a nice long catch up

Hello! Wow it seems like it’s been so long!! I guess it has been quite a while… sorry life is so hectic and without the internet at home, I often have loads of odd little things to do in not a great amount of time when I do get online. Hence why I’m writing this in Word, at home (my home in Brussels… not home home…) and then I’m going to bring it down to the internet café at the end of my road a bit later on to publish, saves me time AND money

So I’ll try and catch you up a bit on the last five weeks, I might even manage to get photos in here too… we’ll see how the Belgian computer likes that later… but yes. I’ll try and give it some structure so you can skip bits you already know about…

Accommodation

The first two weeks I was with Tim and Emily, and Lucy, while we searched for rooms. We originally wanted to live together, me and Lucy, but with other students too. However that proved too hard to find so we split. We found my room first which Lucy generously said I could have, as it’s a room in a shared apartment with two Belgian students. Obviously for me, but maybe less obviously for them… we didn’t know each other before we moved in… but it’s really nice. We don’t socialise loads or anything, and they go home at the weekend so I’m here on my own then… but we chat in the kitchen and “bise” lol. Bise-ing… short for bisous… kisses… you know the French/European way. Here fortunately.. it’s only a one-cheek affair… but I always forget and just like… go the wrong way or offer my cheek only to find the other person has started a conversation with someone or such like…it’s all very embarrassing for me lol… but it’s for the Gospel. So I’ll endure it. :D

French

Well… it’s proving a lot harder than I thought it would! Especially because the rest of the team seem pretty much fluent. However I have improved I think since arriving… I’m learning some phrases and colloquialisms and how to use them. For example… en fait (not fiat as I just typed accidentally)… ummm bof! (I never understood the context for using that one before), chouette – means “cool”, and adding quoi onto the ends of random sentences, I’ve still not quite got the hang of that one.. but hopefully soon!
Happily, I’ve found a reasonably cheap, and nice, and friendly private language school at the end of my road (that sounds quite close, but it’s quite a long road, the European parliament is also “just around the corner”) but it’s quite easy to get to on the bus that stops outside my house, and it’s a course for kind of higher intermediate/advanced students. I had to do a written and oral test to see where I should go, so I was quite pleased with this evaluation. And it’s for 30 hours, with two lessons per week, 1 ½ each, starting on Tuesday until the start of January (with Christmas holiday obviously).

Team Life

So I’m part of the IFES team here, which is Tim and Emily, team leaders, and me and Lucy, team members. The other staff are Erwin, the general secretary, and David who is doing a stage type thing I understand, with the GBU from the Belgian Bible Institute (or IBB from the French). We have staff meetings every two weeks in french, which are a bit crazy and I almost had one of my infamous breakdowns whenever I’m first immersed into French and having to understand and contribute and what not…. But covered it up well with having a cold anyway at the time so my sniffles went unnoticed (until now… lol!!)

We also have a team meeting, just the four of us with IFES, once a week on Thursday nights where we take it in turns to cook one week, and to prepare the bible study another. We’re currently studying Galatians which is cool. I did my first ever study that I’d kind of, written myself last week, and then probably more stressfully... cooked this week!! I’m not a great cook… and I thought I’d picked something relatively simple… hmm. But it worked and it wasn’t too bad… it was like pork wrapped in bacon with tomatoey basil and apple saucey stuff, and then some fried rice with various bits and bobs in it. Lol! We also have our *extra* team meeting on a Saturday night, in front of Strictly come Dancing… I am slowly starting to maybe agree with Emily “Anton-du-Beke!” (as opposed to the much less chantable “Bruce Forsyth”.

We ALSO get supervision aka one to one type meetings once per week, where we meet up with Emily just on our own (when I say we I mean me and Lucy), and so me and Emily are studying Acts, and also reading Knowing God by J.I. Packer (yes Matt I’m sorry… I do have your copy… :S…you were in Spain!) and yeah, they’re really nice and helpful. I love one to ones.

The GBU

One to ones are something I’d love to be able to do with one or two students here, because like I say, I feel like I’ve really benefitted from them in the past, and yeah…they’re just awesome. But it’s hard here because there’s not so much of a culture of doing one to ones, so a lot of students think it’s a bit weird to sit down and study the bible with just two of you… but I’m hoping to be able to sometime in the future, maybe when I know students better. Also might be able to mix that in with some English help or something… I had an idea for my dissertation, something about how TEFL is used in mission organisations and then..somehow managing to make that incorporate me being able to design English lessons around a series of bible studies… maybe evangelistic ones… hmm. But we shall see… I’d also be really interested to do it on the French side, something to do with former French/Belgian colonies like Congo and Rwanda. I just finished one of my “to read” books: “After the Locusts” by Meg Guillebaud… which is about how the Gospel is allowing people in Rwanda to forgive each other after the 1994 genocide. It was amazing. So yeah… but would be quite tough to write about and research and everything… so we’ll see.

