First Week!!

Hey everyone! We arrived safely in Almaty at 11pm on May 31st. And we are excited to be able to share with you about what is going on over here.

Picture this: 35 students/4 seat-less toilets without doors/4 showers with no curtains/one mirror/and a language barrier…this has been our first week in a brand new culture.

Our work here will be the most rewarding—going to 2 campuses, spending time with their students, building relationships, and getting into some GREAT conversation. Already, we have been able to go deeper than just small-talk.

The city is beautiful! We are surrounded by snow-capped mountains (which will be climbed by us later this summer) & gorgeous architecture. A favorite past-time has been “Gulyat” which means to walk around the city; the students have been showing us the high-points of Almaty. We even visited a mosque—it changed our perspective.

Top stories of the week:
· Luke Rasmussen came extremely close to sitting on an old lady on a very crowded bus.
· Jarod Mason (A big football player from Southeastern Louisiana) has gotten some interesting looks from the locals here.
· John Dos—a student here—has really been thinking a lot about Dad, and whether or not he knows him. Please think for him whenever you can.
· Our team has been learning to speak a little bit of Russian, and a few have been learning to speak Kazakh. It is fun to practice this with the students, and humbling to practice them with the locals.
· About ten students have already heard THE story. Please think for them that Dad would penetrate their hearts for himself.
· At our first Kazakh meal, we had a leader speak only in Russian. Tyler Pimental decided to tell him that he was 21, but the leader thought he said he had two kids but had killed them!
· We cannot assume that no one hear speaks English. On the bus, Joanna Palmer bumped into a man and tried to apologize to him in Russian, and he said “No problem.”

With this many American students in a predominately Russian culture, we will have many more stories to tell! We hope you are all doing well as we are.