thoughts from hungary....

2008-01-15T15:31:00.000-08:00

well i guess this may be the last post for this blog...if we start a new one, who knows, but we will let you all in!

we just wanted to say thanks to all who came out on saturday. we were so amazed and overwhelmed by the support and to see so many people out. in the end there were about 125 people there. apparently the goulash soup went over well (so we are told) i will post the recipe at the end of this because i have had so many requests for it! we are so thankful for all who have kept up with this blog and followed us along in our journey in Hungary for the last 2 years....we hope to keep in touch with you all....

a little update on our life now.....i (lynnette) found a job yesterday!!! yahoo, i will be working at an orthodontic dental office starting monday....kyle is picking up some odd jobs with his uncle till my parents come back from their holiday when kyle will work with my dad. we are in the midst of finding a place to live in vancouver close to where i will work. we looked at a place today and hope that we can get it! we are living at my parents now, house sitting and dog sitting. life has been pretty busy since we got back with catching up with family and friends. but its been great, we even had the chance to visit my brother and sister-in-law and our 2 nephews in alberta over new years. (the pictures are from our drive out to see them...we were reminded again what a beautiful country we live in as we drove through the Rockies!)

thanks again for all your support and prayers for us over the past years, and we ask you would keep us in your prayers as we continue to adjust to life in canada!

ok, and here is the recipe:

hungarian goulash soup (serves approx 6)

2 onions (diced)

2 tablespoons oil

400 grams beef/pork (i used 2 medium sized steaks) (cubed)

3 potatoes (peeled and cubed)

4 carrots (cut into thick strips)

4 parsnips (cut same as carrots)

1 green or red pepper (whole)

1 or 2 whole onions

salt and pepper to taste

2 tablespoons paprika (hungarian sweet works best!)

water

1. dice onions and fry in oil until clear

2. remove from heat and stir in paprika

3. return to heat and add water (approx half the pot) and meat. over med-low heat cook until meat is tender (approx 1/2 hour)

4. add salt and pepper to taste. you can also add in a dried hot pepper diced (or hot pepper flakes) if you like it spicy. i used 1 pepper for a pot.

5. add carrots, parsnips and potatoes now. you might need to top up the water if its too low.

6. you can also add a whole onions and green pepper now if you like.

7. cook until all veggies are done. enjoy!

hope it turns out for you!

2008-01-03T13:22:00.000-08:00

just a reminder to any of you reading the blog still and living in vancouver area we will be having a thank you dinner for all our supporters/prayer partners or anyone interested in what we've been doing. Saturday Jan 12th @ 5. we will be having some hungarian goulash soup and sharing stories, showing some pictures from our experiences over the last two years. we'd love to see you all out there and ask that you give us a call if you will be coming, at either of our parents places 604-272-4462 or 604-271-3620, it will be at our church but we can give you the directions when you call.

2007-12-17T17:02:00.000-08:00

so we have arrived.....
crazy to think we are actually at home, on one hand it feels like we have been gone less than a month but then one the other like we've been gone forever, & we sometimes have to question ourselves if we the last 2 years really happened at all.

the flight was mostly un eventful, long hours of sitting on planes and in airports, not so exciting. all our bags arrived although we had to be separated from some prime hungarian sausage. apparently meat is a no go in canada, especially hungarian kolbasz. we had been given it the night before we left and thought well lets see if it will make it, and i guess it didn't.

we had a great evening catching up with family and friends. always a little funny walking through the airport doors to be greeted by all. but especially strange when two reindeer show up to usher you back into canada. we were making the rounds hugging and greeting people when one of friends tells us we need to hug the reindeer in the crowd too! lynnette quickly saying no way i'm not hugging some strange airport workers! well it turned out to be two of my good friends who i guess were feeling quite festive! great laughs of course. thanks all for the grand re-entrance.

we mentioned a couple posts back about how on our last day we were joining team mates to go to ercsi and hand out christmas bags, it went so great and really was the perfect way to spend our last day in hungary. we had packed 73 bags and handed out 72 of them on the one block! visiting 10 homes, a couple we had never before been before. so it was a great way to build some new contacts for our team mates. we told the christmas story, sang some songs and then prayed with the families. here's a couple shots from the day. thank you again to all of you supporting us through prayer. hungary holds such a special place in our hearts, our last two years have been so incredible seeing God work in the lives around us and in our own lives. we really have felt so blessed to have been able to serve in hungary and to be blessed by such a great team there, who were so patient with us and so encouraging. i guess a two year wrap up blog will be soon coming so until then merry christmas.

2007-12-13T01:14:00.000-08:00

only 3 days till we are home....crazy! we are busy moving and cleaning up our place. tonight we have a team christmas party and send off for us. tomorrow finish packing and cleaning because saturday we will be busy. we will be in ercsi giving out christmas packages to the children there, we made up over 70 bags, so hope that will be enough! speaking about kids....we cant wait to meet these cute family members for the first time:

Charlie

Lila

Elias

and of course to catch up with growing

Ben

cant wait to see you all next week!!! if you want our flight info maybe call our parents as i dont really want to post it here for all the world to see!

p.s. hope you dont mind i stole these pics off of your facebook and blogs (cheryl, vicky & mark) but i had to crop the one of baby elias a bit! hehe!

2007-12-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

many of you i'm sure have heard about the shooting in denver at the YWAM base, i know there have been so many of these sort of incidents in the last year but this one really hits us personally hard. i guess because these are young missionaries getting ready to head out to the unknown. YWAM is doing so many great things around the world and here in Hungary. I guess the most difficult thing is that these missionaries were getting ready to head out all around the world and give their hearts where ever that may be in what ever dangers may come but the last place you would think would be right at home. our thoughts and prayers are with all of YWAM and with all involved.

2007-12-06T08:42:00.000-08:00

went to ercsi today to visit miklos and eva, they are doing good.....i got to see my friend melinda which was a highlight. she comes from a family of 9 that lives in the house behind her (which is the size of a small bedroom) its amazing to me how she always is smiling, full of joy even though she comes from a rough family....it reminded me again just how i have been given in life ...and how i need to be daily grateful for what i have. she brought joy into my day today with just her little smile. its going to be hard to leave here next week. lynnette

2007-12-02T10:39:00.000-08:00

so some of you may be wondering, "it's been two years, am i really going to remember what kyle and lynnette look like?" "what if they come through the doors at the airport and none of us recognize them?"

well be comforted ...here is what you should be expecting upon our arrival.... i know i know your thinking, my oh my when did you become so fashionable. well to be honest we always had it in us it just took us some years to develop.

honestly the christmas market is now officially opened in budapest and we took a stroll by today and couldn't resist the photo op., and rest assured no animals were harmed in the making of these pictures although i fear the same cannot be true in the making of these hats! yes fur is in fashion here.

the snow has already come and gone although our street still remains a skating rink. i guess the fact that it's dirt and never sees the sun lends to the fact it's one of the few still with some hard packed snow. i even got in a good game of snow football, with all our neighbours looking on in strange wonderment. we had a good week meeting up with friends and team mates, on monday we headed out to a city 1 hour out of budapest to spend the night with our team mate and family, which is always a good time. they are doing a church plant in the city and it was so great to hear how God is working there.

Today we also spent the afternoon with our team mate jill and took her to the much anticipated trip of coffee at the new york. a very old and classic coffee house here in the city. it had been closed for a year for renovations and since opening last year we had promised to take her there. She got us thorough our first year and spent many of coffees filling us in on all the little details we were missing, showing us all the in and outs of hungary and listening to us complain!thanks jill, for all that. so it was just a little thanks plus we really wanted to see this place and experience it so it was a great reason to go. Here's a couple shots from there.

Our week ahead is full of ministry and starting to get things moved, this last week we went in and closed our bank account here, which was really strange, it was sorta the first thing that really made me think wow we are actually going home soon. our main moving will be next week but i guess we need to get things in order. we plan to do chirstmas bags for the kids in ercsi and ofalu so we will also be helping our team mates with that. on sat the 15th we will head our to the houses and give the bags out and also something small for the families, we really look forward to this, spending some time with the families and just being there one last time.

2007-11-25T11:36:00.000-08:00

Well this last week was busy again, not quite as busy as the week before so i promise not as long of run-on sentences. But no guarantees there, so hold your breath. Just think of it as lung capacity exercises ok vicky! We had our regular ministries, Olga on monday, office on tuesday, wednesday clothing bazzar. On Thurday and Friday we had year end team meetings, plus we celebrated American Thanksgiving, our team mates had us all over for the big meal, so good! We had over 35 people packed into there place enjoying all the fixings and a 37 pound turkey (un heard of in Hungary), the ovens are too small! IT was a great time with the team and yes we had stuffing and pumpkin pie (not together).

Friday our english students invited us to their daughters music school for what we understood as the teachers guitar concert. We were ushered into a small class room together with many parents and before we knew it our hosts were gone and we were stuck in the class recitals. Looking around a bit wide eyed after 15 minutes ...of well to say it nicely new guitar students playing their pieces and still no hosts in the room we began to think ourselves in the wrong room. To make a long story short our friends came back and we sat through the rest of the plucking of strings. They treated us to some tea and hungarian sweets afterwards at the local coffee shop.We then headed back to our place... or so we thought, but instead we arrived at their place for the evening english lessons. Apparently our hungarian skills were taking an off day (we were very confused on many parts of the evening and what we had agreed to...all good though!), on the upside i (kyle) found some hockey games on there tv while lynnette taught english. We spent the evening with the family and had a good time, they are from a catholic background so we had some good talks about why missionaries would come here to a "christian" nation.

Saturday and Sunday we also had some wind up things to be at. Saturday we were invited into the city for a re-union of the summer camp we lead with CE. We played some games, i shared a short message, and they had a little send off for us so that was nice to see that group again. today we had the end of the baseball season party @ our team center. We showed the kids a bunch of sports bloopers which is always a hit for the kids, and had some games and slide show from the season. I also had the opportunity to share my testimony with all the kids so it was a great opportunity to share the reason we have come all this way.

This coming week will be spent visiting all sorts of friends all over the place as we begin to say our good-byes. I didn't think it would involve weeks but i guess better this way then running around the last week closing things down. We also have some team meetings and have english on monday and friday.

Coming up we are putting together christmas packages again this year, but this year will be more focused on the kids of ofalu/ercsi. The day before we leave we will be putting on a christmas service in our ofalu center. Or i guess we will be attending and trying to help our team mates with what we can but we really look forward to this time and it will be a great final evening send off i think. Please pray for this as we share the christmas story with all the kids!

here's one the kids from ofalu... you can pray for him, his name is alex. here's a shot of him this last wednesday, we gave him this bike and as you can see he was quite happy!

2007-11-16T03:50:00.000-08:00

a different kinda week......
so this last week has been a little up and a little down, here's a little synopsis for you all, monday was spent riding down to ofalu & meeting with olga and then riding back quickly only for lynnettes bike to break thankfully near to home, for some reason the "transmission" has gone out, her legs must be too strong! she can pedal and pedal but go no where, and yes the chain is on! tuesday we went to the office for team meeting but with so many people out of the country it was a short one and then we had tons of stuff to do around the office, our team mates pranesh and heather were expecting a baby this week so on tuesday we picked up their kids from pre-school and helped her grandmother the next day to drop them off and show her how the whole place worked, because on wednesday meghan anandlal was born.....congrats heather, pranesh and family! wednesday we had ofalu bazaar as normal, and it was normal in it's own crazy way. thursday we headed into the office to help organize books for our team bus which was headed to romania, it was freezing cold, our train was late and the walk to the office was long. we tried to get done what we needed to but of course other things come up. so we headed out to the local mall to pick some stuff up for friends, and yes not everything we wanted was there and we needed to get more stuff done, oh well. we got home only to have our computer crash.....ahhh...oh yes and we got an sms from a person we know here saying looking forward to seeing you at the meeting tomorrow, hold on i didn't agree to any meeting tomorrow, plus we have some english students at that same time. apparently it wasn't only the computer that crashed. the train ride home was long, crowded and included a song or two by some one in the next compartment with a wooden flute, and we stopped in the middle of no where and some lady just hoped off the train, literally she had to jump as the train was high off the ground, lynnette, so suprised by it that she yelled out "this isn't a stop" with me saying "Lynnette whats with the yelling plus why in english!" it was funny and strange all at the same time. Friday we headed again to the office, short train ride, cold wind and a long walk, we got done what we needed to then walked down to the local resturant for some hot soup and coffee, it was sooooo good. now we are at home, the computer needed a system reboot, apparently we got a virus or something, so we lost everything that was on it. thankfully all our important stuff was backed up on a external hard drive, but we are happy it didn't cost anything and we are back in buisness. tomorrow is bazaar again in the morning, then into budapest for the afternoon, picking up stuff while we can, and sunday our neighbours kid is being baptised so we are going there and then back here for the after party and some stuffed cabbage. should be a great time of fellowship here. so there you go a little glimsp into our strange week. hopefully next week is a little less un eventfull and a whole lot less stressful, some how i think not! (seeing how we have only 4 weeks left here)

2007-11-11T10:09:00.000-08:00

"csak a kispest!"........ the cry of the honved Football Club faithful, our landlord and I headed out for a true hungarian soccer match in budapest this last week, figured i needed to experience a little hungarian sports action, it was a great time, a little cold as you can tell from the picture a little stormy but good. honved is the top team in the country but had a disappointing game tieing the 6th place team but controlled the whole game, so of course that had the fans going a little crazy on their team but made for a good atmosphere.

this week we headed out also for some house visits with families we have got to know during the time, on thursday we headed out to Cégled to spend the day with a family that hosted us for a week during a summer outreach. The bonus was that Kati (our hungarian mother as she refers to herself as) took the opportunity to train lynnette in true hungarian cooking teaching her to make "gulyas leves", (number one soup of hungary), "korozott", my personal favorite, basically a onion, cheese, paprika spread, turro teszta (pasta with cottage cheese and bacon type stuff in it) and "piskota" (a fruit dough dessert) we also visited the church where we served and sat in on their ladies evening, giving a report on our work, they told us about how great a time the community had when we had been there and how many new faces were in church, which was great to hear. we also visited Miklos and Eva in ercsi, who are doing really well, which was also such a great thing to see as they have been having a tough time. since the house dedication they have appeared on the local news and are now "celebrities".

it's snowing now so this next week could be interesting, without a car and relying on our bikes makes snowy conditions a little tricky but then again i've been looking forward to some good snow fall so i can't complain, so let it snow!

2007-11-07T04:36:00.000-08:00

some little random facts of what we will miss from here and what we look forward to over there: out of order and incomplete but here you go:

from home:

- mom d's fresh baked cookies & buns

- mom k's tortilla soup

- a dryer for our clothes

- english speaking country

- the smell of the ocean

- donuts

- niko

- waking up on a clear morning and seeing fresh snow on the local mountains

- sidewalks

- my own bed

- waffle maker & rice cooker

- white spot breakfasts!

- carpeted floors

- frosted flakes

- VMB

- walks on the dyke

- a freezer large enough to hold more than a tub of ice cream

-our bikes (ours here constantly gets flat tires and lynnettes pedal some how loosens every ride)

-our roller blades and a place actually smooth enough to ride them

-hockey night in canada

-and of course family and friends

things we will miss from here:

-walks through Budapest

-good and cheap coffee spots

-bath houses

-the history

-being able to actually enjoy the fall (little rain)

-the christmas market

-being able to travel to vienna for the weekend (same distance as going to seattle)

-festivals every week of the summer

-trabants

-team mates and new friends

-our patio and being able to use it for half the year

-public transit system, being 5 minute walk from train station

-langos

-my BBQ

-our neighbours

-not our neighbours dog (mono)

-un-paved roads

-when people come to visit and are actually surprised we have a flushing toilet and heating

-our church, calvary chapel

-travelling the country in the summer

-paprika

-turo

-H&M (lynnette will miss this)

-the buda hills

-budapest by night (the lights on the river are awesome)

-olga and her weekly kisses for us (although a little wet at times)

-working together (every day all day), it's great

-cheap flowers from old ladies

2007-10-31T08:52:00.000-07:00

just when you think you got things figured out disaster strikes... so we had a little extra time today in between doing some work at the team office and opening up the bazzar for the weekly clothing sale and we thought a good way to kill some time would be in the cukraszda, (coffee shop). we ordered our stuff for some odd reason the lady laughed after i had completed our order but we thought nothing of it, we figured it was just our funny canadian/ hungarian accents and so we sat down, lynnette went off and returned to the table to find me sitting there with this...... with a strange odd look on my face. we had ordered a piece of cake each lynnette ordered a cappucino and i ordered a latte. apparently my latte must have had a slight pronunciation problem i i ended up with the "kaszty" cake also and no drink. ok not such a disaster who can complain with two pieces of cake. we tried to explain while ordering the new latte our mistake but the lady didn't catch the joke and probably thought us kinda strange since we were laughing still about my two slices of cake, oh well they tasted good. but i guess this still wasn't as bad as when i tried to order an ice coffee for our friend Jon when he was visiting us last summer, we ended up with a quadruple shot of espresso with some ice cubes in it!

this weekend is a long weekend so not much happening here, Thursday is the holiday but when there is a mid week holiday hungarians will always take the day around off also. so friday becomes a day off since the whole country works on the saturday before. it's actually considered a work day. we had been in budapest on last saturday and wanted to park, normally free on saturday but we were surprised to find out we needed to pay, thankfully before the ticket arrived on the car!

we spent most of the week putting together information letters for the baseball teams, since the field we have been using will no longer available to us next year. telling people about the proposed plan for next year the need to build a new field, (converting half a soccer field in another part of the city) and about year end wrap up parties and when next season will being. lynnette met with olga on monday as always, every week olga complains about us leaving and tells us to stay, we will miss the weekly meetings with her! but an american girl who is joining the team in may will be able to pick up all our english students so we are happy about that.