Anyway… how did I get there? The GBU. The first group to start back was the ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles) group, which meets on a Monday night at Tim and Emily’s, so me and Lucy both went there for the past few weeks, but Tim is a co-responsable there already, so we’ve since been going to other groups, as Monday night is a popular one for GBU groups here! I was really encouraged by going there though, there seems to be usually somewhere around 10-15 students there, and they’re studying (as are all the GBU group in Belgium this term) Habbakuk and Amos. I found it quite hard to follow to discussions, but the students were friendly, and we’ve got to know a few quite well. At the end of October is the GBU “camp” or house party to UK people… in a town called Spa which is apparently really nice. And someone is going to speak on Revelation, which (great translation) is called l’Apocalypse in French! :D That’s for all of the GBU groups in Belgium so should be cool!!

So where am I actually going? Well, there are two groups that meet at a university called UCL (I can’t remember what it stands for… Université Catholique … something…) but anyway, it’s a medical university. And there’s one group which meets at lunch time on Mondays, and one in the evening at 19h. I went to the lunchtime group with David last week, and again it was nice. We looked at Habbakuk, and at most there were 10 or 11 of us. But because it’s at lunch time, some students had to leave early, and others arrived late because of lectures, so it’s quite hard I think. Also they apparently meet every morning to pray together in a corridor. Which is amazing! But also means they see each other all the time, and it’s a campus university so they live there I think, and see each other around a lot so I think it will be quite hard to really make good friends with them. Kind of reminds me of my CU, we all know each other so well and see each other so much, it must be quite hard for relay workers and outside people to come in and make friends. I have a new appreciation for you Nathan and Nick! :D I haven’t been to the evening group yet, that’s next week’s new thing.

The OTHER group, that both I and Lucy are going to, is a new group beind set up in the centre of Brussels where there are several higher education college places and “écoles supérieures”, IHECS, Beaux Arts, Conservatories, Marie-Abs (I’m not sure if that’s what it’s called, but it’s what it sounds like when it’s talked about!) We’ve met every Wednesday for the past 3 weeks with the students setting it up, to plan and pray about it. This week, on Thursday we went to print out the flyers and cut them out. We’ve got 1500 I think, and 40 posters or “affiches”, we went to put the posters up, then on Friday we met at 7.30am in town (true story.. Mum!) to give ouyt flyers outside IHECS and Beaux-Arts, and I think we’re going to do that again on Monday.

It’s fair to say I was pretty petrified about flyering in Belgium. I actually quite enjoy it in Preston… I make a bit of a fool of myself, but still. I was scared of making people not want to come if they realised I was English, and feeling patronised by being invited to something in their country, by someone who can’t really speak the language fluently yet. But I figured… God’s sovereign so… let’s do it. And it wasn’t as traumatic as I thought. But you do suddenly realise how the language barrier stops you in even the smallest things… in the UK I would say something like… “hi, can I just give you a flyer about some events the CU are putting on?” or something… here I was like… “Bonjour” *wave flyer around under nose* *make them take it* “Merci! Bon journée!” Lol!

So anyway… this group starts this Wednesday at 17h15 at IBB in town. We’ve tried to aim it at Christians AND interested non-Christians, so we’re going to study Mark. Woohoo! Here is something I know a bit after the Gospel Project last year! But yeah, I won’t be leading any of the studies maybe until after Christmas when hopefully I’ll be a bit more fluent, but me and Lucy might meet up with one of the co-responsables for the group, to help her prepare the study.
WOOOOP. There are other things I want to write about… Erasmus students… possibly going to see Muse in Antwerp… funding… church…. But this is a meeeeeeeeeeeega long blog and I’ve been writing it for ages and I do have a life and a big to do list squished onto a tiny pink post it note of things to do today. SO. I will love you and leave you. Hopefully will get the rest of my catch up blog done soon and then can get back to regular blogging.

Thanks for reading this! My prayer letter, which is less detailed than this, but gives you the main ideas and is quite pretty, is available here: ……… but it hasn’t uploaded right and I’m hoping I’ll soon be able to fix that with a pdf converter thingy. (I’m not as clever as that makes me sound)

Bisous! xx

ps. sorry the belgian computer does NOT like photos on blogs :(