent Prosto Tak was playing with a group of under-advantaged children for Children’s Day.

For Children’s Day we had a lot of fun with the kids. Many of our volunteers and students dressed up in costumes and played games with the kids. We sang songs and danced, we played different games, fed them ice cream and hot dogs and just tried our best to make these kids feel important and loved!

Prosto Tak is also a great opportunity for our students to see how they can give to others without having much money or resources. Many of them come away from these experiences with more understanding of what people actually need and want. Many times our volunteers come away with more than the people who we “gave” to.

Most of the time for Prosto Tak, we simply give our time to people who are lonely or don’t get a lot of attention in their lives. Many people think that they need to be rich to give something to someone else or they think that all people need or want is money, when the truth is that what many people need is love and what they want is someone who will spend time with them and give them some attention. This is a gift that we are happy to give once a month and hope to do more of in the coming days, weeks, months and years of our time overseas.

Life Happens

There is nothing to blame but life for my lack of involvement in the blog world lately. You could say I have been using my creative energy elsewhere lately and I am sure most of you know where that place is… 

Nevertheless I am ready to put it into the blog again for a minute… Hope you like the new design. I have been playing around with it for a while and I really think that this one will stick because it is simple 

Here is what we have been up to lately in a nutshell! Hold on tight, cause you’re about to see a lot of photos!

First of all, since my last post, Spring has come in a fierce way and has currently brought summer, which it seems is here to stay. But lets just look at some nice photos of the spring instead of thinking about that…

In Cafe News! We have been trying lots of new things since I started working there including some of the cupcakes photographed above, which to my dismay are not very popular in here ;( I guess they just haven’t quite caught onto the cupcake craze that has swept through the states. We also made Pizza about a month and a half ago for the first time and it took off! We are now very much into iced beverages, including iced coffee in these awesome blue cups that we got from Hong Kong, but we are also experimenting a little with warm drinks such as the Caramel Latte with the lattice on top and our new DARK chocolate Mocha 

We have been doing some big events lately at the cafe as well, which definitely help our revenue, which all goes to Charity btw. We have done several things that call for extra volunteers in the kitchen, which explains the guys in pink shower caps below  One of those was a birthday party, but the greatest blessing we have had lately is a very talented young man that is volunteering with us has done some concerts at the cafe and we have gotten up to almost 200 people in there enjoying and ordering coffees while the music plays.

To kick off the spring we celebrated Easter with a Passover Seder and a lot of baking. I made Charoset and peach pie from www.eatliverun.com for the passover seder and I made banoffee pie from eatliverun and The Pioneer Woman’s Chocolate Sheet Cake for our work Easter Party. It was very interesting, educational and delicious!

 A couple of weeks ago we had the opportunity to go on a crazy hike! It was six hours long! It was by far the longest hike I have ever done, but also the most rewarding! The views were beautiful and the people we went with were amazing as well. None other than our teammates who we spend every day with. I am not sick of these people yet! In fact it seems that I grow to love them more as time goes on. Just look at them! How could you not LOVE those face!

Later that week, we had the opportunity to go to the city of Kentau with a friend to stay with his family.

An authentic cultural experience complete with Kumis (fermented mare’s milk) and Besh Bar Mak (the national dish which includes Horse Meat) It wasn’t our first time enjoying these fine delicacies, but it was a special time nonetheless. 

While we were there we were able to revisit the beautiful city of Turkistan and see the Mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi for the second time since we have lived here, the first time was in October of 2009.

It has been a great spring! Can’t wait to see what the summer brings! Most of you will see what it brings for us since we will be home for another summer in the states! Hope to see you sometime in July or August!

Equipped and ready

I read this in my devotional yesterday and it really encouraged me about my job at the cafe.

“I take pleasure in choosing people to do my work and then empowering them to fulfill it. I create each person with a unique personality that moves them toward a certain type of work. When they heed the desire I place within them, they learn the skills necessary to do the job well. And as they choose to follow me, I bestow gifts that demonstrate their true proficiency for what I have called them to do.

I gave my people the king they desired-Saul- and provided him with all he needed to lead my people well. But above all, I gave Saul my Sp!r!t so that he could fulfill my calling. Likewise, it is my delight to equip you for the work to which I have called you, rest easy. With my Sp!r!t guiding you, you are the best one for the job.”

The Perfect Fit

I never realized how much Papa actually cared about what I love doing until now. I guess after watching Soul Surfer and several other videos about Bethany Hamilton, especially her documentary “Heart of a Soul Surfer,” I should have picked up on that. The way that he gave Bethany her dream of glorifying him while doing the one thing that she absolutely loves! I don’t have such a passion I guess, I mean something so clear-cut, so I guess that I doubted that he cared about the passions that I do have.

Over time, especially my time overseas, I have seen him giving me many of my hearts desires, even ones that I didn’t realize that I had. He has been revealing my passions to me, as well as allowing me to live out those passions as a part of his work.  It is a beautiful thing the way that he has been unfolding my dreams ever so slowly and placing my desires before me to take hold of.

