Our ICM family

This post is especially for our family from Intercultural Ministries in Nampa. Last night one of the Hebron students came to our house. His mother is Korean and his dad is Indian. We started talking about Korean food and language, and he asked why we felt such a connection to Korean culture. So we began to tell him about ICM...family worship, eating together, Korean School for the girls, Korean camp in the summer...wonderful memories.

Today he came back to our house to give us something from his mom (he lives off campus with his parents). It was some dried squid and a plate of kim bap! So as I sit here writing this post I am eating Korean food and thinking of all of our friends at ICM that are demonstrating Christian unity in cultural diversity.

You are an inspiration to us, and we look forward to the day that we will see you again!

Quick Hello

This is quick note to say "Hi". I am just heading into the clinic now, and later I will be busy cooking dinner and going to Mizpah (local children's home). So, there won't be any time for blogging later tonight.

We're doing well - had a great day yesterday hanging out with friends after church and in the afternoon before Lauren returned from her camping trip. Almost all of the girls in Lauren's class (and the class above her) went on a campout for the weekend. They had a great time! On Saturday we celebrated the support staff at Hebron. They came to the school with their families for a short service, lunch, and games. We gave a really gift to the two ladies that sweep our house and wash our clothes, and Ryan even memorized a little Tamil "thank you" for their work.

Speaking of Tamil - we've had a breakthrough!!! Over the past few months we've been having our friend come and teach us Tamil. It is a difficult language that uses symbols (almost 150 of them) for sounds we can't even seem to make consistently. Anyway...I've been getting really discouraged, and told Ryan before our last lesson that I didn't know if I could continue anymore. During the lesson we both realized that if we are going to learn to speak, then we have to learn to read and write. So, we have successfully memorized the first 25 characters, and have realized that most of the other characters follow patterns that we have already memorized - all this since Thursday! The funny thing is that once we memorize them all, we still won't have any idea what we're saying! But it will be easier to read the notes that our teacher leaves us.

I'm going to try to post the symbols that we have learned so far, but it may take me a little to figure out how...

Addie turns 3!

Today is Addie's 3rd birthday! Since I have to work in the clinic tonight, we celebrated this morning before school with a pancake breakfast. Addie opened her presents (clothes, undies, and a little princess doll), and got to wear her birthday crown!

Here are some birthday pictures of Addie from the past 3 years - hope you like them!

Beef...it's what's for dinner

Every Monday night we cook a nice meal and eat dinner at home with our friend Don Foster. He's a fellow American, and after dinner we all go to a local children's home for the evening. For a few weeks we had different soups (carrot & coriander, vegetable, cheesy broccoli), but that got a little too boring so recently we've turned to beef. We've had tacos, chicken-fried steak, and tonight we had spaghetti (with an amazing salad, but it didn't have beef in it).

The interesting thing about beef in India is that it's not a really popular food (Hindus do not eat beef). However, the Muslims and Christians really like it, so it can be found (just more difficult to get on a Friday). Even more interesting is what you have to go through to get beef around here. We have found stall #8 in the market to be a good place to purchase beef - mostly because they have built bird houses in their stall to attract little sparrows that eat the flies. The bad thing about the butcher (and all the butchers in the market) is that he cuts the meat on a large tree trunk, which means that there are always little pieces of wood in the meat when you get it home. Luckily a rinse with drinking water takes care of that problem. Also, if you want ground beef, then you have to grind it yourself - with a good blender, this works pretty well. Then you just have to cook the daylights out of it (just to be sure), and you have a great meal!

Here's a photo of stall #8 for you to enjoy!

Prayer Updates

Dear Friends and Family,

The great thing about a blog is that everyone can have access to it. The bad thing about a blog is that EVERYONE can have access to it! We have realized over the past few months that there are things going on in our lives here in India that we can't share over the web - things that we desperately need you to be praying about! This blog is great for showing you pictures of our family and where we live, but it really falls short when it comes to really connecting you to what God is doing in our lives.

