Mejor de Salud y Curso de Inglès

Good afternoon! Later in the day after my last post, I wondered if I had done too much complaining, but I hope to keep the tone here informal and a fairly acurate picture of how I am feeling. Thanks for the encouragement from those who responded, and I`m happy to report that this week I am (finally) feeling better, which amazingly has an impact as well on my overall mood and outlook.

A new undertaking this week for Nicole,Emily and I was the beginning of our English classes in the parish, which will continue each week on Monday and Thursday evenings. We had 11 and 16 students attend, and more or less we have begun well. We are on the lookout for an ESL course teacher´s edition that we might be able to have sent through the Tardio´s at Christmas, but until then we are covering some of the basics on our own with a little help from some online ideas and input from our students as to what they would like to learn. The ages of our students range from 14 to about 30, with a variety of English experience and proficiency, though all seem eager to learn. Because several requested help with pronunciation, we spent some time preparing a summary of how Spanish vowel sounds can be spelled in English as well as compiling example words for sounds that don`t exist in Spanish. Doing so made us realize how unpredictable English actually is and how many exceptions there are to the rules that do exist. Any ideas would be welcome -- and we are posting summaries of our classes online for our students at www.cursodeinlgespsfda.blogspot.com in case you are curious. Because Nicole and Emily have a fairly full work schedule, I am taking on the majority of the preparation work and generally take the lead during the class when explanations in Spanish are needed.

An exciting event this Wednesday was another trip to the soccer stadium, this time packed full for `El Clàsico` between two of the most popular teams of the Peruvian national league. The game was quite exciting, the fans were loud (reminded me of college football level) and generally an exciting atmosphere. Interesting too that we ended up walking home more than 45 minutes since most don`t have cars and all the taxis are overloaded when the game ends. At least here, though, the stadium-design doesn`t have to take parking lot space into account. Hopefully next week I`ll post some photos from the event.

I began physical therapy this week for my elbow, now completely without cast or sling. Since it was bent at 90 degrees for four weeks, I am still not able to fully extend my arm nor flex it all the way. The therapy sessions are a bit painful in that she works to stretch the contracted muscles and tendons, but afterward I can feel the increased mobility. This week also included the small victories of drinking and shampooing my hair with my left hand :). I have a good ways to go before I am back to normal (or at least as normal as I was before), but little by little I see progress.

This coming weekend I will assist with the Confirmation retreat Saturday-Sunday at a place called Pariacoto, a couple hours away east into the mountains -- supposedly quite pretty there. Efforts to gather leaders of the eight parish neighborhoods were unsuccessful last week, but I did meet with leaders of one neighborhood regarding efforts to invite more of their youth to active participation. My vision at this point is to just begin with visits to homes, among other things looking to identify potencial youth leaders in each neighborhood. In January, there is a national youth ministry training course in Lima for a week or so which I hope to attend and bring interested youth leaders with me. If anyone might be interested in sponsoring the expenses for one of our young people here to attend, please let me know. I don`t yet have information about cost, but my guess is that it will be quite reasonable by US standards though out of reach for some youth and families here. In addition, we still have some plans for Advent -- outing, mini-retreat evenings, a community service project,a Christmas play and having youth help decorate the church. Similar to some parishes in the US, the members of the youth counsel felt that they were not asked for help with many parish events and were excited about the idea of being able to contribute ideas and time to helping decorate for Advent and Christmas.

Tonight we have been invited to a birthday party of one of the choir members whom we know, which should be a fun (and late) evening. I will go after my 8:00 meeting to help plan the upcoming Confirmation retreat (I can`t imagine calling a similar meeting at 8:00 pm on Saturday in the IS :)). I wish you a blessed week, and thanks for checking in!