Oct. 24-30

This Monday a couple from Moody, and fellow short termers, were leaving Turkey. They moved in with me right before I left for my sister's wedding. They are a great couple and very focused on Christ and His great commission. It's weird to think how fast time flies. Anyways, we threw a going away party for them on Sunday. We made a lot of tasty treats such as cinnamon twisties and a big hot fresh apple pie. This was all after Church and a huge meal of Ali Aziz, bread, salad, and salsa. Please stop salivating on your computer! I think that was the fullest that I have been in Turkey and I played the glutton card all night. Everyting was so good I just couldn't help myself. We also played games all night and had plenty of great laughs. They will be missed.

The rest of this week looked very similar to last week. I helped teach English on Monday and Wednesday. Except, this week we started the parable of the prodigal son. The class seemed to enjoy it and they have all improved in some degree in their English since last week. We also played a few games before we got into our lessons like last week. We played "Simon says" on Monday. On Wednesday we played " head, shoulders, knees, and toes" as well as the "Hokey Pokey." Playing the "Hokey Pokey was easily one the highlights of the week. Imagine being in a room with a bunch of Turks singing the Hokey pokey in English as well as doing all the motions. Believe me, it was nothing short of pure awesomeness.

Me and another one of the English teachers went to one of our students houses this week for a private tutoring session. We did exercises with lego's and other objects. We also pointed to things and made him create sentences. He treated us to some Chai and cookies as we took a break. He also attends our saturday night bible study with us and is very interested in Truth.

This week I hung out with one of the guys from the English class. We will call him Ali. He is more my age and he is pretty quiet. However, he seemed like a lot of fun. So we went over to a coffee shop on friday night near the Sevgi Cafe in Kızılay. We played a couple games of chess, had some coffee, cherry juice, and had some good conversations. Although we had to share a dictionary so we could understand one another. Here I made another mistake. This time it was with the language. In Turkish for a word to be a negative an "m" is implemented into the word. For instance when i want something i would say "istiyorum. If i dont want something then I would say istmiyorum. So back to the story. I was trying to say I didn't understand. The word for "I understand" is anlidim. So I said "amlidim." I kept saying this word and used it quite a lot and apparently I was being loud. So my friend leans over the table and tells me very quietly that I have been dropping the F-bomb for about 15 minutes straight.

This Saturday I watched the kids again as their parents sat in on the Bible lesson. Yes, I also wrestled around with them and for some reason they really like being thrown around like rag dolls. I have a lot of fun though and I really like these kids. They also did really great when it was time to be quite. They all listened the first time as we said to be quiet, except for the smallest one. He bit the fire out of my friend who was helping me. I laughed.