Micah's Adventures in K-Town and Other Foreign Locations

I must apologize for the late timing of this post in contrast to previous posts which I have written. The audience might do well, however, in taking into account a period of around two weeks during which I was on vacation in my homeland in order to partake in the attendance to the graduation of my older sister from Wheaton College. With that in mind, this post is only a little bit late. In Moldova the team and I first went south, to the city of Paicu, where we had the pleasure of coming alongside a small congregation in their work. While we could not easily communicate always, we did have a few translators, and our time there was quite enjoyable. We had children's programs where we mostly played games as well as practical work during which we planted potatoes and hoed earth and shelled corn and other such exciting tasks. After the first approximately week and a half, we traveled north to the town of Branesti, which ought to have all manner of accents and interesting letters wit

The last few weeks have been comprised of fairly typical day-to-day activities for me now. The one major change is that I am now teaching German semi-regularly to some refugees. A number of us are taking turns with these responsibilities, but I think it is really a sign of how far my grasp of the language has progressed that I am able to do this. It is something that I really enjoy doing, although it can be exhausting as lessons sometimes last between two and two-and-a-half hours. Easter was this past Sunday as the audience likely is aware, and I enjoyed getting together with my church family for an Easter breakfast before the service. Speaking of my congregation, I had the opportunity to play guitar with Tommy, a man from our church, and Tamara, a young woman who completed the FSJ program last year, during the worship service the week before last. My opportunities for service continue to grow and expand as I spend time here it seems. It's true, the long-awaited departure for o

During the past few weeks I have really hit my stride here in Germany as I have gotten into a nice rhythm of work each week. I feel especially appreciated and needed at the elementary school, where this past week so many teachers were sick that four grades stayed home and I was given the opportunity to be a secretary rather than a teacher's aide for one day. A cool story from this time was that a few weeks ago the FSJ program took a trip to Augsburg, Bayern to visit a prayer house there. For the Americans among my audience, I suppose this area of Germany would be known as Bavaria. The prayer house there has prayer ongoing 24/7. There is often live music played during the day, and it was an incredibly enriching experience for me and the members of my team. Afterwards I even had a good conversation with Mike about some stuff that I felt God had laid on my heart during this time. We have gotten slightly bigger as well, here at the Elim-Zentrum, as we have some guests staying with

The last few weeks have been filled with a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. We had a prayer week, where every evening there was a prayer gathering at a different church in the city. I really enjoyed the opportunity to gather with other believers and just pray for the city and for persecuted Christians around the world. We also prayed a lot for ProChrist, an event that is currently going on. ProChrist is an evangelical outreach event to which many nonbelievers and those questioning whether perhaps God is real have been invited to attend. Each evening a band plays music and there is a speaker who speaks on a specific theme. We are meeting in the Fruchthalle, a large music hall in the middle of Kaiserslautern, and it has been packed the last two evenings. This is something that I have been praying a lot about as it approached, and I would appreciate any prayers by the readership of this blog for the success of ProChrist and for those who may come to faith through our efforts. Our

I may have not updated in a little while, I apologize to the reading audience for that. On the other hand, nobody felt obligated to keep up with my life while they were celebrating Christmas stuff. I think I have done the general public a favor. At any rate, here are a few pictures and stories about the two weeks before Christmas. My actual activities over the Christmas break are classified and will not be shared in detail here at the present point or likely at any other time. If a reader would care to know and wants to contact me about that time, I may share some information.  For our after school homework help and game time, we decided to have a little bit of a party. Here we decorated and consumed many delicious cookies. With the help of a few friends, we mixed, cut out, cooked, and decorated quite a large number of Christmas treats. I believe that the children all had a blast with the hands on activity, and it was a good way to go out with a bang for the last session

I am rather poor at this whole posting a blog on time thing. My audience should just expect these to come when they come, and likely at irregular intervals, and the only sure thing is that they will likely never be when expected. That being said, I have had quite an interesting last few weeks. Thanksgiving was a huge success, with around 60 people coming to celebrate. Unfortunately I didn't get my interview that day, but I was able to go to the school the Tuesday afterward and was asked to begin working three days a week beginning that Wednesday. So now, rather than having hardly anything to do some days of the week, I have the pleasure of waking up soon after 6 in the morning to take a bus and go work with the elementary school, that is, classes 1 through 4. Thursdays I will also be helping out with an after school homework help program in which there are several English-speaking students. I am really excited about my new work, and I have already seen the ways in which I have be