If you would be interested in receiving a more specific update from us, would you please email us with a brief description of how you know us (or came to know about us)? We need you to be praying for us!

Our email address here at school is angiek(at)hebronooty.org (Be sure to replace the (at) with an @ or it won't work)

We look forward to hearing from you!

Christmas in India

We celebrated Christmas four times this year. The first was with Brandon and Karissa in Ooty (with gifts sent from Ryan's parents) - complete with chocolate fondue and Ryan dressed up as a Christmas tree. The second was with my parents in Mysore - they brought a suitcase full of stuff for us. The third was when the package from Ryan's sister and family arrived. And the fourth was last week when three packages arrived friends in Idaho. It has been fantastic!

Here are a couple of photos of our Christmas with my parents. I don't know if you can tell from the pictures, but the gifts were pajamas, marshmallows, gatorade, a raincoat for Addie, sunscreen, skittles, carpet cleaner, citrus air freshener, birthday candles, corn meat, baking powder, and lots of other great stuff! Thank you to all our friends and family - you sent us so many things that we were needing, but the most fun was receiving things that you just thought we would enjoy (and we did)!

Update on Last Post

We scraped the frosting off the top and sides, and then ate the cake. It was delicious!

Brenna's Birthday Catastrophe

Brenna's 8th birthday was on Sunday. It was a busy day, but we managed to make it memorable. That afternoon I made my first cake in India. I don't usually like to brag, but it was beautiful. Brenna helped me put the finishing touches on it by adding candles (which my parents had brought out at Christmas) and little pink candies in the shape of a "B" to the top of the frosting (recipe was thanks to my friend Heidi). We put it on top of the fridge - mostly to keep Addie away from it, and went to a local hotel for dinner.
Brenna had chosen to go to the Holiday Inn, because they are one of the only places in town that has hamburgers and french fries. Before we got there we called my friend Bec to see if she knew what time the restaurant opened (places here don't serve dinner until at least 7pm). She called ahead for us, and told the manager that it was Brenna's birthday and that we would be arriving a few minutes before they opened. What we didn't know was that she also requested that they bring us a cake with candles. So, before our dinner arrived we ate chocolate cake - trying not to spoil our apetites for our dinner and our chocolate cake and ice cream at home.
Needless to say, we were really full when we got home so Brenna opted to open her birthday gifts and not eat any more cake that night. Ryan and I were also really tired, but before we went to bed I figured that I should probably cover the cake with a pot or something so that it wouldn't dry out during the night.
The strange thing was that when I went to cover the cake I noticed that there were only 3 little candies on the top of it. "Addie!" (surprise, surprise) "Did you eat the candies on Brenna's cake?" I asked her. "No, Mommy. You ate them!" Well, obviously I knew that I hadn't eaten them, so I asked Lauren who also denied eating them. By this time, Brenna was asleep so I couldn't ask her. But I figured it was her birthday so it didn't really matter if she had eaten them (I was a little disappointed that I hadn't taken a picture of my beautiful cake earlier). So I covered it with a big pot and went to bed.
The next morning I told Brenna that she could have some cake for breakfast (as any normal parent would have done). However, as I uncovered the cake, I noticed that there were little footprints all over it. Something had been on the fridge the night before when we were out to dinner, and had stolen the candies off the cake! I yelled for Ryan who took one look at the cake and pulled the fridge away from the wall. There tucked into the back of the fridge were all of the pink candies (and a bunch of poo)!! So, last night we put a large trap on the fridge, and this morning when Ryan checked it, the cake ruiner was in it - A RAT!!!
Here is what I heard Addie saying to the rat while Ryan was getting his shoes to take the rat out to the garbage pit. "You naughty, naughty wat! You ate the sweeties off Bwenna's birt-day cake. Now you have an owie neck. Don't you do that anymore. Okay? Okay."