It is only a month into the spring semester here and there have already been so many surprises and changes! Our new teammate Katie arrived in the middle of January from Minnesota and she will be staying for 11 months. She is already settling into life in Budapest well, with a few bumps along the way such as losing her metro pass and getting her phone stolen! I am excited to see her already building relationships however and having a great attitude about everything. She is very independent, already knows where she wants to go to church and is comfortable going into the city alone. I for one am so excited for Katie being here, as her main ministry focus will be helping with English outreach so I now have a full time partner! She is also super fun and having spent a lot of time in Minnesota, understands the ‘up north culture’ unlike the others on my team here.
Another big change in the past couple weeks has been Betsy and Cassidy (my two roommates for the fall) moving into the city. They had been wanting to find a place in the city for awhile now, and with Katie arriving it was kind of perfect timing (we had about 1 week of someone sleeping on the couch). Their new apartment is lovely and will hopefully provide them more opportunity to host and to experience more of normal life in Budapest. For some reason, Cassidy and Betsy moving out and Katie moving in made me ambitious to do some home improvement, so I spent my spare time the past couple of weeks scraping, puttying, sanding, painting, moving furniture around and cleaning. I also decided to move into Betsy’s old room as it is a little bigger and has a lot more daylight. So I just last night moved the last of my things to my new room and figured out how to organize things in my new little dresser.
English Clubs so far this winter have been a bit of a disappointment to me. Not that they aren’t fun and that we don’t have good conversation, but I had hoped to see a lot of new people coming and so far that hasn’t been the case. We had ended on such a good note in the fall that I fully expected to see everyone from the fall plus some new faces come in January. I had made a big effort to make and handout creative flyers, start a Facebook group and I was hoping that at least some people would come based on that. When I only had one new person at our first meeting I really felt like a failure, like all my efforts were a waste. I held out hope that the next week would be better attended, but so far attendance has been pretty stable at around 6. I also had a couple of people make comments about what I should have done advertising, or other things that I should do to ‘be a better host’, but it is hard when I am just one and I am just learning too. Those comments were hard to take, because I work hard, certainly more than 40 hours per week and people are always asking more of me. It is so often hard to choose where to invest my time and when it is ok to say ‘This is my time, I need to be able to relax, sleep and do the things I love that keep me healthy and happy.’
Since the first couple weeks, I have been told that January and even February are hard times to organize things, as many people don’t like to come out in the cold and the Hungarian school semester doesn’t end until the end of January so those who teach or have kids in school are often busy around this time. By now, I am less upset about it, feeling like maybe this is what God has for our club right now, but I still long to see more people come. I think it is a time of trusting more in God’s timing and not letting my pride get in the way as if the success of the club depends on my ability.
On a better note, I have been invited into some other cool opportunities. A woman from my church is an American and UK history professor at a local university and has invited me to come help foster discussion in a couple of her classes. Her and her husband are really strong Christians and she uses the classroom and history to speak the truths of the gospel to her students. I am so excited to start this and see where is goes! Also the parent English club at the high school I have mentioned before is set to start soon and I hear that there is a lot of interest there! I am a little nervous, but hope that it will be a fun and fruitful time (this could totally use some prayer).
Well all for now, as always thank you for your love and prayers!
PS The picture is from touring the Hungarian Paliament building in January!