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

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...

I know it's been a little bit longer since I last posted than I meant for it to be, but hopefully my audience can forgive me. I knew that we had a church retreat coming up, and I thought it might afford an opportunity to really talk about something a little bit more exciting than my ordinary day to day life. Every Friday we have a believer's course called Al Masira here in the Elim-Zentrum, and a week and more ago, during this course we, the church, invited along any participants who would be interested in coming to our church retreat. Given that it was an invitation, they were invited along free of charge to a weekend of bible study, worship, games, and authentic German food. But I get ahead of myself. Five adults and one girl from the course participants piled into our big white church van Friday evening, and it was off to the retreat. Friday night we had dinner and then a session. There were four such sessions, each including a time of worship as well as approximately an...

When I first arrived in Kaiserslautern I was surprised by the size of the city and a little intimidated as to how I was supposed to find my way around. Recently, however, I've started to become more comfortable with this place and feeling more at home. This building in which I'm living is starting to feel like my home, but at the same time I'm realizing that nowhere on this earth is really going to be my home. I have a true home to look forward to someday. Another encouraging thing is seeing people around town that I recognize. There's an Afghan man from Café International whom I've run into twice now in town, and it's really cool to see the way his face lights up at recognizing me, as I'm sure mine likely does too. Let's see, an interesting story or two from the last few weeks? This past Saturday we had a church cleaning day, and everyone came together and worked towards a common goal. It was quite a fun thing actually, talking and cleaning. That ...

Wow, a lot has happened since I last posted, and I think that I'm starting to really get adjusted to the idea of living in Germany. From purchasing and cooking my own food to fixing problems with the dishwasher, I've begun to adjust and get used to a little bit of the routine here. A huge part of German culture is obviously soccer, and there are tons of people who go absolutely crazy over it. I don't really care that much, but seeing the defending World Cup champions play is a pretty cool opportunity, so I went along with the hype and watched as Germany beat Azerbaijan 5-1. This was a really fun time and an opportunity to see the German sports culture and to spend an evening doing something with my team.  This was the view at the beginning of the game. Germans don't express a ton of patriotic pride often, but at soccer games they always go all out. There was even a small marching band to the right side of the huge central display. After each goal, the fans lifte...

A lot of people want to know what my regular week looks like, and since the last two weeks I've started with my outreach days in addition to seminars, I finally have a pretty good idea of what my weeks will look like. Mondays I will continue having seminars most of the time. Lots of theology and German, as I've previously mentioned. Tuesdays I am helping out at the local Baptist Church with their breakfast café as a dishwasher/server/whatever role they need me to act in. This is a neat opportunity for me to meet people from the community, especially those from my neighborhood. Most of these people are elderly, and they love to talk to me while I'm there. Wednesdays I go to something called Café International, a program of another local church. At this café, refugees come and drink coffee and eat with people from the church and community. I've met a few pretty cool people there, and I'm starting to form friendships with them. There are a number of Afghan and Ir...

The last two weeks have been filled with many, many seminars. To clarify, a seminar is up to six and a half hours of theology, which of course is completely in German. I ended most days completely exhausted from a combined course in Theology and German, but it was a good kind of exhaustion. The kind you get from working (thinking) hard and accomplishing a lot. I won't bore with in depth summaries of each topic, but here are a few stories from these past two weeks. Early on, we, the FSJ team, visited a café run by the local Baptist church every Tuesday. I will be helping out with this café as well as with the junior youth and youth programs at that church. We were able to speak with Thomas, the pastor, about what my role would be to some extent. It was a rather cool experience. Unfortunately, the rest of the day did not go nearly as well given that we spent four hours waiting outside the city hall for an appointment to file some paperwork which ended up lasting all of five minutes...

Perhaps a slight bit of background information is in order. A while back, perhaps 5 or 6 years, I had decided that I'd like to take a gap year before college and go somewhere with EMM's YES program. Essentially, the YES program was one year consisting of both a discipleship training school and an outreach portion. The YES program, however, shut down recently, and I therefore was not able to participate in it as I had hoped. Nevertheless, I still had the desire to take a year before going off to college and do something worthwhile with my time. It was in this context that I stumbled upon FSJ in Kaiserslautern, Germany. FSJ stands for Freiwilliges Socialez Jahr, but the English nickname for this particular program is Free to Serve Jesus. Since I am pretty interested in serving Jesus, and the program consists of nearly the same elements that comprised the YES program, it seemed like a good fit to me. Of course, it doesn't hurt that I've taken five years of German in school...