Years of Love
Greetings.
We just finished our 7th day of our Conversational English classes, this week we have all of the students from 8:30 to 3:00 each day. They are long days and both students and teachers are tired by the time 3:00 arrives. This is my 5th year of teaching English and I reflected back over that time I can truly say that this years experience with our students has been the most rewarding. Before we taught anyone who signed up for the English course but for the past two years we are teaching the Bible School 1st and 2nd year students, these students really want to learn and work so very hard, we are all very impressed with their efforts. They also know each other so there is a sense of community that wasn't felt in my previously experience.

I have been leading the level 1 students. We have 18 students and 7 teachers in our class. We are able to have 2 and 3 students to 1 English teacher so the students really get a lot of personal attention. We do the majority of our teaching in small groups. Since our students have very limited experience speaking English (many of them had a hard time saying, "Hi, my name is _____") we work a lot on just learning vocabulary and putting it into simple sentences. We started just learning the colors and today we finished talking about daily routines and started our unit on feelings. We had a visit by Boso the clown, aka. Renee Svoboda who helped demonstrate what "happy", "sad", "frustrated", "confused", etc.. You should have seen the students faces when she came in with her wig, red nose and clown make-up, can't wait to see the pictures! We try to make sure to have a couple of games each day that we use to review the subject material, tomorrow we will do a game of charades, the topic will be feelings, we think this will be a lively activity with lots of energy.

The 18 English teachers are enjoying the calm that has been felt after the very busy weekend of celebration of the 10th Anniversary, everyone else left on Monday morning so we have the Bible School staff all to ourselves. This afternoon they took us to a beautiful valley which has a small ski area and we were able to take a walk and then we had dinner outside in a small village near Martin called Valca. One of the church members in Martin joined us to talk about the tradition of sheep herding and then he gave us a "whip" demonstration. This is a very old tradition which not many people know how to do any more, he has a special whip that he uses to make loud snapping sounds. He is a delightfully friendly man and makes a special effort when we come to town to do his demonstrations.In closing I just want to say that the only requirement of coming here to teach English is that you can speak English. You don't have to be a trained teacher to do this, we emphasize conversation and don't teach grammar. So, if you want to have an experience that you will never forget, with people that will warm your hearts, in a country that is so beautiful you think that the Sound of Music was filmed here, I recommend that you sign up for next years program!

Please continue to keep our group in your prayers.
Best regards,
Peggy Sontag