Elly’s turn.

Yep, you read right. We are the proud survivors of three months in a very foreign country! We’re going to take a moment and reflect back on our time here.

What has helped:

God. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for God leading us down this path and even though there has been many tears and ‘what ifs’ and wondering if we’re doing the right thing, God hasn’t failed to show us that he has everything under control and we really should just leave it up to him. Our faith in him has definitely grown stronger in our short time here.

The seemingly bottomless well of support from David and Kathryn. They juggle wonderfully the multiple roles of parents to Aydin, occupational and speech therapists for Aydin, team leaders where most of the team live 40 minutes away in Kardzhali, ‘go to gurus’ for the Millet church and heaps of other things that I can’t list off the top of my head. On top of all that they manage to find the time and energy to be there for us – be it to drag us around the mahalle introducing us to the locals and trying to translate our weird brand of Aussie culture to them, to accompany us to each visit to the police for our visa applications, to set aside a night a week for an attempt at some serious God talk (I put it like that cos we need more ppl to diffuse D and my habit of getting off topic…), and most importantly their patience as they sit and listen to us prattle away in our desperation to have anyone to speak English to. Thanks so much guys and Allaha Şukur! (That was for you Humf, it’s a useful one to know…save it for BG tho)

Routine. It took us a while to get to somewhere we felt comfortable with, but I feel like we’re onto something here. We now feel we have enough ‘busy’ time in the week to justify complete flake out in the weekends. Four mornings a week we do school with Aydin, three afternoons we go to Mirem for Turkish, most of the rest of the time is filled with lesson prep and study. By the weekend we are more than ready to stay at home and not be social, even enjoying the odd spot of housework. Somedays, like today, we are completely anti-social but we’re ok with that. I spent last weekend in Kardzhali chasing up some information for a friend and tutoring Eunsu in English so having the freedom to do nothing today was lovely!

The Internet. We’re in Europe. The Internet is very fast and very cheap. Skype is brillliant: free to another skype account and 3c a minute to Australian fixed phones. All our friends have something on the internet that helps us stay in touch with them, be it a gmail account (chat!), a facebook account (photos!) or a blog, home is never really that far away for us. Sometimes I do feel like we’re cheating in our OS experience, when compared to older generations and I wonder just how we’d handle life without instant access to home. However, on the most part contact has been waning as we get used to life here and don’t feel the need to have such a firm grip on the goings on in the land of Aus.

The other thing the internet is useful for is access to television. Long before we left Aus we’d stopped feeling slightly immoral for downloading television instead of waiting weekly for it to appear on tv (complete with advertisements ruining a perfectly good storyline). It was pure Gen Y impatience and self-centredness, but now this habit is what keeps us sane. At the end of the day it’s so good to be able to crash out in front of the computer for some escapism. I’m not sure what the new season of How I Met Your Mother will be like without Humphrey’s usual post-work coffee churn out, but I think we’ll cope.

Mirem. Our language teacher. She is one of the most lovely locals I have encountered and isn’t at all put off by our weird foreignness. I think we are in turn actually teaching her a lot in the way of Aussie culture!

What hasn’t helped:

Homesickness/Culture Shock. Stu touched on this in his post, but it’s been a big enough of a deal for me to not mention it here. We have encountered this very differently form each other, which I think has helped us greatly support each other through it. This is where I will truthfully say that the internet and it’s promise of instant access to home has been both a blessing and a curse! I think the biggest cause was a general feeling of discontent. We had in effect stopped our lives in Australia and so the idea of returning was mingled with thoughts of ‘return to what?’ but our lives here weren’t feeling very fulfilling either. As I said above, routine has greatly helped with this feeling! We still don’t know what we’ll do upon our return home, but the idea of speaking English and safe drinking water is sounding like a good reward for a challenging year overseas!

Petty Bulgarian beauracracy. ‘Come on now, we saw our ID cards on the desk. How about instead of telling us that the director is away, you just tell the truth and say that as loud Aussies we annoyed you, ok? Just grow up.’

Time is moving more quickly now that we’re busy and in no time we’ll be posting about our 6 month milestone! I am very much looking forward to this upcoming six month block – Humphrey’s visit and a European winter and Christmas. The novelty of a second summer wore off in mid-July.

That’s all for now.

Lots of love, take care, God bless.

Elly xx

I can’t believe it’s been 3 months already! Of course, we sometimes think I can’t believe it’s only been 3 months! but I think the former is my usual feeling. I’ve reached the stage where certain memories of home give me a rush of Oh, yeah! We used to do that! On the flipside, some of the things which seemed really weird to us when we first experienced life in Bulgaria seem completely normal now… Still haven’t eaten шкембе (tripe) though.

Homesickness: I definitely experienced this differently to Elly. I never had any sudden realisation that we were ‘stuck somewhere uncomfortable for 12 months!’ – for me it’s been more of a gradual piling up of things that I appreciated at home. The fact that the pile is growing probably means that I’m missing home more now that at any other point of out trip, but really, I’m not yearning to get back. For the most part, I’m finding our lives here quite enjoyable – and in the times that I’m not, I’m at least enjoying the challenge of it. Don’t get me wrong; no one enjoys being out of their comfort zone, but I suppose I have the knowledge that God put us in this crazy situation, and he’s in the habit of putting those who follow him into circumstances where they can be challenged and grow.

Language: it was fantastic to start actual Turkish lessons two weeks ago with a lovely Millet believer named Mirem. I was initially dreading the amount of time Dave suggested as a minimum for language learning: 15-20 hours a week’ – and less and we wouldn’t make much progress. I really couldn’t see where we’d find the time and energy but we’ve managed so far. I think the reason for that is that learning something you can use and benefit from straight away (eg. by communicating with our teacher who has almost zero English!) is very rewarding. Chances are that our spoken Turkish will remain fairly limited (ie. slow and stilted) by the end of our time here, but already we’re enjoying the novelty of being able to follow Dave and Kathryn’s ‘secret’ conversations. Mwah ha ha!