2007-10-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

update of sorts....well life here is moving along quickly as always. people always asking us when are we going home? do you have a countdown going?....so we are thinking about it lots but in the meantime still trying to stay concentrated on things we are still involved with here. its sort of a weird feeling trying to think about going home and leaving here and all we have come to love about hungary. we are very excited to be coming home (don't get us wrong), but it will be hard to leave here. we look forward to seeing many of you when we get back, hanging out with friends and catching up with family and meeting new members we have never seen! but if you think of us in the next 7ish weeks, please pray for us to be able to say goodbye to hungary and be able to readjust to great canadian living once again.....thanks!

OK on a totally different note, this last wednesday we were in ercsi for a dedication of miklos and ava's house. it was so amazing to think about where God has brought them from remembering last year and them in the tiny house, to now in their warm, dry, and safer house. and also looking at their lives and how God has moved in them and changed their personal lives. i just had to sit back and be amazed! the mayor was out and the pastor from erd along with many others. although it was a cold day and my feet almost froze off, it was cool to be there for it. you may notice in the pictures the lovely color the house got painted....miklos picked it himself and they love it....its supposedly the new style here in hungary! the other picture is of their youngest son mario....he is very cute, but a little trouble maker, but we love him and i couldn't resist not putting this cute picture of him on!

2007-10-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

to england and back......

a really late birthday present... this last april for lynnettes birthday i promised that we would make it out to london before we left for home and seeing how we only have a couple weeks left what better time than now. thankfully europe is the center of cheap flights and so off we were to visit the great city of london, which just so happens to be home of our friends alison and tristan. lynnette went to high school with alsion and hasn't seen her in 2 and a half years. so really the trip was more to see them and it was a plus to see all the sights. we flew out on friday and landed in sunny london, which it stayed the whole weekend, much to the surprise of all london! what can we say... we know how to pick our weekends. saturday we headed out to the countryside to do some "geocache-ing" and see more of england than just the city. what is geocach-ing you may ask, good question we still aren't so sure, basically its a GPS lead treasure hunt with coordinates found on the internet and little canisters hidden all over the place that you have to find. basically it was a good excuse to get out into the woods, and a bit lost. alison's GPS telling us the spot was within 7 feet of where we once stood, and us searching ever tree but the one directly in front of us. oh well we eventually found it! just as the girls were voting to give up eagle eye tristan made the discovery and we all headed home satisfied. sunday and monday were spent in the city seeing the sights and catching up on old time, and making new ones, (riding the double decker buses, saying high to big ben and racing up escalators), it was kinda strange to be back in an english speaking country for the first time, but we really enjoyed the city wandering the streets and sipping drinks in places winston churchill frequented. there are few cities that just emit history like london, oh and of course the cars on the wrong side! all in all a great weekend, with great friends, thank again alison and tristan!

2007-10-17T07:57:00.000-07:00

a night at the opera

last night our long awaited trip to the opera was upon us. not that we are huge opera fans, neither of us has actually ever been but more for the building and the event of it. and it being close to my birthday we thought it a good way to celebrate. so off we went and when your are spending it in a theater over 100 years old who cares if you understand only part of the story. Madame Butterfly was the opera and the language sung was italian with a monitor above the stage with hungarian subtitles. so between the two of us we could put together most of the performance. plus the symphony probably would have been reason enough to go. and no, we didn't talk through the whole time

trying to figure it out, we were afraid of being shunned by all the faithful opera fans. although the seats creaked like crazy so you had to sit perfectly still not to make tons of noise, the acoustic being so good the smallest sounds could be heard from all....... heres some shots we took while at the show, the one below is specially for andrea.

it being her birthday this weekend (happy birthday), we laughed so hard because it was like a scene straight from the muppets.....her favorite show!

and her favorite characters so heres to you andrea! haha.......now you get a view of our box from the front and back........ so as you can see we had a good time, and no the people in front of us weren't real life muppets but actually french, i didn't ever think i would be spending my 25th birthday sharing a box at the hungarian opera, kinda funny. but as you can see from the pictures the place is quite the sight. and tickets to the shows really aren't too bad since you can pay anywhere from $100 to $1.50. we payed about $20 and the seats were super nice. it was totally worth it!

2007-10-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

happy birthday kyle!!!

well, today kyle turned the big 25. it was a pretty relaxed day, i made him some pancakes for breakfast, we went to ofalu to teach english...he fixed my broken bike (what a man) then on the way home from ofalu we stopped for some cake and coffee at our favorite place near by. this evening we were invited over to team mates for dinner....i brought a cake (mocha mousse, thanks mom k for the recipe)....but the funny thing that stuck me was that because we are biking everywhere now, we had to find a way to bike and get the cake over on our 25 min ride to dinner. so we put the cake in a box and strapped it onto the back of kyles bike. on the way i asked him if he ever thought he would be spending his 25th birthday riding a bike in hungary with his birthday cake strapped to the back....we had a good laugh. (and the cake made it there in perfect condition if you wondered) tomorrow we will continue the celebration by attending the opera in budapest. this is something we have wanted to do since getting here and i thought that this would be a perfect time....i hope its good...we will see and post some pictures tomorrow maybe. can you take pictures in an opera?? anyways, just wanted to wish my wonderful husband a very happy birthday...love you babe!

2007-10-12T10:27:00.000-07:00

every morning you can find these elderly people down the road from us near the centre of town. they set up tables and sell their flowers from their garden, walnuts from their tree, or eggs from their chickens. i always like buying from these old ladies for 2 reasons.... 1. they are just so cute sitting there and 2. its part of their income. the pensions here are really low so the elderly are forced to work here after they are retired too. so today i bought a little
bunch of flowers from the lady on the far left....she gave me a 5 minute run down on what to do with them when i get home....and of course she instructed me to carry them upside down on the way home too.... its a thing they do here.

2007-10-07T13:08:00.000-07:00

God works in ways we sometimes may not expect.....

so, many of you will remember our accident of last June. i remember just after it happened thinking "God why"? why after all the work that has been put into these vehicles and all the pain we had to go through, why? why would you allow this to happen? and maybe we will never know fully the reasons for it, except to tell and share how we were saved from serious injury and maybe even death... and also to tell of how God has better plans than ours. After hearing of the accident an OM worker in Finland who has worked for years in Austria and throughout Eastern Europe for years... took it upon himself to bring the "Bus 4 Life" to reality. And after a year and a whole lot of hard work here is the fruit, quite exciting to say the least. This bus will not only serve Hungary but will be a tool for all of Eastern Europe. It's been equipped with tons of room for books, a projector and screen for movies,a kitchen, 2 beds, bathroom and all sorts of extras for different ministries. We got to take it out to Ercsi this last weekend for our kids ministry there and it set the perfect backdrop and attracted kids and adults from all around. Here's a shot of our team mate Petri who just joined us from Finland and is our bus driver, no not our personal one, although we stopped for groceries on the way home and laughed that we had never taken a bus to Tesco before. Pray for him as taking the bus on is a huge responsibility and for safety on the roads.

We spent the second half of last week hosting the Budapest Christian High School's "service days", so we had a whole crew of Grade 7 and 8's in Ofalu and Ercsi mostly doing clean up work. but they also did a kids program each afternoon and on the saturday. On Friday with the younger kids we walked the city of Ercsi handing out tracks and invitations to our church services and also our team mate matt accompanied us with guitar in hand. we soon found out where one goes with a guitar one must expect to sing, as we had requests from a number of people. so we had a great time singing songs and praying with people in the community.

Today we had our second Ercsi sunday service as well and it went alright, all things considering. Since we were unable to use the same place as last time we were in the school gym not a ideal place but it worked. please pray for us as the team tries to find a long term place for the services. And also pray for the services themselves that people would come to seek the Lord and not to cause trouble, and for wisdom for Carlos and Rita as they lead the ministry. We know the Lord has great plans for these places although at times it may look like we are just spinning our wheels, He is moving and it is him that makes the seeds grow.

2007-10-03T10:48:00.000-07:00

"Boldog névnapot" Helga:

well since neither of us can celebrate this key celebration in the hungarian culture we will celebrate it today just for the sake of it. and plus it works out nicely that it's my mom's, so "happy name day helga", this francia cremes is for you. or for me in your absence. i know your mouth is drooling just thinking about it! this was her favorite during her time here! now for those of you who are saying what are you talking about "name day" well the hungaian calender also has names on each day, sometimes more than one on a day or some names with more than one day per year, depending on the popularity of the name. this day, depending on which hungarian you ask is a bigger day than your birthday. and for those of us with out a hungarian name too bad no celebration for you, or you find a name closest to your , like Lynnette could take "Annette" or I could take "Karoly". But we don't,...... although some people like to constantly call us other names, like i get called kayak, or karl or even Tomi!

so if you ever want to make your hungarian friends day, or year, look it up and remember to wish them a "boldog nevnapot". Sorry the cake is not in top shape minutes before picking this cake up from the shop we got half attacked by a dog, Lynnette being terrified of dogs, was able to pin herself between her bike and a house and the dogs owner finally called it off, so of course she was not happy about this and was still shaking after, and accidentally crushed the cake with the loaf of bread we bought.

2007-10-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

mark your calendars...its official, we have booked our

tickets home today. so the date is.....DECEMBER 16!!!!!!!! its sort of weird to think about going home already...i counted yesterday and its only 11 weeks till we are home...now that's crazy! not that we are counting. OK maybe a bit. but we are still looking forward to many things yet that we have here before we go.

this weekend (thursday-saturday) we are hosting a group from the budapest christian high school. they will be helping us at the Ofalu ministry centre with some practical work. and on sunday we have another service in ercsi (with hopefully the help of some swedish friends!)

hope you all have a good week...looking forward to seeing you all in only a short couple months!!!! (sorry no picutre this time!)

2007-09-30T03:36:00.000-07:00

to the czech and back in a day and a half........

so apparently this is something we have picked up since being here calling the czech just that "the czech". not the czech republic as was pointed out to us. i guess we are on a first name basis. so after almost 1000km of driving, 2 baseball games, sleeping on a gym floor with 27 kids (needless to say not much sleep) and a tour of a castle we are back home.

we were invited up by the czech coaches to play their kids and teens teams at a town just outside of Ceske Budejovice, it was a interesting couple games to say the least. in this town they have 2 full time baseball coaches and a facility to rival anything. Compared to us with players who had never seen a baseball before this year and our field well not quite as perfect. we won't say anything about the 2 canadian coaches who are far from

full time. so we were in charge of the kids team and our team mate terry took the teen games. and altogether i guess we played not so bad. considering our kids have only played one other team all season, it was a good experience for the kids and a good challenge to play the czech guys.

between the games we had the chance to visit the local castle which was a big plus. actually the fields were right below the castle so it was quite funny to look down from the castle down onto the sports complex, complete with golf course. not exactly what was in the original plans of the castle i'm guessing. we spent the night sleeping in a gym and of course it took till 1am to get the kids to quiet down but i guess that's to be expected and it made for a much quieter drive home. i was assigned to be the driver for the girls van, 8 girls in a van makes for some seriously loud giggling on the journey there, but home was a whole different story with the girls catching up on the lost sleep, no complaining here. but yes it was a good trip, sometimes felt a little like babysitting but it seemed like the kids had a good time so that's what it was about. many of the kids was there first trip to austria/czech so it was very exciting for them to be out of hungary, some of the kids picking every object up and saying wow a czech leaf, or a czech ball. funny to watch them.

2007-09-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

second time around in kiskunhalas

last summer we travelled to this southern Hungarian city to put on a 2 week English camp in the local reformed high school. this year since our summer was already committed to other places, we instead were invited to come into their regular English classes and be guest teachers. very apprehensively we approached this task since none of us are trained as teachers and all we had to offer were some activities and being native speakers. this happened to be exactly what they wanted and the week turned out surprisingly well. at least we thought so, hopefully them as well! we taught in the grades 9-12, and were quite surprised at their level of English knowledge. most of them being in an English intensive program, we taught in about 3-4 classes a day. and we taught each class a little about Canada too as we did a presentation in each new class we were in. we also used many speaking exercises and songs to bring along their English. on going we really didn't know what to expect and had a tough time seeing where we would have chances to share muc more than English with the kids, but we realized at the end of week that we had tons of great talks. monday and wednesday we were involved in their evening bible studies and on friday we were given a class block to do skits and share testimonies. so we saw once again how God works in ways that we are not prepared or expect to happen! many kids we saw last year we again talked to and we were also able to talk lots with the teachers. with one teacher telling us how she didn't really enjoy reading the mandatory morning bible verse in class as she "wasn't really religious" as she put it. but then at the end of the week she told us how she was really thinking through the stuff she had been hearing and that it made a lot of sense to her.

as we shared our canada presentation we would always mention how young canada is...only 140 (1867), and how my parents church built in 1950's has historic landmark plates on it and how there are many buildings in hungary older than our country! and one class spoke up and told us there school building was built in 1890 so not much older/younger than canada and the school was founded in the 1600s. one class we taught in was even in the historic library with the picutres of the school founders looking on, a grand piano in the corner and many books older than well too old for me to explain. we originally had a game planned called a "running dictation" which as the title suggests included running but we felt a little apprehensive about that and decided to calm it down a little, "a strolling dictation" when we taught in that class room.

we got home late friday night and saturday night we headed out to our team mates church plant to help them with their english club. we did our canada presentation one last time (sixth time that week) and sharing some good old maple syrup, and explaining about a little place that has too many doughnuts to count. sunday we were in ercsi for the first church service. and even did a skit to boot. yes we are "pantomime extraordinaires" as our team mates put it. we put it more like we learnt two skits and now are called on to perform all over the place. oh ya and i (kyle) sang on the worship team (in hungarian). ya ok strange and funny to say the least but you never know just what you may do here! thankfully and by coincidence our mic cut out after the first song, maybe it's a sign from God. He's saying you can do the skit all you want, at least then your mouth is shut, but sing, come on that's where i draw the line, zap!

we had about 25 people come out so we were thankful for that. and yes it may not be your typical service, or far from how any of us may think a service may run. (ask us in a couple months all the details when we can tell you in person) but honestly it went well, to some one who may walk out of a north american church service and into this one may think it is total chaos, but hey that's just how things run at times! but amidst it all we know God is moving and especially see it in the lives of Miklos and Eva who we can see just light up whenever God is shared with them. and of course all the kids were out, which may have a little to do with the chaos but again when they all walk close to an hour to get to the church service it shows they desire to be there! so there you go hopefully a little taste of our last weeks, sorry it took a while to update, but im sure you can all appriciate our busy-ness and forgive us.

this weekend we head to czech republic with our kids and teenage boys baseball teams for friday and saturday for a couple of games. so that should be a good time away with them all, the last event of the year with them all and a weekend away is always fun for the kids, especially for the kids who haven't played a game in months.

off to the bazaar tomorrow!!!

2007-09-15T09:01:00.000-07:00

just a couple things before we head out for outreach tomorrow. today we went to ercsi for the new Saturday kids program along with our team mates carlos, rita and niki. we meet at the house that was built for miklos and eva, notice the nice new tiles and green walls. Above is a little clip from the day, a hungarian version of "this little light of mine", the kids of course loving to yell "nem" (no) we had around 20 kids, sang with them memorized, John 3:16, made salvation bracelets (with the 5 colours) and fed them. it's always a joy to be in ersci but also quite difficult with the surroundings and just the conditions the kids are in. please continue to pray for ersci and the programs there. next sunday will be the first "church" meeting which will happen twice monthly at the community house. please also pray for miklos and eva as they continue to be in very difficult times dealing with jealousy, others being jealous of their new place and causing many problems.

in other news our new prayer/ministry letter is hot of the press and here for you to see,

click here, and follow the links. it will also be coming in the mail for those of you who receive it.

