Kirbys in Catania

It's been a while since we updated on here.  As usual, lots of events have happened, and Alan and I have learned a lot of things this month. After our visits to the churches in Catania and Milano at the beginning of May, Alan and I tried to take some time alone to pray separately and together about this decision.  If you've ever visited the Bible School here in Florence, you know this is a hard task to accomplish - alone time.  So we spent a lot of time thinking about this decision separately at first, mainly because we never had sufficient time to discuss it together.  This was probably a good thing though.  The third weekend in May we went to Gensano, a small town not far from Roma. There was a convegno there.  It was great to meet even more people from all over Italy, and to reconnect with those we've met before.  We got the fun job of babysitting, so we mostly played with the kiddos all weekend.  The youth at the convegno in Gensano Also...

Graffiti House Last week went by quickly.   Our official semester is ending this week but we are continuing classes with those students who want to continue.   All of mine and Alan’s students are continuing.   Thursday, Alan went to dinner with one of his students and his student’s family.   Now that we are at the end of the semester, it’s nice to look back and see how our relationships with our students have grown.   Another one of Alan’s students, Arben, has been coming to the school nearly everyday this past week.   He made us an Albanian meat pie dinner one night.   They were pretty good! Cute buildings in Milano Tram in Milano Early Friday morning Alan and I took the train to Milano.   Two men from the church took us to Marisa and Carlo’s house where we had lunch with them and a few other people from the church.   Once again, this weekend, most people didn’t speak English, so we were had to practice our Italian. ...

Since it's been a while since I've written, I'm going to split up what's happened the past two weeks into two blogs. The first week of May started out slowly.  Actually, April 30th was what they call Notte Bianca (White Night).  Most of the major cities have a celebration with bands, events, music shows, dances, and other entertainment.  Also all the stores and museums are opened till around 1am.  So Florence is just crammed pack with people.  Most people and most of my students told me that they stayed out till 2/3am.  Robby Shackleford used this event to help raise some money for Help the Children Florence Foundation.  Lindsey and I helped him set up Tuesday morning and the others helped him with the event during the White Night.  This foundation donates money to the research of a local doctor here who has found a cheap way to do diagnostic tests on infants to detect genetic immunodeficiency diseases.  You can read more about it at this w...

Pronunciation class! Okay, lots has happened since the last blog.  First, two fridays ago (April 19th) we had a pronunciation class here at the Bible School.  Elizabeth, who is a speech pathologist, gave the 3.5 hour seminar.  We had around 40 students come to the class.  Elizabeth lectured, and then each of us teachers would do practice exercises with a small group of students.  It was really neat, and they are still talking about it with me in our private classes.  It was very helpful to teach them pronunciation rules for things that are especially difficult for Italians in particular.  All of us Americans learned a lot about our language that we didn't know before either.  So thanks Elizabeth! It was great!  That is, except for the part when we broke into our groups and none of us Americans knew how to pronounce scythe correctly, and almost nobody knew what it was either.  :) Last Saturday, Melissa, Alan, and I tagged along with...

I've decided that in addition to blogging about our experience here trying to spread the Gospel here in Italy, that I am going to blog about some funny everyday stories, interesting tid-bits, and cultural differences here in Italy.  I was going to do it all in one post, but after I saw how much I wrote just about the food here, I decided to split it up into topics.  The Food I have to talk about the food here.  Italians take meal time very seriously.  They don't have lunch or dinner during meetings at work, and they don't do anything else really while they eat.  They just eat.  In a typical Italian family, the mom does all of the cooking.  Of course, pasta is a staple here.  There are tons of different types of pasta.  However, these two dishes that we eat in America are not actually Italian, and most Italians haven't even heard of them: chicken parmesan and fettucini alfredo.  Dinner is often had late in the evening - usually around...

Ciao from sunny (finally) Italy! The sun has arrived.  In fact, while I'm writing this, I'm sitting outside on our new swing that someone donated to us.  We just finished putting it together this morning. :) We have been taking advantage of this beautiful weather. Two Saturday's ago we had park day for the kids at church.  Several of the kids and some of their parents came.  I was sick again that weekend so I did not go, but everyone tells me that it was fun.  It sounded like the day involved a lot of soccer playing.   Last week was a pretty typical week for here.  Our classes went well.  On Thursday, we took the kids from church to Cascine park here in Florence.  It's a nice park alongside the Arno river.  They have a small fair that is there all the time.  Only two boys from church were able to come, Marco and Moreno, but we had a lot of fun.  Actually, I think us adults might have had just as much if not more fun than th...