Day One!

Written by Brittany:

Even though we don’t leave the country for another 2.5 months, today really is day one.

We are currently up in Wheaton, IL at Wheaton College (yes, home of the Billy Graham Center) to begin our training in ESL and our orientation to the program. Since I already have a TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) Certificate, I do not have to take the first two weeks of classes, and so Jadon is going them alone. Here is his first day of school pic:

While most people who will read this blog (hi, mom) already know our story, for those of you who don’t, here’s what has been happening with us over the last 8 months.

Last October, a group called TeachOverseas accepted us to spend one year teaching conversational English in Turkey. We were excited about this possibility, especially since I have been longing to get back to Middle Eastern culture (and food!).  We started doing little planning things to get ourselves ready, and then in February we got a call that TeachOverseas had lost funding and would not be sending any teachers in the future. So our plan for the next year and a half suddenly just disappeared.

After that, we tried to figure out if that was a sign; maybe we weren’t supposed to go overseas, and we should stay in our neighborhood and settle down. But a couple days later we were given the name of a different organization, Teach Beyond (http://teachbeyond.org/), and so we gave them a call. It turns out Teach Beyond was hoping to take over some of TeachOverseas’ programs, and they asked if we would be interested in possibly going to Turkey with them instead. So, of course, we signed right up.

The Turkey program was new, and Teach Beyond had to do a lot of logistical work to get it to work, so we waited for three months to find out what would happen, if Turkey would work, and if we would be accepted by this new organization. It was a very difficult time of uncertainty while we tried to patiently wait.

Then, on my birthday (May 8), we finally got the email from Teach Beyond telling us that because of restructuring, Turkey would not work, BUT we were asked to go to Prague instead. All of the frustration and trepidation that had been building over the last three months just disappeared and was replaced with excitement and peace. The Lord worked this out in a crazy way, taking us to a totally different part of the world and with a totally different organization than we had planned, but now we are here, and everything is moving in the right direction, and we are so excited to see what the next year holds!

So, blog readers, hold on to your hats. Cuz here we go!