2007-09-12T13:44:00.000-07:00

so in the past we have asked you to name that sign, while us knowing the sign wondering what your creative minds can come up with, well today we actually need your help, what on earth is this sign telling us? ok obviously the Popsicle and alcohol makes sense fair enough, although you would hardly ever see a Hungarian eating a Popsicle (ice cream is the treat) and well somebody obviously sees no problem with drinking on the bus but whats with whatever is in the middle? what are those? please help, we are confused!

2007-09-09T11:24:00.000-07:00

so another week is suddenly done and we find ourselves with only a couple months until we are home, and if you want to know what our plans are for when we get home well, (not that we are counting down)..... let me direct you to this sign, maybe it will answer your questions, and maybe it won't... all i know is i get confused every time i look at it and in the end well all roads lead to.....well other roads. so enough said. alright so life here, well the last week was spent starting up English club again in Ofalu, meeting with good old Olga and also with our friday class, daughter and mother so it was good getting those groups going again. we are also preping to head out for our last OVM outreach, next sunday we will leave for kiskunhalas a city we were in last year for a english camp, the only difference is this year we will go into their class rooms to teach english, yikes! we made them know and realize none of us are trained english teachers so most of what we will do will be more activities based and not so much teaching based. but it should be a good week being in the local high school and hopefully doing more than just teaching english! the other exciting thing is that the ersci church will be starting in the next weeks! Carlos and Rita our brazilian team mates who we have worked alot with in Ofalu and Ercsi are planning to start meetings in the local community hall. We will be helping them with this and also every Saturday we plan to do a kids program, possibly in Mikos and Eva's house/yard, this is the house that was built this last year. It's really exciting to see progression happening in Ercsi and we have many families who have showed interest and have been asking us when we will begin meetings, it is our prayer that as we begin these meetings that the message of Christ would be clearly spoken to the people, that he would move in the hearts of those in ersci and many would come into relationship with him, we are excited to see how God will work in the next coming months. please pray for these coming months, for the ercsi church that both hungarians and gypsies would attend, (which is usually un common). maybe your wondering what does the car photo have to do with anything, well nothing i just like the picture so thats why it's there.

2007-09-03T12:15:00.000-07:00

what to write....nothing too exciting has been happening around here this last week. we are just getting back into life and ministry here in Erd, which is nice after being away for most of the summer. although we have been a little disappointed when the Ofalu centre got broken into twice in the last couple weeks....they managed to steal the last computer that was hiding in the attic the first time....and now there is officially nothing of value to steal in there. but whoever it was decided that twice would be nice...we think they are just trying to discourage us. but we will continue to use that house as long as we can!

we have started up the clothing bazaar again and English club too. we are getting some good exercise lately too because we have to bike there and back which is about 10kms round trip...so 3 times a week is pretty good! anyways, today we met with Olga for the first time since the beginning of summer. she is her chipper self with many thoughts flowing out of her and arguments that could last us a lifetime. but today was hard for me (lynnette)....for some reason my Hungarian was not working and i was feeling so frustrated with myself. i really wanted to give her the answers to all her questions that were floating around in my head in english....its just that when they come out in hungarian....well they aren't as good. so i kept telling her that it was an off day for me, but she continued to talk and talk. so i just pulled out my hungarian bible and started reading some verses to her....at least she could understand me then! and then she stopped me and reminded me of the verse that i taught her in english the last time we met.....she proceeded to say the whole thing off by heart too. it was this verse:

"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God." Epesians 2:8

i was very encouraged that she actually remembered it and hoped that God some how can use that verse to remind her that she can be saved through grace and have an assurance of salvation in Christ. then we moved on to the "english" part...i was going to teach her some names of foods today, but she stopped me and told me that she wanted to learn another verse from the bible in english....so that's what we did! although its so hard meeting and talking with her...i know that God has a plan and purpose for all our times together even though we only understand each other half the time....and kyle is looking up words in the dictionary for me the whole time! but at the end of the class i asked her for some advice on how to cook this one hungarian specialty....and oh did her eyes light up when she had the chance to share some of her culture with me. it was funny...i will be sure to come up with some more cooking questions for her next week too!

2007-08-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

BalatonNet Conference....and a bike ride...

so last night we got back from the first ever keswick conference in Hungary. it was conference combined with a missions expo also. we were part of the team that stood at the OM booth and answered any questions about OM and tried to recruit others to join also. Luis Palau was the main speaker of the conference along with many other hungarian pastors. we greatly enjoyed the teachings and it was a very refreshing time for us....it was a bonus that the conference was right next to the balaton lake (hungarys holiday hotspot!) so in our free time we found ourselves enjoying the waters of the lake.

one night after the evening meeting we were at the missions expo tent and a HUGE storm decided to join us. we saw the constant lightening in the distance, but thought it might not get us.....but we were wrong! it got super windy and started to pour rain...they had to tie up the doors of the huge tent that the expo was in....the frame of the tent was "waving" with the strong winds (like a piece of wet spaghetti) we have learned that when one is in hungary....one should expect any random storm to hit at any time. but....one of our team mates ordered pizza just before the storm hit and the lady actually delivered it right to the tent door during the worst part of the storm....we were happy because she shared with us....what a devoted pizza delivery service! (for a cultural info: this pizza did not include tomato sauce but sour cream instead...quite tasty, even if it sounds weird! sour cream is a staple in hungarians diet....we like it)

ok....now onto our modes of transport....as we have told you we have no car here but by the generosity of team mates we have been able to borrow cars since last october but no we are back to our much beloved bikes, not so beloved by our rear ends but hey i guess we need to get used to them again....we took them also down to balaton to give us a little freedom, we took the train down since it was the easiest to get the bikes down, each train has a bike carriage also on them, we were sitting here as we got close to our stop and suddenly at the stop before us the other two who have bikes on the train come running back and decide to get out at that stop, they got one bike out and on the platform but as they had the second one half way out the train starts to role and there is one of them running along with the train trying to stop it and the other pulling his bike in to safe it...so we are thinking ok we need a game plan....we have very little time so lynnette jumps out right away at the next stop i throw the bags to her then pass on bike quickly run back grab the other and jump out.....whew we made it, we expect to see the train rolling away just as i jump out but ofcourse when one is ready for things like this the train sits for 5 minutes which is exactly what this did...oh well a little excitement never did any one any harm.

2007-08-21T07:52:00.000-07:00

as promised here is some video and shots from the race this year...you may remember from last year but i got some more shots form different spots. the video is specially for you chris..... some proof of the inverted helicopter....it's kinda hard to see but i'm sure you get the point... the shot a couple below is of the malev jet liner that was flown through downtown at just above building level, was quite the sight to see so low and close to the parliament. since yesterday was the biggest national holiday of the year there was also tons of stuff happening around the city. we also headed up to the castle district for the folk art festival, a great place to see tons of cool local handcrafts and eat our new favorite "langos bread". oven fried pizza type with all sorts of toppings. the evening also featured a huge fireworks show which we have heard is really good. but we will never know because for the second year in a row we got stormed out. (chistina and beeni will remember this clearly, or maybe you chose to forget it!) last year we had no notice but this year we had some... so we were able to get under a castle wall....flash backs form last year....after 1/2 hour we thought it was over so we began to walk down to the river....well we had to run for cover and found the only place the tunnel on the end of the chain bridge...probably as long a massey tunnel for you vancouverites...it was packed from end to end a couple thousand people at least...all fearing the worst like last year but other than rain it was fine. we had a good time laughing as we ran through the huge puddles and streams flowing down the streets dashing for the subway. good times and memories!

a few notes to those who will find faults in this post (vicky and chris) i'm starting to think these are our only two readers....well anyways yes the food is quite good even if it doesn't look so perfect and already has bites out of it and secondly upon closer inspection i see there was room in the middle of the tunnel, this would have been helpful to know at the time as we stood shoulder to shoulder with strangers and took pictures of them! and maybe it wasn't quite as long as the massey tunnel but who's counting and i've been known to embellish once in a while?!

2007-08-19T13:04:00.000-07:00

Piliscaba english camp:

we spent this past week in piliscaba a smaller town not far from budapest, we worked together with a organization called CE (christian endevour) who were putting on this camp. in past years they have had a pastor from ireland helping them but he could not come for the whole camp this year and they asked if we could help. upon arriving to the camp we realized we had been chosen as camp leaders so our roles quickly grew. but it was a really good week, tiring but really good. each morning i (kyle) shared the morning bible study and after we would have discussion groups and also team tasks based also on the study, which added a little stress but each day we were amazed at the creativity of the kids. skits, posters and land art were the tasks and normally they were quite comedic! we really felt God moving in the lives of the kids, through the discussion groups, really good times of sharing with the kids and also in many other ways. we were really grateful for this opportunity to serve in this camp although it was stressful we really felt carried by God throughout this camp. we learnt that we can't completely prepare for anything, often times during the discussion groups i would have no idea what questions to ask or how to get a good talk going but was always amazed by how God would direct them, sometimes the kids would come up with the craziest questions, with one even saying on friday but what now? what happens when i go home? how do i keep driving the porsche? (this being my last talk, drive the porsche not the the trabant). as illustrated in the poster. it was a complete learning experience for us both, as i had never lead a series bible study and we really understood the verse "when i am weak, you are strong". we now have a couple days to catch up, going into the city to watch the Red Bull Air Race,

some video to follow, and then on Wednesday we will head off for a conference, we will spend 5 days at this conference were we will also be having a missions expo, so basically hangin around our new bus, also to be unveiled at the conference and answering questions, Luis Palau is the main speaker so we are looking forward to catching some of the sessions also.

2007-08-11T04:40:00.000-07:00

bumper crop.....

well after months of toil and hard work we are finally seeing some results..... look at our spoils.... a month ago we had bought this little plant at the local veggie stand and thought we would see what we could come up with...apparently severe heat and being gone for weeks on end isn't so great for pepper plants, but hey i guess a couple ain't so bad! i'm kinda scared after being famished for weeks on end they may take a little revenge on me and scorch my mouth. maybe i can convince lynnette to try the first on.

in other news after a whole week at home we are back out.... we leave this afternoon for a week outreach where i will be doing the morning bible studies. the bible/english camp will have 25 kids around 11-16 years old so a wide margin of ages but we are looking forward to it. we will also have conversation groups and different activities for the kids, we had been invited to help by a organization called CE (christian endeavour) they do camps throughout the summer and this will be the first time OM has helped to it should also be a good chance to link our two organizations for future ministry.

2007-08-05T11:13:00.000-07:00

OM and the Irish in Cegled:

This past week we spent in a city not far out of Budapest called Cegled, a great city where we did english club and baseball for kids from 4-15. It was a great week, and thankfully not as hot as our past outreach. Also we were joined by a group from Ireland part of a group called Exodus. One leader and 5 teens came and helped with our programs, basically like what north americans would know as VBS, we put on a program for the city in the reform church. We had around 45 kids depending on the day and then in the evenings also had film club, where we watched films like National treasure, Good Will Hunting and others and then afterwards had discussions on the film. Lynnette co-lead the english clubs and i the baseball where we taught many kids for the first time the game of baseball. quite funny and then afterwards had a testimony each day. We worked alongside the reform church of Cegled, interesting point... in Cegled there is the largest reform church in Eastern Europe. we had a tour of this church on Saturday, where lynnette proudly held the large old key of the church and also rang the bell, and deafened the rest of us since we were high up in the tour. (we also listened to an oragn concert in this church one eveining...very cool!) The church where we had our programs was actually built during the communist years, one of only 10 built in the whole country during communist rule. also quite interesting to me maybe not you, oh well you know now! we spent the week with some hungarian hosts, where lynnette learnt all sorts of hungarian cooking tips and even got her eye lashes dyed, long story.... she had a cosmetic shop attached to the house, lynnette disappeared into the shop for a while and i was quite interested to see what she may come out with.....they were great hosts and we got tons of hungarian practice, really it was so much fun to just feel at home in their place! this is zsolt one of our star students...ok well he required alot of attention, as he could hardly sit still for more then 10 seconds, but we really had a good time with him and saw him really thinking about things and responded so well as we gave him more responsibility and tasks. Going into these cities and towns we never really know what to expect and each place is so different but we really have enjoyed the diversity of the towns and we had such a good time in Cegled. hopefully we will be able to head out and drop into our hosts place for a weekend sometime in the fall before heading home!

2007-07-28T06:51:00.000-07:00

just a quick update since we will be gone for the next week, beth and meghan left our presence on tuesday and are currently enjoying the sunsets of venice, we try not the think of that too much and the rest of our week was fairly uneventful, except for a couple flat tires and a muffler which decided it no longer wanted to be part of the car we were driving. to the rescue 3 hungarian men and a long piece of wire. nothing like a little extra excitment!

we head off tomorrow for another week of outreach in a city 1 hour drive away. we will be going with our OVM team (us and joska and sandi) and also a team from Northern Ireland. A group from a organization called Exodus which is very involved in discipleship of young people and taking them on short term trips like this one, very cool work. We have 5 teens and a leader joining us and we will be putting on basically a day camp for kids, english club, baseball and film club. So far over 40 kids have signed up and we hope for more to join as the week goes on. We will also all be staying with host families in the city so it should be a really fun outreach. Please pray for the team and for Cegled, that God would move during this week and bless the local church, we have really felt your prayers and have seen God moving in amazing ways this summer so far and are really excited to see how he will move in the upcoming weeks.

2007-07-23T12:13:00.000-07:00

kiskunmajsa/kubekhaza outreach

well to say the least our last week has been an interesting one! first of all it was scorching hot the whole week, with thursday being hotter in budapest than in bagdad. meghan and beth joined the OVM team for a week of english/kids camps. we traveled first to kiskunmajsa where we joined an on going english camp that was held at an old communist military base. and well, the girls got there fill of interesting stories, enough in their words that they "could go home now and be chalk full of experiences". although we had to deal with everything from cockroaches in our beds, to enough flies in the eating area to feed the camp on it's own the camp went really well. the conversation groups we held went really really well and the kids had a week full of hearing testimonies and teachings. beth and meghan were quickly latched on to by the kids. on the first day we arrived the boys were proudly showing off all sorts of old military gear that they found around the camp area..... jackets with hammer and sickle buttons, army caps and old machine gun shells, but when they told me of a landmine it was too much for me believe! so a couple days later they took me to the field to show me, here is gergu proudly showing off his find. personally i thought it a good idea to keep distance from this but he very adamantly told us it was diffused. but still we demanded he not touch it, as you can see he didn't listen and even saw no problem with holding it while smoking! as you can tell gergu didn't think he needed to listen to us and thought it hilarious that when he threw it in the air we all ran in the other direction.

our second half of the week was spent in kubekhaza, a town we were in last summer also. we also had an english camp but for smaller kids and it went extremely well also. the week ending on sunday with the baptism of two of the teachers of the camp. joska was asked to help along with the baptism. something that was a great blessing to him and the team. and really it was a special day with one of the kids from our group taking the step in front of the camp of accepting the Lord, praise God for how he worked in this last week! the baptism was held in the backyard of a local lady who accepted Christ into her heart 3 years ago while joska and sandi were in kubekhaza. since there is no church in the town we resorted to using the kiddy pool in her backyard, quite the scene to say the least.

thank you again meghan and beth you guys did awesome work and really were a joy to have stay with us. it was "good" right beth?!

2007-07-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Share Photos - Free Video Hosting

after only a few short days of work beth and meghan transformed the blank canvas of our ministry center wall into a work of art. we left it open to the girls to do whatever they saw fit to paint with only the one challenge being something that would get people thinking as they came through the room for the clothing sale, seniors clubs or many other events that occur in this room. we were i won't say suprised but very impressed with their work. you can be the judge yourself and watch this time lapsed clip of their work. we havent worked them to death....we took them into the city today and enjoyed some great weather and the lovely city of budapest!

tomorrow we will be saying a tearful goodbye to andrea and warren as they head off to amsterdam and then home and we will also be leaving along with beth and meghan for a one week outreach in the south of hungary. so the week ahead will be busy but we are all looking forward to it.

also we have a link to our latest ministry/prayer letter on the bar on the side.

