life

routines and rhythms

We have a house – now we need a routine
It’s been a long time since we lived somewhere new. Well, that isn’t true. We’ve lived in several ‘new’ places in just the last year. But living in a place for a little while vs living in a place with a long-term commitment… it is different.
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We are so busy with language learning in the form of classes at the university that it has been a challenge to get a rhythm.

Sunset

Language Study – Meeting People

Liberty and Van are doing well in their schooling. Actually, we think they are pretty amazing considering that they entered the school not knowing French! Fortunately they have made several friends, and even a few who speak just enough English to help them with school assignments and telling them what’s happening in class. Both Liberty and Van tell us that often they are working away, and they sort of hear the teacher saying something, and suddenly everyone is getting up and leaving… and Liberty nor Van know what is happening! But praise God, they have done well, academically and socially. Liberty has been getting involved in sports. Van has had to deal with a bully, and managed to do so in such as way that he and the bully are now friends, high-fiving each other when they see each other.

Each day for lunch at school they have a 4 course lunch, which they thoroughly enjoy. As well, there have been many opportunities to play and do sports. In the first month they have gone on a 2 night bicycling camping trip, archery, fencing, another bike ride to the seaside, various trips to galleries and natural museums, handball tournaments, a soccer tournament, and this week they are starting volleyball. Wow.

Bike Riding
One activity we thought we’d be doing a lot of in France was bike riding. We had thought everyone would be riding bikes here and there. Well, it isn’t as widespread as we thought, but we still wanted to do this. So this week we finally bought a bike for Michelle. Now, she and Liberty and Van all have bikes. What about me? Well, I signed up for Velolib! So I can use a bike for a small fee/per use for the year.

Bike riding

Looking for a home and a school

When we began our search for schools for Liberty and Van in late August, most were still closed. So we focused on finding an apartment. That was actually easy as there are many options for finding houses or apartments. What we realized after several days was that rental agencies wanted someone from France to act as our Guarantor for our rent, with a salary of 3 to 4 times the monthly rent.

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Who has that kind of money?? So we reached a point of discouragement, and really, it came down to trusting God to lead us to an individual landlord who would trust us and not insist on a guarantor.

In the meantime, schools opened and we could visit them. One after another we were told, “Sorry, no room.” So we found ourselves with no apartment, and no school for the kids. What to do? We had met one landlord who seemed willing to trust us, but hadn’t heard from her clearly.

Then, mid week last week, we visited one school. The Director said there wasn’t room, technically, but she could call the class teacher to see if one more child could squeeze in. She tried calling, but there was no response. So the Director decided to call the next door school to see if there was room for Liberty (who is in a higher grade). The Director smiled as she was told that one student had just cancelled their spot: There was room for Liberty! This seemed to embolden the Director who, being impressed with how quiet and patient Van and Liberty had been waiting, said she would try to make sure Van could get in. This way, they would be in the same school. We thanked her profusely, and went off to meet another missionary who lives in Caen with his family. He had offered to help us talk with a few schools, but since the one for Liberty had opened up we decided to go there first and start Liberty’s registration. While there the Director from the school we were trying to get Van into called, and spoke with the Secretary of Liberty’s school. When she heard we were there right then, with a friend who spoke French, she yelled for joy (we could hear her over the phone!) and asked for us to come back to her school (Van’s) once we were done at Liberty’s school. So we finished up, and went back to Van’s school to hear the great news that Van’s class’s teacher had willingly offered Van a spot. So just like that, both kids had found their schools; both schools were eager and happy to have Liberty and Van!

Below I am including some pics of the unfinished apartment.

Looking around

Will it be finished?

The Office

France

The title is simple. France. This is because, as most of you know, we are finally, actually in France! It was really a tumultuos process, filled with some uncertainty and ambiguity, but we truted God, and did what we could, and voila, here we are.

Hello from Les Halles

So where are we? Right now we are

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in a city called Lisieux, in the Normandy region. And we are in this housing while we travel back and forth from another city, about 45 minutes away, called Caen. It is in this city that we will be based for a year, studying French (language and culture).

