once a month update :)

What fun we’ve been having! I hope you all are doing well wherever it is you may be. I pray for you all quite often and thank God everyday for blessing me with friends and family who keep us in their prayers daily too! It’s so hard to believe that it’s been one month since we’ve been here. October has flown by and November will be over before I know it and we will be planning our Christmas break adventure to explore India. So much has happened since we’ve been here. We saw an elephant walking down the road outside our campus a few weeks ago. I wish I had my camera but we were having a work social, where we divide the students up and pick-up around campus, so I couldn’t capture that moment fast enough. Just last Friday we saw a monkey on a chain but it was not a happy experience, it attacked one of the girls, but she wasn’t hurt. I really do love it here and the people have already become like family. God has blessed us- the people are very friendly and always comforting and I am very much content here. A week ago Friday we didn’t have school because there was some kind of festival so Kara and I went with some students to a Bazaar or market. We took a bus for 10 rupees (appx. 5 cents) and “roamed” around. They took us to one of their favorite bakery. What a fun time we had-we walked up the river a ways and rode a bamboo boat back to the bazaar where we caught our bus and headed home. Friday was Children’s day in India, a national holiday and no school. So the staff put on a program for the students. A few of the kids we have gotten close to taught us a Hindi dance and we performed that for the program and it was quite a hit. But it was so much fun. Kara had a terrible fever this weekend and I caught a cold so we spent the whole weekend sleeping. Today (Monday) we are feeling much better and we came with another teacher, Miss Tani, to Tura the closest city, to use the internet and purchase a few items we can’t get at the local markets.
We have plans to go to a Garo wedding (Garo is the clan from East Garo Hills, our district) on Dec. 10, with Miss Jenny one of the staff members who has adopted us as her own, which will be a fun experience and she is planning to take us to Kolkata for a few days after that. Then we hope to go visit Home Sweet Home an orphanage down south for Christmas time. We are starting to work on our traveling plans and it is so exciting.
Because this is a boarding school far from any kind of town or village there is really nothing to do after school, it reminds me of UCA . The kids mostly sleep and eat when they are not in school and they go to all the social events early so they can sing because there is nothing else for them to do. I would really like to start up some kind program for them to get involved in for next school year. They have a room for a library but have no books yet, so we are working on getting books for next year. I would like to start PE classes and the school is planning on having a music class for next year also, but they are waiting for a keyboard. The kids love to sing so I think a choir will be fun for them. This week starting Monday the 17th the kids begin their finals and Maranatha is coming to dedicate the new church building on Wednesday, it will be fun to meet them and have westerners around for a few days. We have to talk SO slow here for them to understand our accents so it’s always really nice to talk at a normal pace and be understood. Thank you again for all of your prayers I don’t know what it would be like here without them. We think about you all too much and miss you! We used to always look at our clock set to the time at home and wonder what everyone was doing at school and home. But we are quickly getting quite busy. Have a great week and I’ll post again as soon as I can.