2007-07-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

so after half a week of hard work by beth and meghan the upstairs mural has now been completed, very impressive work i must say and now it's off to the downstairs where they will also do two smaller paintings to brighten up our main room where we have the clothing bazaar..... here's a time lapsed video of their work! notice the sweet matching shirts to begin, they say they didn't plan it...we think they did! we have had a great week so far with the girls here, thanks for your help. we have also been busy painting some walls downstairs after there was some water damage earlier this spring. so its a painting party here! stay tuned for a part 2 in the "paintings of beth and meghan"...

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Share Photos - Free Video Hosting

2007-07-06T02:04:00.000-07:00

from one outreach to the next set of visitors....well andrea and warren arrived on monday and we have had a busy week with them already. its been great! we showed them around all our favorite places in budapest of course, and put them to work too! but they have been such a great help to us already....and are willing to do anything! here is a picture explanation of some of the things we have been up to this last week:

saw the city

sanded a wall in prep for a new painting that will be done next week by beth and megan. (not too sure what i am doing in this picture!?)

had a nice dinner out

cleaned up a bunch of stuff out of the OM centre attic. this week the OM centre road has the time where you can stick out all your garbage you cant normally throw away out on the road...poor garbage men that have to clean that all up!

and went grocery shopping....this picture needs a little explanation! as you can see they are not holding on to the handle but the buggy isn't going anywhere....it the magic of magnets! they thought it was hilarious so i snapped a picture to remember the moment....i say they need this technology at home too!

2007-07-01T10:50:00.000-07:00

Bóly:

this last week we have spent in the south western hungarian town of Bóly. we worked along with the local reformed church and put on english clubs, kids club, sports camps and a video night. we had a great time hanging out with the local teens and learning many new hungarian words like "durva" (hardcore) and mesztelen csiga (slug-but literally translated is "jersey-less snail, or naked snail), and "pupu teve" (camel....i laughed really hard at this one!) and hopefully we were able to teach them some english too. the teens had a good base of english so we did more discussion groups and talked about all sorts of topics. it was really great to get more in depth with these guys and just hang out and have fun. the guys had much to ask about canada since they loved watching whistler mountain biking and squamish climbing videos. so of course they all now have an open invitation to come and check out vancouver. this is Gabor who proudly wore his canada shirt to show us! some of the guys also took us to the local city of Pécs, well actually by the book Bóly is a city but only 3000 people live there. but they were very stern on correcting us when we called it a town, but anyways close by is Pécs which has been voted the cultural capital of europe for the coming years. a very nice city to say the least! you may be wondering whats up with the locks, well its a tradition in Pécs that couples in love go to this fence and clip on a lock, our guides for the day had a lock some where on the fence but he was unable to find it. i can see why in that mess, but im sure his girlfriend would have been able to find it. the pastor who we worked with serves that town together with 15 other towns, and 9 of those he holds monthly services, just to give you an idea of the demands and lack of pastoral workers here in hungary. we had a great time serving alongside janos (the pastor) and his wife francie (a former OMer) they have a great work going in this town and you can see how much the teens respect and enjoy just hanging out with their pastor which was really cool to see, as it is kinda rare here in hungary. pray along with us for Bóly and the surrounding area.

We are also very excited since tomorrow my sister Andrea and her husband Warren will be arriving to visit us. it'll be great catching up on old times and showing them a little bit of Hungary. we also will be preparing for our next outreach in 2 weeks and doing some work around here. My cousin Beth and her friend will be coming in a weeks time to help us locally here and also on our next outreach. So we will be doing some painting prep work at our team center in Ofalu for our arriving artists (Beth & Megan) to complete a mural in the center there. so times are busy but it's a good busy, so there you go our weekly update, and a happy canada day to all, eh!

2007-06-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

#3 in the nation....... not bad for a team made up of 75% first year players.

although we had a disappointing day yesterday (with a loss of the first game) ,the boys were able to get things together and pull off a huge win today. after going down 8-1 in the third inning they were able to manage the improbable comeback in the last inning to tie the game. and then in the first extra inning were able to open things up to score 12 runs. we've decided they just enjoy watching us coaches go crazy while they cooly wait until just the opportune time to win the game. we had a great time with the boys spending the night bunking in little wood cabins, and enjoying a good swim together..... odd note i quit competitive swimming at 13 due to the fact that i refused to wear a speedo..... the team of boys on the other hand had no problem what so ever swimming and running through the campsite in their ginches, and no one in the campsite had a second thought about it.... cultural lesson number one.

this shot above is of the boys proudly chowing down on their hand picked watermelon. while us coaches ate Chinese food the boys disappeared and came back 10 minutes later displaying their find. with huge smiles on their faces, we on the other hand thought "great, watermelon, one problem we're staying at a campsite, no knife." where upon one of the boys pulled out a knife big enough to gut a moose with that was newly bought at tesco also. nothing would phase these boys on their endeavour.... cultural lesson number two, when i was 13 and given money to buy stuff for a weekend my bag would be filled with chocolate, chips and root beer and not a water melon ...let alone any fruit or vegetable. and if it did i would never have thought to get the knife also!

look what i won mom! for most of these kids it was the first championship of any kind and with a national anthem, announcer and posters all over the city nerves played a big part in our first loss. but in the end the boys were able to pull throw and end the season with a win for 3rd place .

on another note....we leave tomorrow afternoon for our outreach in Boly. please pray with us that it will go well and that our energy will be restored after spending the weekend with 12 boys! we will be leading some english conversation groups, baseball camp, selling some books, and hanging out with the local teens and kids there. we dont have too many details for this next week but we pray that we will be prepared for whatever comes our way!

2007-06-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

why is it that when you are in hot weather you would rather it be cool and when it cool you are waiting for the hot weather to arrive?!? we are now enjoying +30C weather but here i sit wondering how it will be possible to sleep. i mean seriously for a vancouverite the only time you get this weather is when we head off to go on vacation to osysoos but then you don't think about it because you can always go for a swim in the lake. coaching baseball and packing boxes from the bazaar is not such a relaxing experience as you melt from the heat. anyways i won't complain about the weather anymore because i am actually enjoying it. but i'm also hoping for the evening thunderstorm to cool everything off.

mom and dad dyck flew off the morning and i guess they would probably be in the air somewhere over the Atlantic by now maybe greenland, maybe they have one of those UPS GPS tracking clips on them and i could find them? or maybe not. we had a great two weeks with them although one week was spent by me and dad watching our wives get sick, but we both tried our best to enjoy ourselves with many BBQ's (this meant for more food for us). and we even fit in a round of golf which was a first for me overseas. hungary only has 7 courses in the country so along with our south african teammate we headed out for a round, honestly it was quite strange for me since i felt like i could be walking the hole back in vancouver but it was a great time together although we got taught a lesson or two by Pranesh. we were also able to show mom and dad much of our lives here and enjoyed trips into the city and to vienna. but what we really enjoyed most were the evenings together sitting on our patio and chatting and laughing. it's really rare that we would be able to spend so much time like this with our parents and we really valued each day, hopefully we weren't too much for you guys!

in other news this weekend we head out for baseball finals, we have qualified for the top 4 in the country and even had a short article in the local newspaper. we play in the semi finals on saturday then either in the finals on sunday or for 3rd place. so we will stay in deberceen as a team all together for the night which should be a good time with the boys. the team we play on sat. is the best in the country but we were able to beat them last game so it should be a close one! the boys are pumped to say the least. Then on monday we will leave for our first outreach of the summer to Boly a town around 2hours away for a week of english lessons and working with the local teens, we will be working together along with some former missionaries who are now leading a church in this town so we are looking forward to working alongside this church to connect and build relationships with those in the community!

we will update on how the finals went on the weekend hopefully before we leave for our outreach!

2007-06-09T10:47:00.000-07:00

family visiting....mom and dad dyck arrived on wednesday evening after a long flight...weighed down with lots of goodies from home! the last couple of days we have enjoyed showing them around here and budapest today...here is a little glimpse of what we have been up to...

had some morning "mate"....(paraguayan tea for those who wonder)visited some neighbours friend of ours....picked some yummy cherries there too!of course there has to be some bbq-ing ...enjoying dinner together on the patio....

market in budapest....dad captivated by the hungarian sausages!looking over budapest from our favorite spot!we are so happy that mom and dad are here to visit!!!

tomorrow we are off to another baseball game...if we win we go to the finals next weekend!

2007-06-04T00:10:00.000-07:00

A 65-year-old railwayman who fell into a coma (from an accident) in communist Poland regained consciousness 19 years later to find democracy and a market economy.... Polish media reported on Saturday.
Wheelchair-bound Jan Grzebski, whom doctors had given only two or three years to live following his 1988 accident, credited his caring wife Gertruda with his revival.
"It was Gertruda that saved me, and I'll never forget it" Grzebski told news channel TVN24.
"For 19 years Mrs Grzebska did the job of an experienced intensive care team, changing her comatose husband's position every hour to prevent bed-sore infections," Super Express reported Dr Boguslaw Poniatowski as saying.
"When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere," Grzebski told TVN24, describing his recollections of the communist system's economic collapse.
"Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin."
Grzebski awoke to find his four children had all married and produced 11 grandchildren during his years in hospital.
He said he vaguely recalled the family gatherings he was taken to while in a coma and his wife and children trying to communicate with him.

I don't know if you caught this story but it really blew my mind reading it. Talk about a new world view. You want a accurate picture of the differences between communism and democracy this is the guy to go to. Being in eastern europe we hear all these stories about the first big box stores opening and people walking in turning around and walking back out because the option to choose is just too drastic, or how saturday was market day and everyone went to the main market and stood in lines all day just to get the essentials to get through the week. Times sure have changed and continue to change. Take Erd our city for example in the year that we have lived here we have gone from no large scale grocery stores to two huge mega big box retailers, is this a good thing well yes and no. Construction is booming, well ok sorta booming, highways and railways are being upgraded to meet the new EU regualtions but Erd continues to be a dirt road mega town and our new swimming complex which happenings to be right across the street from us well remains closed even though contruction is complete. Why? well there is no money, they spent millions building the thing but have realized they have been spending money they don't have and now can't pay for employees to run the place and this is kinda a picture of the country, money is being spent all over the place but at the same time the government has said they cooked the books and there is no money and so they tax the people, house gas prices alone have been raised 50-70% alone nevermind a slew of other things and schools/hospitals are being shut all over the country, so how is Hungary doing? thats a good question. Better than 15 years ago but the burden especially upon the poor in the country side is really over whelming and is driving many to wonder how they will survive if the country continues in it's path. So pray, that leaders would lead responsibly that they would look to take care of those that aren't making it and that people would see as we put our hope in man and government we will be let down and failed but rather people would see there is one who we can put hope in and we will never be let down.

2007-05-31T03:45:00.000-07:00

This past weekend the OM team here in Hungary headed off for our once yearly team retreat. no complaints when it means spending the weekend with friends and staying in a castle! Vajta is a small town here in Hungary and in it is a Bible school which has completely renovated a old palace/castle. the story of the castle was that it was built in the early 1900's by the 5th richest family in hungary, they fled during the 2nd world war and the camp fell into the hands of the communist party and was used as a vacation home for leaders and their families, it was then converted into a camp for handicap children. but after the fall of the iron curtain the government could no longer afford to keep it up and it was abandoned. in 2000 the palace was bought and converted into a bible school complete with everything from a pool, to two i must say pretty cool coffee bars. we spent the weekend playing games, we had a guest speaker, and a trip to the pool which included what is needed for true team building... a giant pool wrestling match. we had a great weekend of catching up with team mates, getting beaten in a variety of card games and sipping good coffee. here's a shot of how we've been getting around hungary now a days, it's slow going what can i say. these are all the rage for kids here, there super funny to watch all the kids roaring around on them, i just had to give a try. apparently i'm a little to big though. but really north america should wake up and get their hands on these, we are actually thinking of starting a export buisness to introduce these to the american market! i think it will go. but in reality we do actually have wheels here right now, we are borrowing our english team mate's (jill) car, believe it or not we have had a car since october. first jill's then when she came back and our south african team mates (pranesh and heather) lent us their car and now that they got back jill once again lent us her car as she doesn't need it. and now we found out our brazilian team mates (carlos and rita) will go home for the summer and told us we can us their car......! what can we say but the Lord provides and we have great team mates! this last picture is of our team leader rodney and his wife kitty and their two boys mark and patrick. they are leaving the team to go back to the states. we have enjoyed getting to know them so much and will miss them greatly, we will especially miss their boys who refer to us as kyle basci and lynnette neni which is the formal way to great people but they are the only ones who do this for us and plus their really fun and funny guys to have around. rodney and kitty you will both be missed but we know the Lord had amazing plans in store for you in the states. this coming weekend will be filled with helping our team mates move out and in of various places and also on sunday we have baseball games, our boys team won both matches last weekend, even beating a un defeated team, which we had earlier lost 23-3, and we just found out that we have qualified for the hungarian finals which will be happening in two weeks time, so "hira" pirates! GO Pirates!

2007-05-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

well, another week has flown by again....haven't been so great at updating our blog, guess that means we are busy! i have to think back about last week and try to remember what happened

...i will share about english classes...last monday we met with olga again. we are now teaching her how to ask for directions in english...apparently what i thought would be a one week lesson, is turning more into 3 weeks! but we had a great talk with her these last 2 weeks. she is opening up and asking lots of questions. we have talked a lot about assurance of salvation and just shared with her that there is hope of heaven in christ ...and of living eternally there...not here on earth as she thinks she might! but she shared with us that she really isn't even sure where she will go after she dies. today i showed her a power point that a team mate has made, its a presentation of the gospel in hungarian...we are praying that God really uses this to waken her heart to Him.…and that her stubborn heart would be softened! last week when she was talking quite fast (and i wasn't understanding anything she was saying)...i was just looking at her and it really saddened me because i see that she is totally lost. i saw a women who needs God and is so far from Him....and its hard to talk to her because she is old, and her heart and mind are set in their ways! but my prayer really is that God would work a miracle in her life and draw her to Himself. this morning i was reading in a book, just thought i would share something i found encouraging...

“I cry out to the God Most High, to God, He will perform the cause I hold in my hand.” Psalm 57:2

“The very thing that I hold in my hand- my work today, this concern that is beyond my control, this task which I have greatly overestimated my own abilities- THIS is what I may “cry out” for Him to do for me, with the calm assurance He will perform it.”
-streams in the desert

we also have a new student….she is actually the mom of the newest kid that comes on Fridays. I will meet with her on Friday for the first time for English lessons. I have spoken with her lots (in Hungarian mind you) at baseball because her daughter plays with the kids team. So I am excited to start meeting with her on a weekly basis and continue to build a relationship with her. (yes mom klassen, its Adrienne and Atilla’s mom!)
we also got to help with some of our team mates who are doing a church plant 45 mins from here. They are holding English clubs on Saturday nights for teenagers who want to practice speaking. Only 5 kids showed up but it was a good time, we look forward to helping more with it when it starts back up in September. we are also looking forward to seeing my parents in only 2 short weeks...yahoo!!! (-lynnette)

in other news we are enjoying 30'C weather and it should be holding round there for the next couple weeks, summer has defiantly come! sorry to rub it into you vancouverites! oh ya and Go GIANTS Go! (-kyle)

2007-05-14T01:01:00.000-07:00

mothers day in hungary.....well not actually since here in hungary we celebrate a week earlier....ahead in time and in celebrations!
yesterday as we told you in our last post we had a outreach in ercsi, a community about a half hour drive from home. the swedish/finish team has been here all week meeting with different families and holding meetings. last evenings meeting went really good, some students from the local christian high school came also and lead worship. i briefly shared my testimony with translation of course! as much as i wished my hungarian was good enough to speak in front of people it just ain't. (my english is also on the quick road downhill!) then we had some special gyspy music from the swedish team and also they shared a message for the people and invited people to the front for prayer, with many people responding to this. this video is some little excerpts from the evening.

Photo Sharing - Upload Video - Video Sharing - Share Photosthe two middle clips are a mothers day gift for my mom. while they were here they met little robbie and she especially asked for some video of him. robbie is such a special little guy, blind since birth but he has a glow and fire that really can't be described. you can't help but smile when around him, with his sporadic loud AMENS, and Hallelujahs. and he sings like no other kid i have ever heard, as we pull up to his street he always knows and comes running out of his house yelling CARLOS, CARLOS (our brazilian teammate). the other videos are of the swedish/finish team with some gyspy music and also a little three part translation which was quite funny to watch, from finish to roma (gyspy language common throughout europe), and then to hungarian since not all the gypsies speak roma. praise the Lord for the work he is doing in ercsi and pray for a continued openness in the people there!