Caen centreville

Please pray as we look at schools and rental flats or houses.

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Chilliing, Paris-style

For Rent

Wow, what a day!

Our visa applications were submitted and accepted Wednesday. But what a day. We had most of the documents, but were missing a few, and in some cases the documents we had were missing some precise details, such as dates, or our full names. But praise God, in the end, we managed to get it all together, and the visa office accepted our applications. As far as we know the visas are now being processed in Montreal.

Passports

Another delay

Well, this seems familiar. Once more we are facing a delay of our original departure date! We had naively thought we would depart Canada for France in late June. Well, to apply for a long-term visa for France one has to actually fill out an application form online which results in you being assigned a date on which an interview for the visa takes place. The form to fill out is multi-page, and each page would stall for us as there was some detail being asked fo that we didn’t have, or know if it applied to us. We would write to a few places to try to get answers and most time the replies were not that helpful. So back to form online and voila, suddenly we could go to teh next page even htough the missing info wasn’t supplied. So, is it needed? Or no? Will we find out at the interview?

Anyway, at the end of this online application form the final pop up window tells me that there is a 30 day wait between the completion of this form and the actual interview. WHAT?? If this had been the first pop-up or shared bit of info we would have gone through it much more speedily.

As it is, our visa interviews take place July 18. Each of us gets 30 minutes. Even Liberty and Van. There is a lengthy list of things we need to bring, but the details missing from the online form worry me. Please pray about this.

Hamilton Harbour

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we have been able to visit Hamilton harbour, and take lovely bike rides here and there. Each time we stay here as the kids grow older they discover more things about Canada. For example, we have usually had a car when we are home, but not this time. This has meant taking the bus… just like in China! But we’ve never taken the bus here and at first it seemed trickier than China. In China you just sort of barge onto the bus and toss money at the driver. Here, people are in lines, they move slowly onto the bus, and the bus drivers are friendly. Wow, what a change.

Our bus stop

We all miss the lively street activity you can find in China, but here we’ve enjoyed the odd fun thing, like face painting at a restaurant! There was a lady giving free face paintings to any kid who wanted it. Of course our kids did!

Liberty the Leopard

Van, the more traditional leopard

Ontario and Texas

Well, here we are.  We are back! It is always a strange process, coming back. When you’ve spent 2 or more years of your lives in other countries, dealing with the idiosyncrasies of life there, and made a life complete with habits and patterns and rhythms, and then leave it all: It is always an adjustment.

Fishing in Texas

For one thing, you return to a place wherein you already had a life and it is easy to get back into the rhythm of that past life. But many aspects of that life have changed. The stores have closed or changed. There are new traffic laws. The prices seem higher than you remember. And the lives of the people you know have changed too. You can’t ask the same questions as 2 years ago, but you aren’t sure yet about what the new questions ought to be.

And when you are the kid, the process is even stranger! You have memories, but nothing clear, so this return home is sort of the start of a new journey, but not really. Your parents have their memories that include you, but you don’t have them. You want to go to this or that place but since your parents have done it already maybe you won’t be able to do it. You miss the snacks you used to buy at the local shop that you could walk to, just you and your brother. But you can’t do that here since you have to drive to the corner store, and once there you need to be careful because a couple of street people are having an emotional breakdown or fight over stolen drug paraphenalia!

At the same time, it is so wonderfully blessed to be back in the land of the free (that is both Canada and the USA). You don’t have to wonder if you are being followed. There are no listening devices in your home. Cops won’t stop you on the street every 400 meters/yards demanding to see your smartphone. The food you buy is (generally) safe. The people are… friendly! They don’t stare at you! They say hello! You don’t need to go to a central police station and register your arrival! Wow!

There are churches! With crosses! You can pray in public! You can sing a praise song out loud. You can read a bible… anywhere! We are so thankful for all the good here in North America.

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Family in Canada

We got back to Ontario in February, and stayed for one month. We are now in Texas visiting Michelle’s family for one month. In April we will return to Ontario for 2.5 months of visitation and prepping for the next move. Do you remember, or know, what that next move is?