Teaching: this had been going quite well. I think in the last month or so we’ve been getting a bit frustrated with the material – or at least its suitability for Aydin, who requires lots of repetition. Catering it to him is hard work, but we’re getting better at it. I think we’re doing a good job – and so do Aydin’s parents! The student himself… generally enjoys school, but certainly isn’t afraid to tell us if and why we’re boring him!

Free time: at first we spent hours on the laptop corresponding with home, fine-tuning the blog, keeping up with websites we frequented at home… This was a natural reaction to the initial culture shock, but it began to feel a bit shallow and we started to feel bad for not getting more involved with our lives here.

So we threw ourselves into some of the things Dave and Kathryn were doing – various forms of visiting people and/or walking through the mahalle. This was all 100% Turkish language stuff usually on very hot days. And it exhausted me immensely! I suppose on reflection that I’m the kind of introvert who get tired out by social interactions even in my own language and culture, and some of the extended times we spent with people – completely voluntarily, I should point out! – left me tired out and headachey for several days. Sounds wimpy, I know, but give it a go and you’ll know what I mean! We had a good chat with D+K one Sunday arvo and I decided to be more realistic with the amount of intense cross-cultural stuff I volunteered for.

Elly and I both started writing bits and pieces of fiction. This was something I had resolved before we left to get into the habit of doing while in BG and I’m very pleased that I’ve managed to. I’ll tentatively consider putting something on the blog for your perusal at some stage in the future (was that non-committal enough?).

We’ve also spent a lot of time listening to music. One of Elly’s birthday purchases was a nice set of speakers. It’s incredible how good music can sound out of real speakers when all you’ve had for 3 months is laptop in-builts!

The future: we’re looking forward to October when Humf comes to visit us. The plan was to jump in a Lada and drive around BG as well as Turkey, but since Elly and I witnessed a nasty car accident last month we’ve been less keen to drive ourselves (buses are good, here). However we travel, it’ll be awesome! The long, mountainous train journey to Bansko (ski resort) is on the menu – for the scenery rather than the skiing. Lots of planning to do!

Aydin and Kathryn will be visiting Australia in that time to visit lots of specialists and generally to gauge Aydin’s progress. There’s the possibility that D+K will need to move back to Australia for Aydin’s sake. That would be a huge decision – they’ve been here for 12 years.

Elly and I are here to help D+K but also to work out for ourselves what we want to do next. At this stage we’re not feeling drawn to long-term mission – which was one possibility for our future – but we remain open to it. We really admire Dave and Kathryn as well as all the other families we’ve met who are doing amazing work here. We are sure that God is using this time to grow us and that we’ll be more able to engage with whatever he has planned for us when we get back. That’s in May next year, by the way.

Signing off (and handing over to Elly),

Cheers,

Stu.

I’m not sure if we really did justice to the limbo we’ve been in for the last two weeks. Since visiting Slavyantsi the first time (circa the Dreaming in Turkish post), there’s been a distinct possibility that David, Kathryn and Aydin – and therefore we – would up and move to a village in that region. It’s about 100km from here but the ethnic make-up is largely the same. The indescribably different and challenging thing about moving there would have been living in a village (pop. 3500) as opposed to big old Haskovo (pop. 100,000). Seriously, if we think we’ve had cultural challenges here in the city, moving to a village would be several orders of magnitude worse! Village life is very different; anyone who’s lived in a small town will understand the lack of anonymity and privacy. Relocating to a village as a bunch of Westerners would make that all the more apparent. We would appear to be stupid (“they don’t even know our language!”), untidy (“did you see the crumbs on their rug?”), immoral (“all those Westerners are depraved!”) and decadent (“they have that huge house all to themselves!”). Nevertheless, we’d no doubt become quite sought after by all and sundry when it came to a sudden need for money or transport or English lessons. To top it off – and this would be the most difficult thing for us – there’s no way we could rely on having those little things we crave when culture shock really kicks in: things like time and space to ourselves, or a conversation in English, or a nice relaxing coffee in an anonymous cafe somewhere…

Oh yes, it all sounds quite challenging. However! I’m really posting here to announce that D+K decided that they will stay in Haskovo for the next year or so (at this stage). So I was leading you down the garden path with the preceding paragraph… but I thought it was worth explaining why we’re so happy and relieved about it!

Stu here writing, by the way.

[I should add that we're sure that if things had been different - or if things change in the future - that God would look after us in a village context. We're willing to follow D+K wherever they go - that's why we're here, after all - but we're glad this is the outcome!]

D+K spent almost 2 weeks praying about the decision to move. Personally, I was really impressed and humbled by how they heard from God. It wasn’t simply a vague impression of “yes” or “no”. When they announced their decision to us they shared 4 or 5 different Bible passages that gave them confidence that staying in Haskovo was the right decision. Over all, though, they felt that God was saying yerleşmek, a lovely Turkish word meaning “to settle down” or “to nestle in”. In other words, make yourself at home in Haskovo. (Hmm, maybe the stork photo is relevant after all!)

Want to know something else which made me happy today? We bought 8 peaches, 5 bananas, 5 tomatoes, 3 eggplants, a kilo of pickles and a cabbage all for about 4 leva (just under AU$4). How sweet is that? The prices of fresh fruit and vegies just keep falling!

I’d like to dedicate this post to Weetbix™. Wish you were here, old friend.

Cheers

Stu.