2007-05-06T09:07:00.000-07:00

april showers......

well this month has been quite a busy one as you can see from the lack of posts,..but we have had a great time hosting family. Catching up on old times and making lots of new memories, it was so great to be able to just "be" with family and also get to show them life and work here. we look forward to the coming months as other family will also be coming. but it has also made us really miss home and especially our new niece and nephews, some of who we have only seen over web cam. but we will be able to catch up in only a few short months which will fly by!

this shot of me was taken in vienna while there with my parents, we convinced lynnette to go and give this "statue" some money but as she walked up he lunged out and freaked her out, the rest of us had a great laugh and she refused to go back and give him the change.

we also had "take your family to work weeks", we had told our family that if you come, your joining us where ever we go and basically that's what happened, hope you guys didn't mind it! they joined us at English club, clothing bazaar, baseball, and many other things, mom even cooked team lunch on tuesday for over 20! thanks again mom! we also ran into a older couple in our neighbourhood, while on a walk back from ice cream. Their grandson plays baseball with us and lynnette has met the grandfather a couple times at the field and chatted with him. they invited us all back to their place for drinks and snacks, we had a great time. the picture is of lynnette, my mom and the lady, they broke out the family pictures and gave us a tour of their small farm (backyard). it was great since moving to our new place we were hoping to get to know our neighbours and now we have a great relationship with this family (good for practicing our hungarian too!), the grandma promises to stop by for tea every time she walks by with her grand daughter!

baseball continues to go well the boys teen team had games last weekend out of town so we had a good time heading out on the road last weekend, we can see them improving and they were quite excited to win their second game. we also have two kids from the team now coming to weekly English club so we are thankful that the relationships built at baseball are reaching further than just on the field. this is the teen team at our game last weekend.

we are really excited for this coming week since a team from sweden will be joining us to work in ofalu and erchi with the gypsies, they are also gypsies who speak roma (gypsy language) and have been here numerous times and have great response in these communities, on sunday we are hosting a special evening in erchi. we have rented out the community hall in erchi (the same one we used at christmas) for a outreach evening. it's always a good time with this group and we know they will be excited to see were there semi truck of donations went from christmas, although we have worked through a good chunk of the 1000 banana boxes they sent there is still plenty more clothes to be sold/distributed. please pray for this week of outreaches. we also took my parents and mark and bonnie to visit miklos and eva, carlos and rita (our team mates) have a weekly bible study at their place, they are both doing much better but continue to pray for them both.

2007-05-01T23:17:00.000-07:00

more visitors....we are having a great time with mark & bonnie here...always good for laughs when marks around! we love having you two here!

2007-04-24T12:45:00.000-07:00

week review in pictures...

kyle bbq'd some burgers baseball practices

drank some cappucinos

saw the city at night
...during the day!

took the tram
....and much more!!! we have had a great week. mom and dad klassen have helped out with so much....clothing bazaar, mom taught some english, baseball practices. its great having them here and showing them what our daily lives are like!

2007-04-19T05:33:00.000-07:00

well since winter never really came this year it seems like summer wants to come a month early. just perfect timing for my parents to stop by for a little visit. they arrived on saturday in vienna and so we met up with them there and spent a couple days seeing vienna. we had a great time taking a tour of the summer palace and many sites around the city, it was alot of fun to tour mom and dad around since they had never been in a european city and ever site was something totally new, since a heritage site in vancouver is anything built before 1970 and over here it's more like anything built before the 1900's. the weather was great, so we spent most of the time walking around catching up, and of course visiting many cafe's along the way. we are no back in Hungary showing them our home and ministry, today we were out visiting miklos and eva and seeing the gypsy community. and yesterday they got to experince the clothing sale and we did a clean out of the ministry center, hey if we got them here might as well put them to work,.... they were more than happy to help actually. and this afternoon it's off to baseball practice were they full suitcase of gear which they brought will be put to use.....many thanks to you all who helped contribute to that, the kids will love the new stuff. oh and did i mention all the goodies we got, i got enough root beer flavoured things to last me a year plus all sorts of other treats, guests are so great to have....... not just for all the gifts they bring! so ya we are having a great time and look forward to the weekend when we can take them into budapest and show them around.

2007-04-11T04:41:00.000-07:00

post from ofalu....well here i (lynnette) sit in the ofalu centre. i was waiting for my english student to arrive, but i guess she forgot today! so i decided to get my prep done for english club with the kids for this friday...finished that off! (we are still reading the story of david and goliath) and since they have internet here i thought i would just post on something i was just thinking about as i was waiting.....my student that was supposed to come today i meet with once a week. she is a great girl, super nice, a little older than me, but we get along good. she is such an easy student to teach too! last week before easter i gave her the gospel of john. she said that she had read the bible before, but she seemed excited to recieve part of it again. i havent talked to her since and was hoping that we could talk about it today! through out this week i have been re reading john again and praying through it, that it would speak to my student as she is reading it also. its amazing how many new things that God has been showing me through it too! but my prayer is that even though we meet to learn english....somehow God would use this time to speak through me and kyle and that our student(s) will come to see Him for themselves!!! please pray with me for my one student who didnt show up today,that we could meet again soon and have a good talk together.....thanks so much for all those who are continually lifting us up in prayer, know that God is using your prayers in a mighty way.

2007-04-07T11:07:00.000-07:00

watch out ladies it's easter time in hungary,

and with easter monday approching the hungarian tradition of boys spraying perfume on women will happen once again throughout hungary, i was actually just reading a article on this hungarian tradition and about how it is slowly fading away, especially here in the city. the tradition goes..... that as the boys spray women with perfume they recite a poem that basically says "as one sprays water on a flower so it doesn't wilt.... i spray perfume on you so your beautywon't wilt", what does this have to do with Easter, honestly i really don't know. but it did get me thinking, what has faded/wilted in my relationship with God. in what ways has the power of Christs Resurrection faded in my life,in what areas of my life do i need to be washed anew to prevent my wilting. i'm pretty sure a spray of perfume won't keep anyone from the inevitable wilt, albeit disguise it for a while but i am completely assured that Christ alone can save me eternally.

many people have been asking about how miklos and eva have been doing, sorry to not have kept you updated lately on them, carlos and i went out to erchi last thurs to visit and bring out some new clothes for the family and he is doing much, much better. for those who don't know just after christmas he had kidney failure and was admitted to hospital, after being there for a couple weeks he decided to leave and go home, because in his mind nothing was wrong with him. after 2 weeks of ignoring ours and his families requests to go back he fell really ill and was given days to live, the Lord worked a miracle and he survived those very dark days and now is doing so much better, the doctors even going so far to say nothing is wrong with him. Praise the Lord. Miklos and Eva both received the Lord during this past christmas season and our teams is now having weekly prayer meeting in their house. During May a group is coming from Sweden to work in Erchi and other places and it's our hope that both miklos and eva and maybe more would be baptised during this time. we continue to be amazed at how the Lord is working in their lives. yesterday we also had a special kids club in ofalu, carlos and rita had a easter presentation for the kids, opening 12 eggs and each on containing a item that helped to tell the story of christs death, ressurection and why it is so important in our lives, it was really well done and the kids really got into it. it was so great to see the kids so captivated by what the next item would be, sometimes it can be really crazy specailly if there is a larger group which there was. we left really encouraged at the response of the kids. continue to pray for them. they have a really understanding of the gospel, but pray it wouldn't just be knowledge but that they would seek a relationship with the one true saviour. sorry no recent pictures both these ones where taken this last fall, but if you have a craving for something new here is our latest prayer/ministry letter

2007-04-01T10:51:00.000-07:00

Boldog Szülinapod,

Lynnette! Well I know it's a day early but i figured why not celebrate and have some fun, plus it was a super nice warm spring day. Well me being the last minute planner i am was still piecing the day together this morning but thankfully it was a sunny day which makes things much easier. So in celebration of the coming 2010 Olympics in vancouver i thought maybe we would test our skills at the bobsled and begin training for our Olympic dreams! Canadian bobsled team here we come, ok not so much, as will be witnessed by the following video. We found two things out today, one we will never make the Olympics and two we should never get a motorbike, since as we went around the corner one of us, who will remain un-named leaned out of the corner and one of us leaned into the corer, nothing quite like sliding around a corner feeling every rivet on the slick metal and smelling the flowers all at the same time!
Photo Sharing - Upload Video - Video Sharing - Share Photoswe left with only a couple bruises, but the hurt of realizing your Olympic dream has come to a crashing end is what hurts the most! oh well makes for good laughs afterwards. since we were on a children's theme we headed up to the highest point in budapest via the children's railway. kinda a smaller scale train run by kids, now i'm sure you all have in your minds those tiny little kids trains where the conductor is larger than the engine he's sitting on. But it's quite a bit bigger than that and takes you through the rolling hills just above budapest, it really quite nice actually, we then hiked to the top of janos hill and took in the view. To end the day off we headed into budapest to our favorite Italian place for some good pizza and pasta, ( i know not so hungarian, but who can say no to italian).

nothing better than enjoying a great day with my amazing wife!

2007-03-26T08:38:00.000-07:00

ok so here is our latest installment of label that sign, once again to the best response (as chosen by us, with no bias of course)goes a boci (hungarian choclate) bar and for extra incentive a pack of hungarian sweet pepper seeds, for your very own hungarian vegtable garden. for some extra fuel for your creative minds this was found outside the bear pits in cesky krumlov, czech. we blacked out the original text so we will also let you in on that later, we will announce the winner this weekend so there you go, have fun and as an extra hint lynnette has a bias for the more humours side and not neccesarily the accuracy side. (ok maybe we have a little bias). so shoot away!

2007-03-24T02:07:00.000-07:00

week in review

well this week has flown by like every other one lately. ravi and amanda left yesterday morning so we are just back to the two of us. it was so fun to have visitors and some old friends to hang out with. as much as Hungary is feeling like home to us it's so nice to just be able to relax with good friends and have a taste of home, they even brought us some ivory soap which was a smell of home, funny how things like that can bring you to another place and of course we are looking forward to our next visitors who come in only a months time...mom & dad klassen (that's if the passport people decide to give them their new passports in time!)

anyways, on monday kyle and i had 2 classes of English and worked on our new prayer letter, while r&a were exploring budapest. on tuesday we were at team prayer meeting and in the later afternoon we met up with our friends to take them to a thermal bath house...experience true Hungarian culture! we spent 3 hours in there, it was pretty funny, watching all the regulars play chess in the pool and standing over the "healing jets"...amanda wasn't quite a fan of this part of the experience, oh well it was funny to watch her! on wednesday we went into ofalu to do some practical work (painting basketball backboards) and set up for the clothing bazaar. r&a were quite willing to help us out, so we put them to work...just kidding, but thanks again for helping us guys! i put on 2 pics of the bazaar before anyone came to show the amount of stuff that we have. (im hiding in one of the pictures!) every week we put out different boxes of clothes. we still are opening new ones too, the people love it when we bring out a new bag/box...it gets a little crazy. at the end you cant see anymore boxes cause all the clothes are spread in huge piles on top of them. then we get to clean them up and pack them all away every week, so its a big job. but its always interesting, we have regulars that come and we are getting to know them quite well. they always end up trying on all these crazy clothes and laugh hysterically....we all end up laughing by the end. rita (our co-worker) is thinking of starting a womens club once a week for all these ladies, we hope it works out and they come out. on thursday we finished painting the b-ball boards and it was time for baseball practice. this was the 2nd practice of the year. now we are coaching the kids and teenage boys team too. we have about 14 kids come (mostly new kids!) and about 20 boys. so its a good turnout this year. ravi got to be the back catcher for the kids team....thanks! i got nailed in the big toe with a ball thanks to little Attilla...he said sorry and felt really bad, but it was a good practice and we even have 4 girls on the team. yesterday we had english club with the 3 kids. im not so sure that friday is the best day for them....they we so hyper and excited. we taught them the different kinds of weather. the one kid kept saying "claudia" for cloudy, but i think he learned it in the end! it was hilarious, we ended up laughing a bunch and played a couple of games. thats our week in a nut shell.

its saturday morning and we just finished eating a breakfast made by my lovely husband...egg mcmuffins, yummy. and now kyle is vacuuming and mopping, so its my turn to do my part of the cleaning...the bathroom! sorry if this blog is a little random....have a great weekend.

2007-03-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

cesky krumlov,

on our way back down to hungary we made a couple day stop in a little town in the southern part of czech. it was such a cool place complete with winding cobblestone streets and a super colourful castle. instead of a moat filled with crocs protecting the castle, here they went more unique and chose the bear pit instead, with three live bears. ravi and amanda found this place while looking through some travel books and it was quite the find! we also enjoyed some of the local cuisine, "roasted pig knee", hey you gotta branch out and try what the locals eat, but honestly i can't say i would order it again. here's our wives in one of their best shots, they enjoyed browsing the many shops in town while rav and i brushed up on our hacking (hacky sack) skills, something we also spent many of hours doing throughout europe while waiting for trains, buses and just about any time we could get it in. Ravi's hack has spent time on window ledges, pipes, rail tracks and covered in grime, dirt and other things from many different countries. To us it may be a prized possession but to our wives not so much, Lynnette took a errant pass of her lips and well she wasn't too impressed, we informed her though that she just kissed most of europe ......good thing for amandas hand sanitazier that was quickly wisked out, Good times!

2007-03-19T06:06:00.000-07:00

czech with friends:

this past week we took some days off to go meet up with some friends and see a little of the czech with them, i (kyle) went to bible school in spain with ravi 4 years back and travelled around europe with him afterwards. he and his wife (amanda) headed out here to meet up with us and make some new memories, and our wives had to put up with us and our "remember when we were travelling and.....""we got lost in italy"or"we slept in that train station"or"we forgot our jackets at that hostel way up in the swiss alps and had to train back for a whole day just to get them".......

we had a great time touring around Prague for 2 days, including a trip out to Terizin, while in our hostel we met a man who was doing research and putting together information on a little known former Nazi compound outside of Prague. Here during the war jewish people were taken and held while waiting deportaion to one of the many death camps. The interesting part of Terezin is that the nazis used it as a front, they shot footage here for a propaganda film and even toured the red cross through, complete with coffee houses, swimming pools, and theaters they passed it off that it was kinda like a getta way for the jewish people, but these things were only operational for the time of the films and the tours and in reality it was a place of death, torment and hopelessness. The main objective was to starve and work the people to death and it that didn't work then to ship them off to auswhitz, or one of the many other death camps. As neither of us had ever been to one of these places before it was a real eye opening experience to what really happened in those terrible years. The picture here on the left is what you find at many of these places, it is right as you walk into the main entrance "work will make you free", a lie right from the start as in those times, work killed many but freed not one.

2007-03-09T06:17:00.000-08:00

Driving Miss.Dragam,

Amikor mentem az iskolába autóval a mi utcánkban egy idős néni odafutott az autómhoz. Kinyitottam az ajtót és ő beszállt. Ez nagyon korán volt és azt gondoltam, hogy álmodom. A néni nagyon gyorsan beszélt. Én azt mondtam, hogy nem beszélek jól magyarul. Megkérdeztem hova megy. Sokat beszélt, de csak azt értettem, hogy posta. Amikor megálltunk a piros lámpánál ő kiszállt azt mondta, „Nagyon köszönöm drágám” és átfutott az úton egyenesen a postára.

Well if you didn't understand the above then I guess you'll be missing out on todays blog....... ok fine I'll fill you in, plus i thought some of you may be interested to see what this hungarian language is all about and for any hungarian readers out there, all 2 of you, this ones for you. We told this story to our language tutor and he thought it was so good he had us write it out, so heres the product of last nights language lesson, this story is from wendesday morning, I headed out to some early morning basketball at the international high school. I never thought i would wake up a 6am for basketball but some friends convinced me too, so i bundled up, grabbed a banana and a "jo reggelt" (morning breakfast bar) and began driving down our road. I hadn't got far when I noticed a older lady (maybe 65) running towards my car, it being early and not knowing if i was dreaming i unlocked the door to see what she wanted, well she hoped right on in. good thing i grabbed the banana off the seat. and she proceeded to talk really fast, again i remind you it's really early and my mind has not even begun to work in english never mind hungarian, i ask her to speak slower and tell her i don't speak hungarian well, she again begins speaking much to fast but i am able to pick out "post office", and its on my way so i put two and two together and figure out shes late to wherever shes going and she wants to get some where near the post office in town. so i shake my head in confusion and off we go, me and my new found early morning friend. as we get closer i ask her if she wants me to stop at the bus stop but she says no the red light ahead will do. and as we get there i finally have woken up enough to realize i greeted her quite rudely (reasonable for that time i guess) and am able to say good bye politely, (literally translated "i kiss your hand") and she responds "thank you my precious". and then off she runs again across the street.

