TESOL England: First impressions

This is «the clock building». This is where we are staying on the second floor.
There is a café on the bottom floor, and I´m using the office space on the top floor (behind the clock).

TESOL

We´ve been here for a little more than one week, and it has taken us some time to get settled and into our new routine. Marina has started the TESOL-course, and Ana has been going to one of the public schools in the town.
Marina her class is quite small, only three students and two staff. But she´s very happy to be able to be here. As part of her course, Marina will be teaching English on the ECO-course (English Cultural Orientation), which is a course where people learn English. People take this course either before their DTS, or before joining a missions team where English is the team language.
The ECO-class that Marina will be teaching has six Brazilians and one Chilean, which is nice.

We´ve already made really good friends with one of the Brazilian families that is here for ECO-course. They have two girls that are around the same age as Ana. Marina will be giving classes together with the mother. And I hang out with the dad, he helps me with my Portuguese, while I help him with his English. And we talk about bicycles.

Ana is going to a British public school while we are here.
The day after we arrived,
we went to the big mall to get her a school uniform.

Wood End School

We see it as a miracle from God that Ana has gotten a place at one of the public schools in town. We had been a bit anxious about how the whole transition would be. The British school-system is quite different from the Norwegian YWAM-preschool that she is used with. But she is happy to go to school, and takes in all the new thing quite well, the uniform, the homework. The school is a little more than a mile away. So, with a borrowed bike I bring her to school in the morning, and pick her up at the end of the day. We feel so blessed with all the people have helped us getting started here.

Some of the illustrations I have been making for Wycliffe this past week.
It´s so cool to be able to contribute to bible-translation with what I am good at.

What I do

In the first week I have been helping the girls getting started with their schools and schedules. I´m happy to be able to support my girls in this way. As a husband and parent, I want to make sure they can get the best out their time here.
Besides all the organising, I have started to contribute to an illustration-project for Wycliffe Bible Translators. Of the total of 6887 languages in the world, 3287 do not yet have a bible-translation. To speed up the global bible-translation work, they have asked artists to illustrate a few thousand key-words. The words that are the most important to bible translation. They hope to get all the drawings in by the end of this year, collect them and put them all in a kit that the translator can use to speed up their work of bible translation.
I am really excited to be able to be part of this project. Imagine that in our lifetime (perhaps only five years from now), there will be a bible in every language on earth.
I´ll be posting my illustrations for Wycliffe in my tumblr-blog.