…. with Eastern Europe. This weekend we had the opportunity to take a road trip (or Woad Ship, in Jonathan’s words). We traveled across Albania, through Macedonia to Kosovo. As we drove for 8 hours on Friday and 7 and a half hours on Monday with two exceptionally well behaved babies, we enjoyed the beauty of the mountains and villages along with some great conversation and time to think and reflect. Over the past few years we had both felt a deepening call to come and work in this part of the world. Driving across some of the Balkan countries seemed to just confirm again that we are in the right place.

Our time in Kosovo was fantastic. To meet with the two groups of believers was exciting. Staying with the leaders of the groups there in Prishtina gave us the opportunity to talk with them about their history and their visions and goals for the future. We have committed to supporting them by at least visiting them regularly. Kosovo has been on our hearts from the outset of our assignment. Having now both visited the country we have a deeper sense of responsibility to supporting the efforts there.

Check back soon for some picture form our trip!

As the title of this post suggests, we have gone from having no tutors at the beginning of February to having two this month! Today started lessons with a university linguistics professor who has studied Albanian, English and French. We enjoyed our first lesson in that we not only learned what words Albanians really say but also a lot about the culture. He will be invaluable when we get to asking him some of our more complicated questions about the grammatical structure of Albanian and how things really translate. On Monday we start with a highly recommended tutor who has developed her own teaching material. We are especially excited about this as up until this point we have not found any single book to be particularly helpful!

Slowly but surly we are starting to be able to speak to those in our neighborhood that only speak Albanian. We are excited to be able to get to know our neighbors better. With “Summer Day” celebrated on the 14th of March we are looking forward to the warmer weather and the opportunity to have grill outs in out court yard and invite the neighbors!

As readers of our site you will know that we are currently trying not to pull all of our hair out as we strive to learn Albanian… it is no easy task! Well, things got even more complicated when our language tutor who has been teaching us over the past few months left to go to the USA for three months. This has left us searching for a teacher. Unsurprisingly, there are not that many people who learn Albanian, so there are limited teacher and schooling options. Please be praying that we find a good new teacher or, in some ways even better a class setting to continue our learning.

We are finally home in Tirana for our longest stretch yet! We will not be going on another plane (or even near the airport if Jen has anything to do with it) until our General Assembly at the end of June. Our latest 2 week trip took us to Kansas City. Sarah completed her 13th flight in her 4 months of life and Jonathan, well we have lost count of how many planes our little jet setter has been on! We spent a week together with 22 others in a Member Care Retreat which culminated last Monday evening with a service in which our status changed from “intern” to “career”. Together with the other 11 couples serving in countries across the globe we made a commitment to continue in this line of work for the long term