2007-03-06T11:06:00.000-08:00

well, haven't posted in a week, so i thought we should update on our last week or so. kyle is keeping busy with more school visits to do baseball teaching in the gym classes. he told me today that they have handed out over 600 flyers (to the upcoming baseball camp) and seen probably 800-1000 kids in the last couple weeks! i was surprised by how many kids they have taught this game of baseball to....but its great that they are allowed into the Hungarian schools to do this, usually with quite a welcome. i went along once and we noticed a funny thing. as soon as the teacher walks into the gym all the kids line up in a row and say "good afternoon" (in Hungarian of course!) to their teacher....sounds normal right? well its a little weird because the say it in this monotone voice all together and REALLY slow. like its the military or something...not sure why, but its funny! but in 2 weeks there will be a baseball camp (over the weekend, 3 days) that they are inviting all these kids to. and hopefully they will end up joining a team after the camp! so with all the "fun" in playing baseball...the real hope is that we can some how share Christ's love with these kids. the season starts in the beginning of April and we will be helping coach the kids team again....or at least kyle will (and i will when i can.) so please pray with us that lots of kids would come out and that we can share the news of the gospel with them!

i on the other hand, have been busy with English teaching. in the last couple weeks we have gone from 1 lonely student (Olga) to adding 5 more! its great and i am enjoying it! i don't see them all on one day because their levels are so different. so on Mondays i meet with Olga, very beginner. and on every other Tuesday i meet with Zsuzsa (good Hungarian name) she knows a little English from high school. on Fridays we meet with 3 kids (Dori, Zoltan & Gergely) the are around 10/11 and they only know the basics too, but they are a great bunch on kids, very fun! and recently i have been meeting with another girl (Timi) for her to practice her spoken English skills, she is preparing for an interview and a job where she has to know English well, so she needs some help with speaking skills. she comes on Monday and Friday mornings. very quickly we have gotten really busy with English and baseball, but its been good. we are really praying that through these activities we won't just teach baseball or English but that God would use our lives to bring to more to Him.

and since a post isn't finished without a picture, we will leave you with one from a day at the used clothing sale we have on Wednesdays in Ofalu. there is always something interesting to find...a couple weeks ago Rita and I found these toques! (Rita is a fellow OM'er that we work with in Ofalu) the other girl in the picture was visiting Rita, she works in Bosnia with OM....hopefully she doesn't mind this picture of her on the internet!

2007-02-28T10:12:00.001-08:00

just wanted to share an article for any that are interested. often people ask who are these gypsies you are working with, what defines a gypsy, and whats the background on this people group? this is an excellent article written by a OM worker basically giving a history of the people and talking about the work that OM is doing with gypsies throughout Europe. if you click here or on the link on the sidebar under articles of interest it should download. read and pray for gypsies... a people group that is so discriminated against here, that they would see that "all are equal in the eyes of God" and that they would continue to come to him!

2007-02-24T07:24:00.000-08:00

winter has officially skipped us here..... personally i'm kinda disappointed, i was looking forward to some crisp snowy winter days but i know lynnette is celebrating, but then again maybe we are jumping ahead of ourselves and we might just get a late hit of snow?!

this last week ministry wise has been really good, we started meeting with new english students, one new girl on tuesday and two kids on friday, and all of them seem really fun and easy to teach which is of course a big plus, please pray that we would find ways to share the gospel through the english classes with those that attend, a friend in the czech. had some theme days where her english students brought friends to the center and dressed up as cowboys and had different events, so maybe something like that would be cool to do, anybody wanna send us some cowboy hats and horse shoes? also on mondays i shared that while lynnette meets with Olga and teaches her English I have been hanging out with some local kids playing soccer, so this last monday we also started to read through the gospel of John, we read through the first 15 verses. as we read through the word i pray that it really speaks to their hearts. on fridays we also meet with them and this last friday our team mate asked them how many have accepted Christ into their hearts and two of the boys that come on mondays said yes. praise the Lord that he has already been working in their lives. we really see hope in these boys and i pray that as they hit their mid teens they would make some positive decisions that would bring them out of the darkness and hopelessness that is around them. praise God that he promises a hope and a future for these boys! we've also been invited to teach baseball to the local elementary schools during their gym class so these last couple weeks have found us in a number of schools and this week we will visit 2 more. we've probably taught a couple hundred kids and invited them out to a baseball camp that we will be helping to put on at the end of march. this spring again we will also help to coach one of the kids team and the great thing is the field is right around the corner from our place here. it's always a good time teaching a kid who doesn't even know what hand to put his glove on and seeing them the next week celebrate their first hit (and then forget to run to 1st base!).

2007-02-18T09:07:00.000-08:00

the ercesi flea market is a spot,well where you can find just about anything. we had read about this place a couple times and finally decided we better check it out. and well it didn't disappoint, a great place to find all sorts of old antiques, war memorabilia, old furniture and plenty of conversation with locals. we had no intentions of buying anything and left with just that but we had a great time looking at all sorts of things and talking with some of the shop keepers, our item of interest is these old irons they have, 150 years old, they use hot coals as the source of heat, kinda cool but i think a little to heavy to haul home. on this picture take a look at the canes, i had to stop lynnette she desperately wanted to buy the hoof one! yikes!

this last month has found us quite busy, trying to juggle helping with the missionary training course going on at our team center and also at the same time trying to keep up with our regular ministry, yesterday was the final day with everyone heading out to their countries. every sept and jan all new missionaries joining OM and heading to eastern europe first come here for a month of training, (we did this last year in jan.) this time around we had a german family heading to Albania, a american girl also going to Albania, 2 koreans going to Kosovo, one dutch girl going to Moldova. We also had Alba a Chilean going to Albania, please pray for her as she is still awaiting her visa to enter Albania. she is staying here in Hungary until then and it can be quite hard to see everyone else off while you have to wait. We had her over to dinner last night, i kinda had to laugh as i never thought I would say I'm having a chilean over for dinner who is going to albania in Hungary, the world is getting smaller these days! we had a great time as lynnette made us stuffed chicken with a feta, and roasted almond sauce in it, nagyon jo (very good)! and relaxed played cards together.

please also continue to pray for Miklos and Eva the gypsy family who we have been sharing about, i went out with some team mates to visit and miklos is doing quite bad and he and his wife are taking it really hard. the doctors have said he is beyond help and it's really difficult to see him and the family. pray for a miracle that his health would turn around and for his family that they would be comforted during this time.

2007-02-18T09:02:00.000-08:00

here's latest edition of "whats with that translation." We found this at tesco, (big box grocery store) and just had to buy it, who every thought you could fight cellulite with a simple cup of tea. sorry if its not clear enough but yes at the bottom it does say "natural tightness", down with the artifical tightness.

2007-02-15T07:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday at the clothing bazaar in ofalu we met the lady who's kids are going to come to English club (remember from the last post, the 9&11 year old?) well she informed me that they are going to bring another kid along next week! they were supposed to come tomorrow but they cant, so all three of them will be there next week instead. its great to have more kids come out, but funny thing happened as i was preparing for this Friday. i was photocopying some worksheets for the 2 kids that i thought were coming, and i thought "i should do an extra one just in case" funny! God already knew there was going to be an extra kid coming. and also i talked to another lady who is going to come learn English 2x a month. its cool how God is bringing these people out, but please pray for us as we prepare lessons, since we aren't qualified English teachers in any way! but pray also that we can share God's love with these people some how through our very broken Hungarian.

well there is one more story that i can tell, since I've gotten over the embarrassment of it! on Saturday kyle and i finally had a day off to ourselves (first in about 3 weeks!) so we were excited to go into Budapest and check out this cool flea market that we had heard of and just enjoy walking about the city. so after a lovely pancake breakfast the kyle made (yup my husband is the best!) we ran to catch the next train to the city. once we were on the train for about 15 mins, i realized that i plugged in the iron but never unplugged it before we left....aghh! i was so mad at myself, but i thought i would call our landlords who live upstairs and ask them to go down and unplug it for us, simple! but they were out and both had left their phones at home! perfect, we had just arrived in the city (35 min ride) and just had to get back on the next one to go home and make sure our house wasn't burned down! well we were 2 stops away from home and of course our landlord calls and says "we are home now and turned your iron off, you can go back" right, perfect timing...so we got off and got back on another train back to Budapest....lots of train time that day! so ya, it was really irritating to me and i felt like i ruined our whole day, since we missed the market because it had closed. but we did end up enjoying the day walking around the whole city basically, it was a beautiful sunny day. above is a picture kyle took from up on the hill on the Buda side. you can see the palace in the distance. we love living so close to this cool city! cant wait for all those visitors (you know who you are!!) to come so we can show Budapest to you too!

2007-02-11T13:28:00.000-08:00

don't judge a book by its cover.....

the rudas bath house is one of the oldest here in budapest and honestly from the outside it seems like a building that may do better torn down. buts it all about the inside here. a team mate invited me to experience the rudas last week with him and a couple visiting americans. the rudas was built in the 16th century by the turks it has this great feel of history in it, i couldn't help but think i was swimming in a archaeological site. the other unique side to the rudas is upon entering you are given a cloth, maybe the size of a dish towel with a string to tie it around you waist. yes no bathing suits required here!which side to put the towel on, well this is why it is wise to go to a place like this with a experienced friend. the pic of the inside wasn't taken by me, cameras obviously wouldn't be so welcome in a place like this. (it is mens only, just incase u were wondering) so as you can see from the 2 pics you really don't know what may be hidden inside some of these run down buildings. thanks matt for the great time and my now newest fav. spot in budapest. but one thing now concerns me as i read more on the rudas. it boasts that it is a "radio-active" hot spring, yikes.... but it will also help me with any bone decay, degenerative illnesses of joints, chronic and semi-acute arthritis cases, protruded intervertebral disc,
neuralgia. hungarians claim all sorts of health benefits of their many bath houses, i prefer to just claim the relaxation, great chats and atmosphere! click here if u wanna check out some hungarian bath house or see more pics.

in other news lynnette and i have 2 new english students, younger kids 9 and 11 but it should be good, and also when lynnette meets with olga on mondays, for the last couple weeks a couple of the local boys have been coming by to kick a soccer ball around or just see what we are up too, tomorrow i plan to sit down with them and start to read through one of the gospels, maybe a chapter or two a week, well see how it goes, pray for them and for me as we meet and talk, or at least try to talk. and one last pic for u of my other fav thing in budapest, the #49 tram, its super old, slow and loud, but i guess thats kinda why i like it soo much. they could probably sell these trams off to some north american city and pass them off as "retro"

2007-02-09T05:10:00.000-08:00

update on miklos...
a couple of weeks ago we told you about how miklos' health was pretty bad. we hear that he is not doing any better. he went to see the doctor finally and the doctor told him that he needs to go to the hospital...but he refuses to go. we are hoping to go see him as soon as we can, we have been crazy busy lately with helping out with a training program here at the OM centre. please continue to pray with us for him and that he might come to accept christ before he passes away.

2007-02-09T04:52:00.000-08:00

annoyed!

well today i (lynnette) went to the post office to buy a phone card for one of the students here at the training program...sounds simple right? should be, but not here. people here go to the post office to pay all their bills and to mail everything (they dont really use the mail boxes here) so its always quite busy there. anyways, i got there and only 8 people in front of me, should only take 10 mins, but no...i was there for 30 mins!!! and then when i got to the counter the lady told me they dont have anymore! i was so irritated, and she didnt even say sorry, or when/where i could get more! they dont really care for "customer service" here. its more like "too bad, not my problem"! and to top it off it was really HOT in there and i had to stand behind a not so nice smelling person! so i left without anything....not so successful! but i will have to try again soon, and will have to face that stupid long line-up next time i want to mail something! (once it was 15 people...i left and came back!) so now you know what it takes just to mail something...so be thankful when you get a letter from us! thats life here in hungary!

2007-02-04T12:37:00.000-08:00

as February rolls around,....

maybe global warming isn't such a far fetched idea, last year at this time the river was frozen and we were searching all corners of the city for long-johns,(-15C') and today we went for a walk in the warm sunshine, a little chilly due to the wind but really it's so weird, maybe we skipped winter this year, or maybe it will hit late and stay until june or something.... the pic on the right was taken last year at this time cold and winter like, the pic on the left was taken this weekend there was a couple inches of water on top of the ice even, so strange.......so today we once again enjoyed some home made sushi...mmm so good and as you can see lynnette was very happy! but click on the pic and have a closer look, ya thats a rice kernel on her chin! hehe. i saw it and told her i wanted a picture of her excitement to eat sushi. as you can see she bought it and gave me a heroic pose, then i couldn't not laugh and had to show her the little friend. good laughs. lynnette made me promise to put a better pic of us on also so it wouldn't just be her alone looking like a goof! we enjoyed a nice meal out, something we hadn't done for a while, i even got a steak, something even more rare here. (lynnette says literally rare, but i thought it was quite good)

2007-01-29T11:27:00.000-08:00

please pray for miklos....

as many of you may know we have been working with a gypsy family in a town called erchi. miklos and eva have been a very special family to us here. miklos lost his legs a few years ago in a accident and the family has been living in what can only be described as a shack. this past fall we were very happy to complete a new place for them to live, although still quite basic it is rain tight and much warmer, well in the past month miklos has become seriously ill. two weeks ago we travelled out to visit as he had been in hospital but discharged himself. he wasn't doing very good at the time but refused to go back. today carlos and i travelled out to visit again, (carlos is in the picture here that was taken in the summer.) miklos is really in a rough state and the doctors have given him a month to live, in or out of hospital. we travel out tomrorow again to pray with the family and take him into a hospital. please pray with us for healing of miklos and also that God would move in his heart at this time. and of course for his wife and 3 children during this time.

2007-01-29T11:18:00.000-08:00

what once was.....

have you ever thought ummm, i need a new bible cover why not use this purse, no. well i have never also, but lynnette on the other hand seems to work on another bandwidth and had this bright idea. she had picked up what she thought was a "kinda cool" red leather purse (personally i never really thought it so cool), and at first had no further plans of using it but upon seeing the need of her badly battered bible cover and remembering my grandpa's hobby of recovering bibles with leather skirts she decided to take on a new project. yes she's quite crafty. and as you can see her below it turned out quite good, not that i had any doubt but i am still quite impressed. the button was also picked up at our clothing bazaar as was the purse, what finds! so there you have it, do you have a beaten up bible, bring it back to live easily with skirt, or purse. costs involved, 400 ft (2$) for the leather glue!

2007-01-23T09:20:00.000-08:00

it's all about the small victories, just a couple language stories to give you an idea of what life is like battling the language, i (kyle) was assigned to doing some repair and painting work at our team office and after getting the walls prepared i headed out with all the key words i figured i needed, a paint chip of the colour i wanted and the dimensions of the wall. well unknown to me i picked the one paint shop in town that had a rookie on the job. in my head i thought, easy enough bring the paint chip in say i want the new paint a little darker and here are the dimensions i need to cover with paint. after explaining all this the girl looked back at me and with a look of confusion said "micsoda" (what did you say), i knew i was off to a bad start. i explained it again and she handed me a small can of paint for a door. when i needed a large pail of paint for a concrete wall! well after much explaining i finally called a friend who was able to explain what i needed. i also realized half way through i said "fa" (tree) instead of "fal" (wall) she was apparently new on the job and didn't know how to mix paint so i had to by paint dye and mix it myself, at first the mix turned out purple but after some more colour i was able to find the colour i needed. as i stood in the shop with her looking at me like i was from another planet i felt like walking out and giving up on the whole language thing, then this past sunday rolled along and we had to rush out with a visiting german family as their girls had bronchitis to find a pharmacy that was open. both parents were doctors and knew what prescription was needed but legally they can't just prescribe at the pharmacy here. but we didn't want to wait till monday to see a doctor so off we went, thankfully we experienced a very kind pharmacist and my extremely talented wife who seems to have the nack for hungarian and was able to explain the situation and we left with what we needed and some much needed confidence with hungarian.

also a new feature added to the blog is a archive of all our prayer/ministry letters, (thanks kitty for showing me how to do this!) just follow the link on the sidebar if you missed any, and if you would like to recieve them regularly and don't already just drop us a note and we will put u on our list.

