New Realities

It is now Saturday - the first real day off Delynn and I have had off in months - with the house sale, moving, packing, storing, moving, selling cars, traveling, etc. We decided to walk to France (just because we could!), do some wash and take care of our Kehrwoche duties. We have been working hard all week at RIA, preparing to get the school ready for the little ones. We received a incredible gift from an international school in Lyon, France that closed a couple of years ago - their entire library, teaching aids, overhead projectors, calculators (all manuals in French of course!) and boxes of misc. items. We are so grateful because this increases the size of the RIA library about 3 times. God is good. Now we need to go through the boxes to sort, distribute, store, dispose of the many, many items. The picture shows Delynn and Anne (a friend of our director) in the "before" state. Actually, this is better than it was earlier in the week and doesn't quite capture the total number of boxes in the entire Media Center. The Media Center at school will become my responsibility - it contains the majority of our computers and the library.

In between registering with the state, (we now have nice new residence visa pages in our passports - yeah!) and starting the process to get our drivers license (we found out we need something to prove Delynn's maiden name - like our marriage certificate), we have been at the school every day since we landed, helping to get things ready for opening. I have made the acquaintance of a handyman the school often hires, Herr Minke, while assisting him in various and sundry projects around the school. We have moved appliances, desks, shelves, play equipment, erected basketball hoops, fixed multiple things and spoken a lot of German. It is a real work-out speaking in a different tongue most of the day and I love it! I get about 60-80% or more what is going on depending on the context. It is a wonderful challenge. Herr Minke taught me a saying: "Geht nichts - nichts geht", which very roughly translates to "nothing's impossible".

Since it is washing day, I thought I would include a picture of our clothes dryer. This is another reality for us: the picture shows the output of three loads of wash from our washing machine - did we mention how blessed we are to have our own washing machine? Each load takes about an hour to 90 minutes, depending upon the setting, so laundry is a somewhat different process than back in the US. Another blessing is the nice balcony we have in which to dry our clothes.

In the Schwarzwald, there is also a tradition that dates back to the 15th century - about the time Columbus set off for the new world - where cleaning laws were enacted to keep the people safe from refuse piling up in the city. Every two weeks, the home owners or renters had to haul all of their nasty stuff outside of the city walls (except during wartime). This tradition has evolved into the so-called Kehrwoche or "weekly cleaning". In apartment buildings, there are usually two apartments on each floor of the stairwell. For the "little clean", the occupants take turns cleaning the stairwell between their landing and the landing below. We clean the windows, sweep, mop and clean the stair rails. Then once each week, the occupants trade off the "big clean" duties - since we have 8 apartments, we get the "big clean" duty about once every eight weeks. This duty includes sweeping and generally cleaning all of the common areas of the building. Since it is done every week, the amount of work is fairly small, but everyone pitches in to make it a better place to live. I think there is a lesson in there for all of us.

I think that I will wait until next time to update you on the game of recycling. We like to think that we recycle in the US, but you will truly be amazed with the next post.

Blessings to all our friends and family who read this posting.