Maureen arrived on Tuesday morning, and it felt like some glorious reunion. I think Hillary and I were excited for some “fresh meat.” It changed our team dynamic pretty instantly, but in a really good way. Paul and Carol came to drop her off, and stayed and talked with us for just a little while. Hillary was in the middle of her lesson with Tongue (Pronounced: Tongue-yyyy), a Belgian who is fluent in English, so Paul and I showed Maureen around her temporary home of five weeks.
When Maureen saw the stairs, her first words were, “You weren’t kidding!” Those stairs are the stairs of death, I need to take a picture so you all understand, but I don’t know if a picture can instill the fear that these stairs evoke. Maureen was settled in pretty fast, and when Tongue, Paul, and Carol all left, it was time to go on a short adventure.
We decided to throw Maureen in right away, we figured this would be easier for her. We took the tram to downtown Antwerp because we had a little bit of party supplies shopping to do. As I said before: I love public transportation. It never gets old to me! We made the trip really smoothly, and we headed right for the shopping center as soon as we got to Groenplaats.
Because Hillary and I had already been here, we knew that there was a toy store in this shopping center. Our mission: find a hula-hoop for our island themed party. We got lucky and found them in the store right away. After this, we decided to do our grocery shopping downtown as well. We got some bread, cheese, and, you know, the essentials. After this, we headed back to the tram station, and we did all of this shopping within an hour, which meant that our tram right back to the church was free! Yesss!
Maureen made Tuesday a special day, so we decided to go out to eat at the pita place around the corner from the church. Mmm, sogood. Hillary didn’t come with us, so it was Dana-Maureen bonding time, it was good. I only managed to eat half of my pita, so I gave the other half to Hillary when we got back from the restaurant. From there, we waited for Maureen’s first readers. We gave her two for the day, which is a good start for a western European LST trip. Hillary and I didn’t have any readers after Maureen came, so we just worked on our party ideas for Wednesday night.
Maureen’s last reader was from 7-8, and we had Carol’s aerobics class at 8. So we all donned our sweats to participate and talk with the ladies in the class. After the class, we talked with the ladies for a little bit and tried to get them interested in our English lessons, because we’d all love more readers. We made some dinner and went to bed after everyone left. It was a really good day.
Carol also has her class at 10 on Wednesday morning, however, Hillary had a reader during the class, and I had one scheduled for 11. So, Maureen and I were getting ready for the exercise class, but in the midst of that my 11 o’clock appointment showed up at 10. It wasn’t a bad thing, but I just wasn’t expecting it. So, I changed out of my sweats and into real clothes and ran down the stairs to meet with Lucy.
This was the second time that I had met with Lucy, and the first time there was not a lot of talking. She knew less English than I was expecting, so her and Hillary worked out a plan the first week for her and I, and Wednesday was the test of that plan. It worked. Lucy and I worked through the lessons that she had gone over on her own, and then she read through three more lessons to work on pronunciation. She came for two hours, which did not feel long at all. We looked at the lessons, and then we went through and English workbook that she brought. We just talked about everything during the second hour. It was really fun getting to know her. I found out that she speaks Russian, French, Flemish, a little bit of German, a little bit of Hungarian, and a little bit of English… I was really impressed. I also got to hear about her story and her children. I had the same feeling as I did with Palden, this was the reason I wanted to come to Belgium: to get to know people on a personal level. And the fact that the idea of this relationship is based around Jesus, and the best friendships are based around Him.
So, we all worked through the day, and when we were done with our readers, we took a walk to the grocery store to get some more food and some last-minute party supplies. When we got back to the church, we smoothed out our plans and started decorating. After about an hour, we took a break, Hillary and Maureen napped, and I journaled and listened to some music. When they were done, we finished decorating and putting our food together. We just had some simple stuff, some tropical punch, cookies, chips, and pineapple, but it looked gooood. We had some balloons on the ground, it all looked especially festive. We were proud of ourselves. From there, we waited for the guests to arrive. We laid out some leis, I played my ukulele while Maureen greeted people at the door, and Hillary worked the back room.
We had a good group of people there, the Brazle’s, Tongue, Nina, Myrjam, Palden, and Phunsok. We were just glad that we had enough people to play games. Everyone participated, which was excellent. It was so much fun! We started off with a hula-hoop game, where you stand in a circle and hold hands and you have to pass the hula-hoop to each other. That was a success, and a good mixer game. Next we played a game where we each wrote down our dream vacation and we had to guess which was whose. Good times. Next, we played, what I like to call, “Keepsie-Upsies minus your hands.” Last semester at school, I found out that one of the dorms next to mine played this game they called “Keepsie-Upsies” where the goal of the game was to keep a ball in the air by any means possible. This was the same game, but you could not use your hands. That was so fun. We worked up a sweat, and then cooled down with some Pictionary. It was a good party! We were all really proud of ourselves, and we’re looking forward to (rather than dreading) next week’s party.
After all of this had taken place, Hillary, Maureen, and I all sat together on a couch and watched some more Pushing Daisies… we love that show! Haha. We went to bed, happy and ready for the new day to come.
Peace, Love, and Jesus,
Dana, Hillary, and Maureen
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