2007-01-20T00:57:00.000-08:00

"space is shared in europe, not protected. Tables are shared, the air is evidently shared because smoking bothers no one. Cars, houses, buses, apartments, cafes- so many important aspects of life are smaller, thus more cramped, thus more willingly shared. It's not offensive to go nose to nose with an acquaintance during routine conversation because no space is being violated. Talk with your hands, hug, embrace, even kiss at times. Even for friendly people, such familiarity was difficult for americans to understand."

this is a quote from a john grisham book, and i just had to laugh as i read it. it's so true. you know that personal space we all hold so dearly, well it's not so dear here. when waiting in line if your not close enough to count the neck hairs of who ever is in front of you well then you will soon be one place further back in line. we had to laugh once watching a visiting girl wait in line, as we stood outside watching she stood in line but 3 feet away from the person infront of her and after 3 people stepped infront of her she finally caught on and snuggled on up. we keep telling each other that when we get home we better drop this habit quickly otherwise we may get a strange look or two at the 7-11 lineup. so there you go if your coming to europe be warned and get to know your fellow line upers.

in other news lynnette was very pleased to hear after a long journey home a touque which she knitted for our nephew finally made it. ok originally the touque (winter hat for you non canadians) was meant for me but somewhere the pattern shrunk, so plan 2 was made and it was sent to ben for his birthday, and that's where the adventures began, it was being sent to lynnettes sister in-laws parents place (a mouth full) but somewhere along the way a house number was left off and it stopped on route. when we finally realized this a month late! bonnies parents phoned up the post office and were told "ya it was here but we sent it back to hungary since it was wrongly addressed", great we figured that was it we will never see it again. well a week later they get a call and are told it is sitting in the post office waiting to be picked up, apparently it didn't go back to hungary rather to someone on the same road with the same last name and they so nicely brought it back to the post office since it wasn't theres! so there you go the adventures of the touque that could.

2007-01-15T05:40:00.000-08:00

well today we finally finished the process of getting our residency permits!!!! YAHOO! we went to the office in budapest today to pick them up and it only took about 15 mins, that is a miracle in itself considering the first time we went there (and government offices in general here!) so about a month ago we went to bring in all our papers for our residency permit (cause our 1 year visa ran out) and we spent 5 hours in total there, yes thats right. in one office, waiting and waiting for our numbers to show up. and it was so annoying because every time the number changed on the board it was a mystery as to which number it was going to be...its like winning the lottery...random numbers come up! anyways, we submitted all our forms and only had to mail a couple extra ones we were missing, and they told us to come back the 15th of january. but about 2 weeks ago they called and decided the needed just one more paper....of course! and this one was a paper saying that there is actually a house on the land of our address, weird hey? so after all that they gave us our fancy "tartózkodási engedély" sticker in our passports!

on friday we went to Erchi to do some visiting. we went to miklos & ava's house and talked to them for a bit. miklos was in the hospital for a month over christmas. he decided on his own that he didnt want to be there anymore, so against the doctors orders he left a little while ago. when we saw him on friday, he looked quite sick still. his skin and the whites of his eyes were totally yellow. we tried to tell him he should go back, but he has a strong will and dosent want to. so please pray with us that he would go get medical help and be healed. also pray for him to see the Lord in all of this too. exciting news in that family though is about ava, she is now attending the weekly bible study that is held in the town! praise God! we pray that miklos would see God in her and want the same in his life!

right now kyle is doing some work here in the OM center, painting and fixing some walls. and i am busy preparing for english with Olga tonight, should be interesting as usual! but pray that we can be a good witness to her through our lives and testimony. our winter prayer letter should be arriving in your email/or mail soon...if you read this blog, and dont receive our newsletter and would like to just leave us a comment and we would be happy to email it to you!

2007-01-12T10:47:00.000-08:00

sushi's back and i'm alright!

today was the grand opening of the klassen's hungarian sushi house (5 customers served), oh so satisfying! we received some sushi supplies in our christmas package and found the remaining necessities here and finally after a year absence we are back sushiazied, "why so pumped for a bunch of seaweed and rice" you may ask, "just because" i say. i have come to realize this is my most missed food from home, besides some good home cooking by mom of course. (no need to step on toes here!) we even had some first time sushiers join us, 3 of our neighbours gave it a try and we got 2 thumbs up and one no comment. we have seen a couple sushi restaurants here but they are very expensive and i don't know how much i trust seafood in a landlocked country. so there you go you now all know of my obsession with sushi.

2007-01-04T12:31:00.000-08:00

back by popular demand is our name that photo contest, so get out your thinking caps and tell us what does this sign mean and why is it in the middle of budapest? and once again the winner as voted by us (bribes will be accepted) will be the proud recipient of a boci chocolate bar, true hungarian goodness. and don't forget we have a tendency to vote on the more comedic side of the spectrum. Lynnette was the proud spotter of this sign and immediately declared it blogable, so enjoy! oh and heres a hint it's not "only cars with DonKing hairdo's beyond this point"..... in other news this weekend we will celebrate the completion of our first year in hungary, well not exactly but our weeks will become busy later in the month so we better celebrate this weekend... maybe with a trip to the thermal baths close to here.

2006-12-30T03:36:00.000-08:00

time seems to be just flying.... i don't know how we have already found ourselves almost in the new year but we have, and as we look back over the last year its has just flown by. this time last year we were living in lynnettes parents basement, soon to be moving to my parents place soon to be heading off to hungary. and well the rest has been kinda crazy, but we are so amazed to see God's faithfulness through the whole year, we have definitely learnt how his plans are better than we could imagine even though at the time it has been hard to see. (for example while rolling over the land rover) ,it's crazy to think how fast this next year will go and we will find ourselves back home before we even realize it. this coming year we are very excited to have many different guests coming to visit, including all our parents! and of course some friends and other family maybe?!
on another note it seems like winter has finally arrived in hungary with every day in the negatives and even some snow yesterday, snow is fun for the first couple days but i'm sure it will begin to wear off pretty soon but we will enjoy while we can, ok we will enjoy when we can seeing how we are both kinda sick today, well maybe i'm a little sick and lynnette will most likely spend the day on the couch.

(the top pic was taken hanging out the train window one night on the ride home from budapest of a passing train, and the one right above is the pride of budapest and hungary, the chain bridge which is the first bridge built in budapest)

2006-12-23T02:26:00.000-08:00

2006-12-23T01:07:00.000-08:00

a couple days in vienna.......

we just got back from a couple days spent in vienna, we enjoyed touring around the city and their many christmas markets and tea houses! fellow OM'ers(dave ad brenda babcock) who work and live just outside vienna invited us up to stay with them. also dave's sister janet who is working in the czech was staying with them, we attened mts training when we first arrived in hungary with her so it was great catching up and laughing together about our past year. we really appreciated our couple days there, it almost felt like going home for the weekend, vienna has many things that are impossible to find in hungary, like breakfast sausage and root beer, i was so excited to buy some root beer i can't even describe it, i have another 3 in the fridge and am resisting temptation on drinking them all right now. thanks so much brenda for hiking all the way through the city for my root beer! vienna has many markets all over the city, the first pic is infront of the main market infront of the city hall, we had walked through during the day and it was pretty cool buts it so amazing how the atmosphere changes once it's dark and the lights are on. the also was another market up in front of the summer palace which is quite the backdrop for a market (pic below), i must confess i quite enjoyed it even though i'm not so into the craft stuff, lynnette found some great little christmas things. vienna is only a 3 hour train ride from home here but it's quite a big differnce from budapest, both are really beautiful cities but the difference in terms of money and cleanliness is quite drastic. we had to laugh getting of the nice, high tech austian train in budapest and onto our train to home in erd, completely graffiti covered and browned from years of use,i don't even dare look into the bathrooms but i kinda enjoy the feeling of our trains here, gives you a real feeling of history. both cities have the danube as a center point but both are very unique to themselves, did you know the danube has 7 capitals of countries on its banks?! i wrote a couple posts back of songs that now make sense to me well i have another one to add, "chestnuts roasting on a open fire" never knew what it meant well now i do, on the steet corners there are always vendors selling roasted chestnuts over these drum fire things, so we thought we better try some, thinking they would be crunchy and probably tastey, we were wrong, not so good and not so crunchy, more like warm soft and tasteless. lynnette chocked down one and i tried my best to aquire a taste for them but gave up after 5 of them and decided they look a whole lot cooler than they taste!.... so anyways we had a great couple days in vienna, thanks so much janet, dave and brenda for allowing us to spend the days with you! we also put more pics on our flickr site if u are interested follow the link on the side for more pics. merry christmas to all and to all a good night!

2006-12-18T11:46:00.000-08:00

well i know many of you have been praying for our special christmas service which we had in a gyspsy community close to erd. on sunday we headed out loaded down with gifts for children and families. i actually felt a bit like the grinch who stole christmas as i had the joy of driving our team toyota loaded down with all the gifts, all we were missing was a little dog with an antler tied on its head to pull the van! i guess i would need also to be green and have the desire to steal the stuff, as much as i loved all the barbies and toy cars! the evening included a program put on by our team, we sang some christmas songs, our hungarian teammate sang a solo and also our team mates nephew visiting from brazil sang a song. carlos shared a message of Gods power to change our lives. he shared his life story and how God brought him off the streets of brazil and changed his life completely, he has one of the most powerful testimonies i have heard and he had a deep impact on the people there, more than 15 people came to accept christ, many with tears in their eyes and one even before carlos had asked if anyone would like to come forward. God moved in a powerful way on sunday evening and we could only sit back and rejoice in what he was doing!

as you may have read we had tons of clothes and stuff delivered from sweden, so we packed these into gift boxes for the families and the local christian high school donated a ton of toys which we gave to the kids, although we didnt have enough for all who came (many people came completely unexpected) we were able to get names down and tomorrow we will take another van load of boxes out to deliver to families.

2006-12-16T01:49:00.000-08:00

Christmas Advertising Hungarian style, lynnettes favorite past time now is spotting her favorite billboards, go ahead take a guess at what this one is before scrolling down. On another random note some things that have made sense this holiday season, the song "i'll be home for christmas", first time ever this song has made anysense to me! also "i've been working on the railroad" never made sense until ridding the train every day and seeing guys actually work on the railroad, and lastly reading in Psalms 3:7 i've realized that hockey isn't such a godly sport afterall, "you have broken the teeth of the ungodly", anyways back to the billboard by now you probably have scrolled down to see the lovely raw pork billboard, we found this right beside the main christmas market in budapest, we love it's been christmas-azied with mr.snowman. by the way tesco is one of the big box retail places here, kinda like wal-mart but way bigger. for a while right by our house they also had a raw chicken ad which lynnette cringed at each time we drove by and celebrated when it was replaced with a add for eggs. well anyways thought you might like to see some hungarian advertising, and by the way any of you shoppers wondering what the price works out to, it's 4$ a kg.

2006-12-13T12:50:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder what a truck load of clothes looks like?!

this past sunday i received a call from Carlos (a team mate) asking if i could help unload a truck of aid that had come from sweden, we expected it on monday but it arrived a day early. i asked him how many of us would be there to unload and he replied 10 or so, and i responded "good it will go really quick then", to which he replied "oh kyle you don't understand you'll see when you get here!", now I was picturing a mini-bus packed with some clothes and stuff, when i arrived i was shocked to see a full semi-truck waiting, packed from top to bottom, front to back. 24 tons of everything from shoes, clothes, tables, chairs and everything in between. now don't get me wrong we are so excited to have this all donated but it is just a little overwhelming when you look at it. we unloaded it all into our ministry center, so now you can hardly walk inside there, boxes stacked from floor to ceiling, plus we had to fill a vacant team apartment with couches, tables and chairs. I would put some pictures of what the inside of the center looks like but no picture would do it justice so you'll just have to picture hundreds of banana boxes (apparently the swedes have a addiction to bananas) and a huge pile of garbage bags of clothes. We have had a group of swedish gypsies come down many times to do work with the gypsies here and they are the ones who put this all together. they also have contacts in slovakia so the plan is for a truck to come from slovakia to pick up a good chunk of the goods, otherwise we will be spending the next year distributing all of it! on Sunday we will have a Christmas service in a close by gypsy community and we are putting together some packages and also there we will take down names of families so we can personally bring them clothes and the such!

Above is a picture of our team, children and all. This evening we had our Christmas dinner together and as you can see it was quite a crowd, and we were even missing some.

2006-12-09T06:50:00.000-08:00

2006-12-09T05:25:00.000-08:00

Christmas tree shopping

a couple days back we shared of how we tried to go find a place to get a tree and everything was shut down. so we thought we would try again, so we pumped some Micheal w. smith tunes..."I'll lead you home" on the tape player and headed out, we now know all the words and are brought back to our child hood times as we sing along........ and here for all of you to see is our grand, huge tree for this year. we were so pumped to have found the right tree and we could hardly fit it into or small car,.... and as you can see we needed a ladder to get the star on top! alright maybe in reality its not quite as big as in our imagination but we are quite proud of our little addition to our place! (we had a laugh thinking about the massive tree we bought last year for Lynnette's parents...remember j&v?...well this year it didn't quite touch the celling as last year!) we call it our kisfa (little tree). we even found some cute wooden decorations for 2$ and a string of lights for even less, well kinda cause the first one fell apart while we tried to put it on the tree and almost gave us a 240 volt surprise. the bare wire was swinging precariously close to lynnette's leg at one point! our landlords caught us as we tried to bring it inside and informed us that according to our contract we weren't allowed trees. but after much begging and promises of letting Bernd watch soccer with me they allowed us, no just kidding they just laughed at our little tree as we dragged (more like carried it our arms) inside!

2006-12-07T10:27:00.000-08:00

A little brightness on a otherwise gloomy day...... ya today was one of those i just felt like climbing into a hole and hiding from the world! The morning started out fine with me even thinking it would be a good day at language school, boy was I wrong.... if any of you want a humbling experience try a intensive study class, i felt a bit like a two year old child who accidentally walked into a university lecture, ya it was painful. after class we came home thinking maybe we could get some stuff done, like finding a christmas tree, picking up pictures and the such but of course when we got to the tree place it was closed, not that we had plans of buying a big tree, we are hoping for a small shrub or something like that which of course is even harder to find. then we went to pick up our pictures, also not there, anyways maybe it seems like not so much but some days they just add up to alot....... on a more interesting note yesterday was saint miklocs day here, which is a big deal here and as you can see in the pic below he even pays canadians a visit! the tradition here is that on dec.6th if a child is good he will receive chocolate in his shoes and if he has been bad golden twigs will be found, on our front steps we found chocolate and at class we got chocolate and twigs, so apparently we are good neighbours but only marginal students!

2006-12-01T09:40:00.000-08:00

Christmas time in Hungary:

well its hardly december but things are quickly changing to christmas time here, as i'm sure they are at home too! since we are in the city all morning every morning at language school we have had plenty oppurtunity to walk the city, hungarian school is going alright, we can tell it has helped us alot already but at some point most days i'm tempted to just get up and leave or take a swim in the river or something like that, but we are encouraged that we are making progress. anyways back to christmas, this picture here is taken in the outdoor christmas market here in budapest, filled with all sorts of interesting randomness, some really neat stuff i must confess. and thankfully no tacky christmas music! sorry to be a scrouge but i can only take so much of christmas music, by the way thanks mom for the christmas cd, knowing my aversion to it she kindly sent me a cd! my rule is from the 20th on is fair game but more than that is too much, tonight we had kids club again in ofalu, which suprisingly went quite smoothly. The kids are great and if the center was open everyday they would probably be there every day but they are also sometimes very diffucult so today was quite refreshing to have them attentive and just be able to have fun with them! here's a pic of a couple of them.

2006-11-25T06:40:00.000-08:00

Presentation on Canada, horses in the street, and some yummy granola....

ok, so this post is a little bit of everything! first our presentation on canada went really well. we did it twice, once to a grade 7 and once to a grade 11 class, it was in a hungarian school but the student take half of thier classes in english, so their english is pretty good. we had fun talking about our country...and even had a little taste test of maple syrup at the end of class (which they thought was really good!) we think they enjoyed it....maybe we will do it again in another hungarian school if we get the chance!

today we went for a nice saturday walk because the weather was pretty nice. and on the way back home we came across this horse and carriage. it passed us with two people in it at first, then we found it at the light with two more...i guess they were pickin up their friends for a party! pretty funny, sometimes you see these driving/riding along on the road. and it cracks us up everytime we see them, especially stopped at the red light alongside another car. you can see in the picture the man in the car is even laughing!

and the last random thing for the day...for those cooks/bakers out there...i just thought i would share a great recipe i tried for granola the other day. it is fantastic, so yummy with dried cranberries, almonds, cashews, walnuts, raisins, sunflower seeds....anyways its great, we eat it alot of it so i thought i would make my own. we love it over yogurt, if you want the recipe to try, it is here ...i adjusted it a little and halfed the recipe and it made lots still, and next time i think i will add coconut..enjoy!