France

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A Light in the Darkness

Summer 2017

Here we are a the end of Summer 2017. It has been a full summer for us, and we hope it has been for you too.

Zooming along chinese roads chinese style!

We traveled this summer to a small village 18 hours north of us to visit a student of Shane’s, and her family. It was an arduous journey with many police checks along the way. At each one Michelle and I had to register at that station, and then stand side by side holding up our passports with the ID page visible so the police could take a picture. However, it was worth it once we arrived at the student’s home. Her family was initially nervous because they had never met, nor hosted, foreigners before, much less ones who spoke their language – Kazak. But it was a good time. Liberty and Van especially loved roaming around the property with the younger siblings and checking out the animals such as chickens, chicks, cats, dogs, geese, goats, sheep, and a sleeping guard dog. One highlight was driving for about 3 hours towards the border of Kazakstan in order to watch a 20 km horse race, and the riders were mostly boys aged 10-15.

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The racetrack

Speaking of Kazakstan, we finally made a trip over the border to visit Almaty. You may recall me spending summers there from 1997-2002. There is now no need for a visa for many nations, so we were glad to skip the lengthy visa application process and simply show up at the border! Previous years required the better part of a day to get out of China, and into Kazakstan. This time we were through both sides in…. 1.5 hours. Unbelievable how much more smooth the process is now. While in Almaty Liberty could visit her best friend from earlier Urumqi days.

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We stayed in an AirBnB residence beside a giant mall. Inside this giant mall was a Starbucks and a McDonalds. Now, you can choose to go to these places anytime you want, but for us, it was an amazing experience. The province we live in has had no familiar business like these for years. So it was a treat to order a Grande Bold, in Kazak, as well as Big Mac, in Kazak. It was dizzying really.

On the bus to the border

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Liberty and Van had a great summer, grateful for a break from home school. We all went on many bike rides around the city. Probably one of our favourite memories of this season will be of riding around dinner time (5ish pm) and then stopping for our evening meal at a restaurant, eating a meal, then continuing the bike ride as the sun slowly sets and the street lights come on. Ili is actually fairly bike-friendly, so there are many streets where we can ride on bike lanes. There are still people to dodge, and e-bikes zipping around, but overall it is a safe and fun type of outing. There is also a pond full of goldfish, a turtle, frogs, and it is a fun place to play around. Van also learned how to rollerblade, and Liberty got better at it.

The Pond

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BBQ on the riverbank

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An Earthquake

Michelle thought it was just Shane rolling around in bed at 5:30 am. Liberty was having a dream in which Shane and her brother Van had come into her room and were shaking her bed to play a trick on her. Shane thought a really big truck was rolling by outside the building. But as I, Shane, woke up more I realized that the bed was rocking. It was time to get up and starting walking to get the kids! It was an earthquake! We’ve had earthquakes before but this one was lasting longer than the others. As long as it took for me to wake up, stumble out of bed, make my shaking way to Van’s room and tell him to get up (he was the only one still sound asleep), then help him up, and then head back to the dining table to hide under it, and then call Michelle and Liberty to join us and wait for them to also come under the table… the earth was still shaking. We are on the 6th floor which certainly added to the rocking motion. While we hid under the table the shaking intensified. It was unbelievable. I actually started preparing mentally for a building collapse – what do I do next? How will I get the passports over on the other side of the apartment in my desk – I gotta get shoes close to us so we don’t cut our feet walking through glass and rubble – how bad is it going to be? Then the shaking subsided. We experienced a few more after-shocks. Then it was quiet. We could hear people who had run outside, but we hadn’t. I did not want to be in a concrete stairwell with the building collapsing around us, only to make it outside and be crushed by falling debris (the only place outside would have been between two tall buildings.)

