Monday, September 21, 2009

Snapshots of the Week

Last Sunday, several of the teachers went out to lunch after church at my favorite Greek restaurant. It's right on the banks of the Danube River and they serve an amazing hamburger. Since I don't get a lot of good beef around here, I've never even tried anything else on the menu. And, they know how to treat a girl right - every one of us was given a rose as a parting gift!

Monday afternoon was the Staff vs. Students soccer game. The staff team put up a good fight, but the students won 3-2 (or something like that).As you can see from the picture below, I was socializing more than participating. Really I was doing the staff team a favor. It would have been worse had I played. The people beside me are Izabella, Sari, and Hannah. Izabella is a wonderful Hungarian friend of mine who teaches Hungarian language classes to elementary and middle school students at ICSB. Her daughter Sari is a fifth grader this year. Hannah is one of my roommates and teaches at the school as well.Tuesday morning I decided to pay some bills. You might be interested to know that in Hungary, you pay your bills at the post office. Every bill comes in the mail and has a yellow perforated part at the bottom. You just take them to the posta and pay the lady at the counter. The ones pictured below are the receipts that I keep as proof I paid the bills.

Interestingly enough, this bill paying event was a little more exciting because the lady at the window didn't count my change correctly. Instead of giving me 3420 forint, she just gave me the 420. (A difference of over $15.) That meant I had to stand there and explain (without words) that I had been underpaid. After a game of charades, another lady came out and together the two women spent about ten minutes counting all the moolah in the cash box and comparing it to a computer printout. Finally, after much delay, she apologized and gave me my forint! I am so glad I was paying attention!Wednesday was our faculty meeting. In hopes that we will be prepared for emergency situations, we practiced fire drill procedures. This pic is a little behind the action, but you should know that we got to intentionally pull the alarm. I felt a little rebellious even being present for such an event.Thursday I made a long-awaited purchase! There was a mini sewing maching on sale at Tesco (British store sort of like a Wal-Mart) and I'm always needing to hem something, so I went for it. I should have known better. I guess you get what you pay for, because it only made it around one hem of one pair of pants. Now I have to figure out how to take it back. Oh the joys of living internationally!

And today I got a package from my dear friend Laura! THANK YOU!!!!! Even the padded envelope was cute. Inside were some very fun items, but I must admit the best part was when one of my students offered me $25 dollars for my box of Cheese-Itz!

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Staff Retreat

This weekend was ICSB's annual staff retreat - we spent Thursday and Friday nights at a thermal hotel near Lake Balaton (Kehida). Although sometimes we use staff retreat to work or prepare for the coming year, this time we were blessed with a couple of days of rest and refreshment.

We swam in the thermal pools, slid down a water slide or two, listened to the Word preached, and enjoyed fellowshipping with each other. As you can tell by the pictures below, some of us even enjoyed the playground!




Here's one of my favorite quotes from the weekend:

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small
Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all.

Sunday, September 06, 2009

Acronym of the Day

Everybody needs to learn a new acronym now and again, and the acronym for today is RAFT. It floats (haha) around in the International Christian School world as a tool for helping students say goodbye well in the midst of an abundance of transition.

RAFT stands for:
R - Reconciliation (forgive each other)
A - Affirmation (affirm each other)
F - Farewell (say your goodbyes - to people, places, and things)
T - Think Ahead (duh)

When I came to ICSB in the fall of 2006, I began to look for ways to serve the Lord and be involved in the lives of the students outside of the school day. God gave me a wonderful opportunity with the 9th grade girls. At the time, every freshman girl was in my math class, and almost as nervous about starting high school as I was about teaching overseas. We began meeting weekly to study the Bible, pray together, and encourage each other.

I can't believe it, but now they are seniors. I am so proud of them and so thankful to have had the chance to watch as God has used them here and around the world. I'm already mentally preparing myself for what it will be like to say good-bye to them in June. I'm collecting as many sticks of memories as I can so that my raft is buoyant when the time comes. We had dinner together a couple nights before school began and they wrote notes to the new 9th grade girls, welcoming them to high school. And here are some of the new freshmen working busily in my Geometry class this past week. Don't they look engaged! I promise this was not a staged photograph, but it may never happen quite like this again!

<