: just your average grain of salt :

     Thursday night my team of 5 people got to go to the Boise airport to meet our "adopted" refugee family! Ours is a single, Christian, Pakistani mother and her 3 kids. I can't share too much detail about them for privacy reasons, so I'll be changing their names when I mention them on this blog! David is 18, Annie is 17, and Josiah is 10. They're all fluent in English which was really helpful to us, because their mom doesn't speak much English yet.      After introducing ourselves at the airport and chatting with  them for a while, their case manager from World Relief took them to a hotel for the night. Then yesterday afternoon my team got to take them all to Winco. The mom seemed pretty overwhelmed by the grocery store, but the kids were awesome translators for us!      It was so fun getting to know them, and I can't wait to spend more time with them! The first thing the mom asked us when we picked them up to go sh...

     Greetings! I don't have anything super exciting to report, but I felt like I should post something since I'm going to try to update this at least semi-regularly!      Our lectures so far have all been great, but this week was particularly good! Our speaker for the week was Mike Knott, a preacher from Minnesota, and he spoke on studying the Word of God. So basically, teaching us how to learn!      It was really refreshing for me because since I was raised in the church and grew up being homeschooled with a faith-based curriculum, I think I'm guilty of taking the Bible for granted. Being around it so much makes it easy for me to simply view it as another textbook! So this week I've been gaining a new appreciation for Scripture and it's value, and in turn, that has me more excited to go and share it!          In other news, we're all going to get to "adopt" a refugee family through a partne...

     Today I met a refugee family for the first time! 4 of us took a care package to their house, and the only thing we knew about them was that they came to Boise from Sudan. After we arrived at their house, they invited us in and pretty much the only other thing we learned about them was that they didn't speak much English which, of course, is to be expected.       The language barrier made it almost impossible for even basic communication, but we told them our names and eventually we figured out the name of the single mother and the names and ages of her 3 children.       We'd try to say something, like, "Your home is very nice, thank you for inviting us in!" And they'd just smile and laugh, trying to say something back, but of course we couldn't understand either so we just nodded and started laughing too.      They were so friendly and the mother made tea for us to drink as we sat in the living room...

          Well, I'm all moved in to The Duplex in Boise! It's a little cramped, but my 6 roommates are all the sweetest! In this first week we've had a lecture on worship, as well as a 4 hour training session about people who are refugees and wanting to come into the U.S.      We learned about all the requirements they must meet and got an overview of the vetting process each person has to go through. We learned some ways to help them adjust to our culture, while being respectful of their own and also being aware of those suffering from PTSD.           Overall, this being the first week, everything was pretty relaxed and in between times of worship, prayer and studying the Bible, we got to spend a lot of time getting to know each other through playing board games, cooking together, and today we had a photo scavenger hunt in downtown Boise which was pretty great! I felt like a tourist i...