Intermittent Information

Apparently neither E-man nor I am very good at keeping up this site. Thank goodness we aren’t in India right now, or else all of our friends and family would have forgotten about us by now! As I’m writing this, I am sitting in the living room of mine and E-man’s relatively new house. “What?!” you say to me, “how do you guys have a house, especially if you’re going to India?” Well hold on, I’ll get you up to date.

Last year about this time, we were starting to plan my internship in India. At the same time, it became apparent that we would need to fly out the nest of E-man’s parents’ home and find our way as a married couple. We began looking for houses that would not only be affordable and a good investment, but also ones we could use as a ministry in case someone needed a place to stay for a night or longer. At first the idea was to get a feel for the market then buy after the internship, but soon we realized that going overseas was not as likely and we needed a place to live and make our home a bit more than worrying about the internship that never came.

Much like my previous potential hosts, the new organization my school had approved and recommended ended up turning us down for any placement in India. They didn’t have any missionaries or hosts available at the time. Instead, they wanted to ship us out to Holland (!) or work with us at a later time. Since my internship is a very time specific obligation for my degree, I hesitated but eventually tried to find another organization. In efforts to help me complete the assignment, my department approved an in-country cross-cultural internship nearer to the Indian culture than Holland would be: Devon Ave. Chicago! The little India of Chicago would provide ample opportunity for me to practice with the culture I’d studied for years, but little did I know that all was not well.

In order to fund our little trip to Chicago, as well as my tuition costs, I had about $3000 in aid (read, loans). This was not near enough for an apartment in Chicago, even though we were grateful to not need plane tickets or have visa costs. So our bright idea was to stay with a friend of E-man’s who was living in Chicago at the time. However, what we didn’t factor in was his friend’s waning position on the company he worked for; the friend ended up moving back home before we could fully commit to the internship, and we were back to square one.

Luckily, my professors did not give up, and neither did we. I suggested in order to forgo any additional roadblocks, that I study the culture of the Latino community here in Goshen. This way, I could continue working with a culture I’m familiar with as well as save money and fulfill my graduation requirements.

So this brings us to the present; I’m currently working in Goshen after completing my classes at Grace as well as working on my internship in the local Latino community. I have a couple families I’m working with and hope to contact some people about interviews this week. Hopefully there will be more information on that pretty soon.

In other news, E-man got a second job working as a personal trainer for Anytime Fitness here in Goshen.The nice thing is it’s a walk from our new house; the bad thing is it’s not full-time (yet). Hopefully, since this is what E-man loves to do, he will eventually be able to do it full-time and not have to drive to South Bend for his other job anymore. We’ll see. In the meantime we’re making things work and having fun getting to know each other more every day!