2006-11-23T04:26:00.000-08:00

English Club update:

this week we had our first english club, we wrote earlier about how we wanted to start one up and there was interest but we hadn't had anyone yet, but this last week on lady came out, 70 years old and very keen to learn. by the end of the class she was kissing lynnette in excitment of it all. i never knew teaching some one the alphabet could have results like that! she is a lady we have met at the clothing sale we help with every week and she comes week in and week out for shoes, and every week she leaves with a couple pairs. who knows what a old lady like her needs so many shoes for?! one week she saw a pair she liked but they were a bit small, she was very driven and after 20 minutes of pulling, squeezing and sweating they finally slipped on, literaly! ok forced on. this past week she even brought a friend and both of them sat there forcing a whole array of shoes on. she is a very sweet old lady! next week we will also have one more lady and 2 teenagers at english club so it is beginning to grow! we pray that the club would provide for many oppurtunites to share about christ, the old lady is a jehovah witness and this past week we talked a little about christmas and the meaning. this coming week we also will begin our intense language studies, so we will be quite busy! and tomorrow we will be doing a presentation on canada in a elementary school complete with maple syurp and some canada pins (thanks chris and cheryl for those)

p.s. happy thanksgiving jonny (and any of u other americans out there), we will eat a little extra turkey for u at our team dinner tonight!

2006-11-21T03:16:00.000-08:00

As promised....here are the newest pictures of baby Lila. what a sweet littl niece we have! congrats again jonathan and vicky....we love you guys!

2006-11-19T09:49:00.000-08:00

WELCOME BABY LILA CLIBBON!!!!

we are so excited....my sister vicky and her husband jonathan just had their precious little baby girl early this morning. she weighed 8lbs 6ozs! we are so happy for you guys and cant wait to see pictures of her...we will post one as soon as we get one! miss you guys lots and wish we could be there to celebrate with you and hug and kiss our new little niece!

2006-11-14T10:56:00.000-08:00

for our first instalment of "translate this sign for us" section of our blog we present this to you..... to the most comedic translation we will personally mail you a bar of hungarian chocolate.... this sign we found at lake balaton and just had to laugh at so post and enjoy!

on another note this past sunday we along with close to 200 hungarians headed to vienna by bus to enjoy a delerious concert! very cool to say the least to join along with many others from all over eastern europe and worship and jam with delerious and many other bands, lynnette elbowed me halfway through and said look behind us, and there clapping and cheering stood a monk all decked out! the concert was put on by the catholic diocese of austria but there were people from all backgrounds worshipping the same God. the concert was held in a giant old gas can, which also added to the ora of the evening, although we didn't get home till almost 4 am monday we had a really good time. The last two weeks have been a very refreshing time of fellowship, learning and worshipping our creator. The blog session I put on also went really good, I thought of calling it the biblical basis for blogging, but then after looking through my concordance for the word blog being mentioned in the bible I came up empty handed, who would have thought. Ya but we are so thankful for this two weeks and feel very recharged and ready for another year of ministry and live in Hungary!

2006-11-08T06:11:00.001-08:00

2006-11-08T05:36:00.000-08:00

Here is a shot from our group here in Balatonszemes, as you can probably tell its a whole lotta people represtenting a wide range of country working all over eastern europe. We've had a good time sharing all our interesting stories of language, culture mistakes. Good things from the past year and also our struggles which has been good as we have seen we are not alone in all these things. On saturday a group of us went to the local town of Keszthely to enjoy a day of just strolling and seeing some sights. As you can see we also enjoyed the first snowfall of the year, yeah can you just hear the excitment! Actually it has now warmed up again and we are enjoying the sun! In Keszthely there is a large palace/castle that is still kept to its orginal decor and look, rare in Hungary as most of the palaces where destroyed in war. This palace is famous for it huge library which was really cool, like being in a movie set or something, I had a good laugh looking at there very small english section as one of the books was entitled, "Men and horses I have known."

During the weeks we have had teaching on Exodus, Acts, leading Bible Studies and Discipleship, everyone also has made a presentation on their work from the last year and we have had prayer evenings for each country. I will also be giving a info session on bloggin on Friday, so that should be interesting. Many of us here have blogs but there are others who are interested so we will kinda have a open session on them, how they work and the sort. Don't ask how I am in charge of this but it should be interesting to say the least.

2006-11-01T04:34:00.000-08:00

Fall in Hungary,....

well the seasons have definatly changed and now we find ourselves in the midst of our first hungarian fall. the tree colours have changed and are so nice, bright reds and yellows. We are currently at a 2 week confrence near lake balaton and the area is so beautiful. this is the follow up of what we did when we first arrived in hungary so everyone from eastern europe has come back for the 2 weeks, alot of fun being together and hearing all the funny stories and realizing we aren't alone in our struggles! We also have daily teachings and pastoral care meetings which have been really good, refreshing and informative. Anyways ya thats what we are up to right now, hope you all are enjoying the change of seasons as well!

2006-10-24T09:45:00.000-07:00

on a happier note we are very proud to introduce to you all the latest addition to our extended family, Charles Jacob Riley, born to chris and cheryl, (kyle's sister)

We were more than happy to be woken up by the phone early this morning to the news! As much as we would love to be there celebrating with the family we are celebrating here with a big pot of goulash! We love the pic of proud papa being eyed up by his new son! Congrats Cheryl and Chris and we look forward to stories pics and of course meeting Charles! over webcam for now!

2006-10-23T13:48:00.000-07:00

50th aniversary of the 56 relevlotion

today hungary celebrated the 50th aniversary of the 56 revelotion against the occuping communists, it was a day for the people to celerate the people revlution, sadly the day was marred by every celebration being closed to the public and demonstraions which turned into riots, we headed into the city with friends thinking we would enjoy some hungarian festivites and see the celebrations, normally national holidays are filled with authentic hungarian food, music and many markets, but we came to realize tensions in the city would rule the day. We walked around the streets going from event to event only to realize they were for diplomats only and closed to the people, kinda ironic i must say, a day to celebrate the peoples revolution completely closed to the people. Close to the end of the day upon trying to get some coffee and a bathroom stop at a local Mcdonalds of all places we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of the action. The girls were in Mcdonalds while I (kyle) and a friend were watching the crowds gather, when we saw them carrying large items towards the police line we said to ourselves something may be happening, the crowd seemed tense but not too unruly, but suddenly we saw the police water cannons spraying the crowds and the next thing we know the tear gas cans started to fly, for those of you who are now worried, don't be, because we quickly retreated away from the crowds. It was so amazing to us how quickly things changed, becuase when we first standing there we commented on the amount of people but it really didn't seem to be a very aggressive crowd. It was kinda like a bee hive that got poked by broom or something because once that first assualt was made by the police things turned ugly.
The picture below is off the square just before the tear gas started to fly and the tank you see in the first picture we looked at earlier in the day. We found out later that it was actually started up by the rioters and driven towards the police line, aparently all that was done to disarm it was take the battery out. It was stopped before doing any damage and the rest of the night was spent pushing the crowds back and attempting to disperse the people.

The tear gas we encountered was the first that day and I think it took many by suprise as many people were like us just standing around trying to see what was going on and not knowing the seriousness of it all.

It is now 11pm and the riots are still going, probably will go all night. We just wanted to give a update and let everyone now we are now home safe, since many of you know we were headed into the city today and we didn't want anyone to freak out. So there is a little update on hungary and reminder to keep hungary and the people of hungary in your prayers, that peace would prevail and tensions settle and that God would use this time to speak to the hearts of hungarians. Many of the rioters have no goal other than just to disturb the peace and in the meantime many innocent people are being hurt along with police who are being forced onto the front lines, it really has been a sad day for hungary and has proven nothing other than giving the country a black eye in the world press. The 56 revloution was about a nation forming together to create change but today seems like it has been about trying to look good to the world/international diplomats and on the other hand a excuse to cause trouble, all in all it can be described as a big mess.

2006-10-19T08:15:00.000-07:00

What have we been up to lately??
well, since the summer has ended and our OVM outreaches have finished for this year...we have sort of changed our focus. there is a brazilian couple that im sure we have talked about already that work in Ofalu (the gypsy village near here) and we have joined them for the winter/spring months. so far it has been good, a change of pace...but its always interesting! OM has a ministry centre there (just a small part of a building) which is where we have all our meetings.so here is how a normal week goes for us in Ofalu ministry:
monday: english class (kyle & I are trying to start one)
tuesday: bible study
wednesday: clothing bazaar
thursday:nothing
friday: kids club
saturday:sometimes the boys play soccer at the local field
ya, so our week is quite busy, along with team prayer meeting day on tuesday, Hungarian lessons 2x a week in the evenings, and we attend an english bible study at our church in budapest on thursday nights! but if you remember to keep these items in your prayers, especially the english class the kyle and i are trying to start on monday nights. the first time nobody came, but we are going to advertise about it more and hopefully those who have already showed interest will attend. we will try to present the gospel to them in an easy way too, so please pray for us and this new ministry. this next week there is a team coming from England that will be doing a week program in Ofalu and Erchi, so we will be helping out there and joining with them. oh yes, the house in erchi that is being built for the gypsy family is having the roof put on this week and hopefully it will be sealed from the wind and cold soon, as the weather is getting quite cold here in the nights. thanks for all your prayers and support...have a great weekend!

2006-10-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

on the train ride home from Esztergom (kyle's b-day trip)...what else better to do on a train than take some crazy pictures....i love my husband...we laugh and have fun all the time! HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my amazing husband!

2006-10-16T00:38:00.000-07:00

"Lomtalanitas"ing it!
Birthdays in foreign countries are always filled with un-expected “special” events but I honestly can’t say I ever thought it would involve such a “cultural” experience. We were invited out to team mates of ours for a nice day to visit their church and the such, the other small detail involved was a little garage cleaning. They moved last spring into a new place and the back garage was formerly an upholstery shop, and was filled with well... a little bit of everything and a whole lotta old cushions. Lomtalantas is a time when residents can put anything out on their front drives and the city will take it away for you, so for a day the whole neighbourhood turns into something that resembles a mix between war and flood zone. Quite the sight to behold. This happens twice a year and so Matt and I thought we would take advantage of it and pile as much as possible infront of his place, as you can see we were very successful and now the next question is will they take it all! Of course with piles of garbage comes scanvengers and we had our fill of those throughout the day, we decided this should be a new addition to missionary manuals for networking as we had all sorts of vistors and neigbours coming throughout the day for metal, vacuums and just to stand and look in wonderment at our great wall! At one point we even had some old residents drop by to give us a little history lesson of the house and back gargages of the Edwards place, which was a one point the town butcher and auction barn, then turned into a uposltry shop which was quite easy to figure out given all the evidence we hauled out all day. We figure if this place was in north America we could have made a killing selling of all the relics we found, early 1900 photos, a birth and marriage certificate from that period also, hand crafted seats, sofa’s and tables and even a old combing wheel used to make the stuffing for cushions, oh and did I mention the cushions were filled with animal hair, ya I found this out upon throwing one in the fire, not such a good idea, the smell reminded me of burning my knuckle hair or something, the stench was terrible to say the least.

The day wasn’t all work we also went to their church plant in the morning for their Sunday service. This is a very new church and already has between 20-40 attending, it was a really special time to be involved in such a fresh and vibrant church. We really enjoyed the service and people you could really feel that God was going to do special things with them in that city, pray for the Tatabanya Calvary Chapel as they continue to grow and reach their community. Matt just last week started their first youth event! Thanks again guys for the great day and cake! Yes as you can see I got a birthday cake and for those of you who can remember Lynnettes birthday my candle even out does her giant matchstick! And mom yes it was really marzipan!

The weekend also included a trip to Esztergom with some friends from church, it was a cool town of course dominated by a huge cathedral, we climbed to the top of the bell tower which made for some cool views, the bell inside was huge. I think something like 6 tonnes As we were standing there we realized it was just about noon so we all prepared to make a sprint down the stairs at the first sign of movement of the bell. But we found out later that the big one is only used for special occasions and the smaller one is used daily. We also took advantage of the close proximity of the slovakian border and took a walk across the bridge for a stroll in slovakia, not everday you can say that! They had a big fair and market on the Slovak side so it made for some interesting sights.

2006-10-09T00:46:00.000-07:00

Moving and bogracs’:

Home sweet home, yesterday we finally had a chance to properly un-pack and set up our new pad. We had moved in earlier in the week but were too busy to do anything but eat and sleep here. Our place is only about a 10 minute drive from the old, closer to the town center but further from the team office, but we are really liking it. Plus a new pool will be opening right across the street from our place. And speaking of streets, ours will soon be paved, well apparently they will be, we will see. A big step up in the world of Erd for us! And we even have a proper flush toilet here….anyone who visited us knows what we had before, it was more of a trickle of water (plus the assist of a bucket full of water helped!) Yah for modern technologies! Thursday and Friday we spent helping in Ofalu and Erchi. The local Christian high school had their service days so we were flooded with 40 teens. Half the group painted and worked on the ministry center in Ofalu and the other half we took to Erchi to work on the house project,(which is now at roof stage!) Part of the team in Erchi (the girls) painted a different house down the road, the girls all came back covered in bubble gum pink paint, apparently a popular colour here! We also did kids programs and finished the days off with a bogracs in Ofalu. Now your probably saying “that sounds interesting what’s that?” Well let me fill you in on a Hungarian tradition handed down from ancestor to ancestor and now to us Canadians! Basically a bogracs is a Hungarian cook out, and also the name of what you cook your meal in. If you look at the picture you will see Lynnette stirring the meal (goulash soup), for 80 people you need one big pot! Goulash is filled with potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, meat, parsnip (or white carrot as they like to call it here), a whole lot of paprika, and a goulash paste. Well hopefully we got it right with the little Hungarian help we had, our team of Canadians, Brazilians and Americans did our best and it seemed to turn out, no complaints at least. We will have to try it out on you guys at home sometime when we get back!
Here are some pictures of our new pad, amazing how a new place can even make mopping exciting, hey Lynnette!?! And also a picture from outside… notice our wheels out front too, ok not our own wheels but a team mate, (Jill from England) has very generously lent us her car for the winter as she is going home on furlough. It will be so nice to have especially during the cold winter months. Thanks again so much Jill! We are having her over for Canadian thanksgiving on Tuesday so we will have so pictures to introduce her to u all! We will enjoy a Canadian tradition together, complete with turkey, mashed potatoes and even some “stove top” stuffing sent from home! (thanks mom!) We figured since Canada is a commonwealth country of England then who better to enjoy thanksgiving with!

2006-10-08T12:22:00.000-07:00

today i am officialy hating the computer and technology! Blogger is not letting me post any pics and is taking FOREVER!!! and i cant get our prayer letter sent out...so i dont like hotmail today either! so hopefully we can get things together and make friends with the internet again! sorry for the delay in updates...its been a little CRAZY busy lately, but we will tell about that later!

2006-10-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

Weekend with the youth: october has found us so quickly and we are back from our last OVM outreach of the year, we spent the weekend with youth from a town not far out of budapest at a youth camp, we joined them for their annual camp. The camps focus was on rock music and what we fill our minds with, the youth were all from the Lutheran church and had all been confirmed this year so our focus was really on getting them to think about what that means and to realize that their faith is a choice not something inherited from their parents. The pastor of this church as a real passion to see the youth break from traditionalism and take their relationship seriously. Of course it was a teens camp so it was filled with all the extra excitement, arguments and of course annoyed caretakers, pool staff and the such. But what camp goes with out it little quirks. Last night we both had a chance to share our testimonies and do a couple skits. Yes thats right we do drama now, I know it makes me crack up to, never know what you may find yourself doing here! Lynnette is a master actress, I have a tough time keeping a straight face while in role! Well in other news the weather is still like a early september day in vancouver, we fear that winter hits it will take us completely by surprise but until then we will continue to enjoy days in shorts t-shirts and sandals. Well since we keep delaying packing for our big move this week I guess I better get on it, ah maybe not theres not so much to pack! We don't exactly have much in the way of possessions. Yet somehow things tend to pile up, when I read how Jesus told the disciples to take on the sandals on their feet and then I look at what we have it kinda hits me to think about what I really need and what is just extra, not that we can't have stuff but just what do I see as essentails as what do I see as extras. Coming here with only a small portion of what we own has really opened my eyes to how much we really have and don't really use, some of the stuff I have packed at my parents is things I use maybe 2 or 3 times a year. Maybe I should just tell my parents to just have a big garage sale, or maybe not. I guess that means I'm still attached. I would be lying if I told you I am completely disconnected with possesions but I am just a little less reliant I guess, take the microwave for example, I have come to realize I can survive without it. But I do miss popcorn, although I faintly remember it being made in some sorta spining thing.