We found out later that the epicentre of this earthquake was close a town north of us called Bortala. This made me pause. We had recently been through that town on our way back from another place further north. We did not get a pleasant reception in Bortala. Schemers and thieves tried to rip us off with exorbitant prices for transportation back to Ili. Our protests were met with mocking laughter from bystanders. It was overall such a negative atmosphere and disdainful treatment, unlike anywhere else in our experience that I almost spoke aloud – may God curse this town for its cruelty to travellers and visitors. But I thought it in my heart only. So to hear that just a few weeks later it suffers an earthquake gave me pause to wonder. What would have happened if I spoke it aloud? Would the people remember? Would it have done something in their hearts?

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Online life

One thing I regret about my early days here in Xinjiang was that I did not bring a camera. One reason for this is that I sold it to buy the one-way plane ticket! But another reason was that a foreigner walking around taking pictures would draw unwanted attention.

Well, that attention concern has never abated. But at least cell phones have cameras – so everyone is taking pictures! It is funny sometimes how people go about it here towards us. On one hand you have the bold impersonal approach – the person walks right up to us, sticks their phone in our faces and snaps a shot, then walks away. No greetings, no thank you’s. Another approach is the shy but stealthy approach – the person comes to us from the side, walking sideways, and with their phone tucked in their arm they sneak a picture. Then there are the friendly types who actually smile, say Ni Hao or hello, or здравствуйте, and make small talk, AND THEN ask for a picture. To those we most often acquiesce.

But what do we use to back up all our photos and videos? Let me share a number of free and paid-for services.

We use Flickr, and so use the Flickr app to backup photos, when on wifi, to our account. For this we paid for the Pro account which gets us 1TB. We also use Amazon Prime and their associated Unlimited Prime Photos backup. Then, just to be sure, we use Shoebox which has a nice feature of showing us weekly what we were doing 1, 2, 5, and 10+ years ago. Its a nice way to go down memory lane. Since I have a Google Nexus phone my pics also are automatically backed up to Google Photos too, once again only on wifi and when the VPNs are on. So that is at least FOUR methods on the cellphones alone. We also move the photos to our computers and external hard drives, which in turn get backed up online! We don’t want to take any chance.

When we want to print them out from here we so far have used Mixbook the most often, although some of the other services look like they have good deals from time to time.

Spring is coming

Thank you for upholding us with prayers, encouraging emails and letters, and your support. In this post we want to include an update on Shane’s dad’s health and situation, as well as some notes about the past few months of teaching and life in NW China.

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Parties and Celebrations

Birthdays and holidays are perfect times to have guests over and get people together, and to share about hope, love, grace, and life. In November, Van turned 7 years old and wanted to have a big party at home. The whole family got involved to give Van a Lego-themed party and invited adults, students, kids from the community, and teachers. The kids and adults had a blast. We played games and ate local food prepared by good friends of ours who enthusiastically took over our kitchen and prepared a Muslim-friendly meal. We enjoyed seeing the joy on the kid’s faces as we laughed and played and celebrated life.

As an English teacher, Shane teaches language and oral English, and also about culture and values. Most students have never met a foreigner or interacted with someone from a different country or with a different worldview, so they are very curious to hear of a different way of thinking or doing things. Teaching opens doors to deep conversations with students and acts as a window into the lives of people living here. During Christmas, Shane wanted to really highlight Christmas and the impact of giving. With the help of Liberty and Van, he went out and bought 124 small gifts and, with Michelle, wrapped each one to give to each of his students. His students were truly touched. On the days of the Christmas parties in the classroom, Liberty, Van and Michelle dropped in on the classes to bring cookies and treats for celebrations. We all had a great time of eating together and playing games. Each classes surprised Shane on another class day with special music, singing, traditional dancing and a birthday cake in honor of Shane’s birthday (that means FOUR different cakes in one week!). Christmas with the students will definitely be a highlight of our past 10 months of living and teaching here.

Following Christmas, China celebrated its biggest holiday of the year: Lunar New Year. The New Year holiday is not just the Eve and the Day, but a 2 month holiday time when people travel back to their families for a big reunion.  For teachers, this meant Shane had 2 months holiday from classes. This in part is why Shane was able to return to Canada for 10 days

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