This past week I have seen this more concretely than any other time. I have held this desire, this hope inside of me for some time now. I have thought about it and dreamed about it several times, but continued to push it back in my mind and in my heart because most of the time it seemed impossible or impractical. But now I have seen this dream realized and I couldn’t be more excited and more in awe of the Father’s love for me and knowledge of who I am and what my passions are.

I can remember two years ago when hearing about the café project thinking about how I really wanted to be a big part of it. As you know it has taken time for the opening of the café to come about for various reasons, but it did in September 2011 and since than I have been working there.  I have been loving this part of my work and feeling less and less passion for my role as a teacher and more passion for my role as part of the Café team.

But it didn’t seem practical to work in the café more full-time and there were a few different things stopping me from saying that I would do it, such as my need to spend several hours studying language. I also never expressed to my leaders that this was a desire of mine, and in some ways I didn’t realize that it was a desire or that it could even work.

You see, they have been looking for a local operations manager for some time now and they finally found one a few weeks ago since our current manager will be leaving for the states. He will be gone temporarily, but when he comes back he plans to commit more time to another project that he is working on, therefore there is a need for a permanent manager who can do what he has been doing and work along side him as he continues to lead the vision of the café.

The operations manager that they found seemed like a perfect fit! He was friendly, he spoke great English, and he loved the job… Until, he got a better offer in another city. After two weeks of training he notified us that this wasn’t the perfect fit for him, he had found something better.

When I heard this, I was thinking, “What are we going to do our manager is leaving in a few weeks for the states and we have no one to do it, except… ME!” This seemed like the only easy solution and the more I thought about it and talked with Curtis about it, the more I realized that this was my dream. We also found quickly that the timing was perfect because we had just gotten a new teacher from the UK who could teach my class while I work in the Café.

As quickly as I realized this, my dream was realized. I talked to our manager the next day about it and everyone in leadership agreed that it was a perfect fit and that it was most definitely orchestrated by our father in he*ven. They know me and understood that this role fits with many of my passions.

I could not be more thrilled about what Dad has me doing. I really feel that this has been perfectly orchestrated and that it truly fits who Dad made me to be. It suits many of my passions including: coffee, baking, decorating, socializing, loving and communicating with people, creating new things and the list goes on and on. I am also a good point with language and will be able to do much of the needed communication in Russian, which will give me even more practice than I am getting now.

Please talk with Dad for me as I enter into this position. I am so excited about it, I know that I love doing most of what it takes to fill this role, but I am sure that it will be trying in some ways too. I am also entering into a leadership position and that is no small thing, so I could really use your chats in this area.

Thank you all so much for your continual support! I cannot tell you how excited I was to share this news with you. I am in love with being in the cafe, working with people there, helping with the vision and coming up with new food and drink ideas. I love the café team, our excellent baker, magnificent barista and two energetic young volunteers. I love the atmosphere and want to work on communicating the vision through the design. I am just so excited and couldn’t think of a better place for me!

Lovin' Life

Seriously! At times I complain or talk about difficult things about living overseas. But today I was reminded of the many things I love about life here. Today was great because I didn’t have to teach. I was just working/hanging out in the cafe (which I have been helping with a lot lately, but in a way that I really love) and also doing movie club, which was also fun.

Today was just filled with love, from students and people that I work with. I genuinely love being at work with my friends and co-workers. I really feel like part of a team/family here. We have so much fun together, but we also invite others to be a part of that family. It is not closed with no admittance to outsiders.

I got to share that love with some girls over coffee this afternoon. I also got to serve in ways that brought me life and joy. Loving people, making things beautiful and absolutely enjoying life. It was a magical day in so many ways, including the snow falling gently throughout the day as I watched from the warmth of the cafe. Feeling blessed to work in such a warm place, warm in more ways than one 

Graduation year 2

For the second year in a row, graduation has proven to be the culmination of a year of hard work. Although I don’t write about it that much, we put a lot into our teaching. At graduation we find out how much our students really appreciated the class and all of our hard work.

One of the things that really touched me this year, was these two young girls. I knew they had a lot of fun in the class, but I had no idea how much they actually loved us, until they wouldn’t let me go at the end of the graduation. They were both crying and saying how much they would miss us over the summer. These are the things that keep me going when I remember how far we are from family and friends.

Another touching thing that our classes did was present us with gifts. Each of them gave us something special to remember them by.

A student designed a t-shirt for Curtis’ birthday and he hasn’t taken it off since 

One amazing class really knew the way to my heart… They bought me an electric mixer

The funny thing about the mixer is that the student who decided to buy it for me was at my house the day before the graduation party helping me bake. I had her working on the chocolate chip cookies and when she got to the adding flour part she asked me why I didn’t have an electric mixer. I told her ours broke and she was on top of buying me one the next day  It is a really nice one with a blender attachment, so I am pretty excited.

In reality, these gifts don’t matter much. They were well appreciated and the gestures of love were felt. But what matters is what we have poured into these student’s lives. We hope to see fruit from what we have poured into their lives. And we hope that some of the connections that we have made will become lifelong friendships.

We have truly been blessed and could not have asked for a better second and last year teaching ESI. We will miss teaching ESI, but we are also excited about what G*d has in store for us next year! Please continue to pr*y, as we are not sure about who will teach alongside of us next year. Thank you all so much for your constant support, pr*yers and love!