I would encourage all kids about 8 and up to participate in the Hour of Code. Take an hour this week to complete your choice of three activities: drawing, building a website, working with a database.
Give Hour of Code a try. If it’s a hit in your home, here are a couple of other places where you can play to learn code.
Code.org https://studio.code.org/
Code Combat https://codecombat.com/
Image from CodeCombat.com
If you missed all the action, Easy Peasy was flagged as spam this morning by WordPress’ automatic controls meant to help us. They blocked our site until I could get ahold of them this morning to help them realize their mistake. They did and we’re okay. Everything’s back to normal.
Thank you for all of the patient responses. I’m sorry for the stress caused to those of you who panicked! As long as it is in my power, I will never leave you nor forsake you. 🙂
I am HERE. We are living in the capital, marked with a star. It’s pronounced, Skope-ye.
We have no visa to stay here, so we are making plans to head back to Germany at the end of November when our 90 days of visa-free travel ends. Then we will get another 90 days to stay visa-free in Germany.
We’re curious to get together with our refugee friends in Germany to see how things are now. Refugees want to get to Germany because they give free housing and a monthly allowance. That’s seriously why many only want to go there. They aren’t fleeing for their lives. Most are coming from Syria, and when they fled for their lives, they ended up in Turkey, Lebanon, or another country closer to their country of origin. Now it seems many are just looking for a better life.
We know the grass always looks greener on the other side of the border, so to speak, but some in Germany now are forced to live in tent cities because there wasn’t enough prepared housing for the influx. There is also increased violence. Some of those who fled Islamic countries because they became Christians are now forced to live with Muslim refugees who threaten their lives. It’s a mess of a situation. We don’t know if we can be of any use other than loving those refugees God brings into our lives.
We still have till the end of November in Macedonia. We don’t see any refugees here, and we’ve looked for them in the city. They seem to be just heading by train straight through. Macedonia is my favorite place, and I’m loving being here with my old friends. At least once a week we get together with someone for dinner. Tomorrow we’re meeting a family we met through EP. They’ve just arrived in Macedonia to start an orphanage. It is my hope we will be able to get a visa to stay in Macedonia if nothing changes in Germany. There’s nothing easy or certain about obtaining one though. Thanks for caring.
While we were away, Macedonia built tons of statues and monuments. Below is the city square with an enormous Alexander of Macedon on his horse; he’s better known as Alexander the Great.
I have always been vague about where we lived overseas and what our family did. I still don’t want to put too much online, but I do want to share what’s going on with my family right now as things are kind of topsy-turvy for us.
Until this summer my family had been living in southeast Turkey near the Syrian border. I’ve actually seen ISIS members. They recruited in our neighborhood. Our city faced the brunt of the influx of refugees from Syria to the point where now a quarter of the city is refugees. We ended up being support to a school for Syrian refugees and my husband discipled Syrian, Afghan, and Iranian pastors leading fellowships in the city.
This spring we found out that our residence permits were not going to be renewed to continue living anywhere in that region of Turkey. As we had felt called specifically to that city and not to Turkey in general, we didn’t feel right just choosing another city in Turkey to live in. We sought the Lord as a family and two weeks later found ourselves moving to eastern Germany, really east, like a stone’s throw from Poland, or as they say here, a cat’s leap.
We moved in with a family who had been strangers before we arrived. We were at their home for six weeks until we moved into our apartment just this August. Yes, we just moved in. When we went to apply for our residence permit in Germany, we were met with a letter saying our application would be denied unless we enrolled our children in school. They had been told by a German friend of ours that we would be homeschooling. (He had been trying to be helpful.) The Lord has not changed our minds on homeschooling, and so we began speaking with this official and that official and sending letters, etc. In the end we were not given permission to homeschool, and we have to leave. We’ve only been in our apartment for less than a month. This weekend my husband will leave with my two oldest to find our next home, and I will be traveling by plane a week later with the youngest four children.
Where are we going? We are headed to Macedonia. It’s the first foreign country the Lord brought us to years ago. We were there for 6 years, living and working among the Roma, better known as Gypsies. I love Macedonia, and I have not been for a visit since 2008. We are allowed to stay three months there without a visa before we either need to get permission to live there or get out.
We do plan on coming back to Germany in three months (we can re-enter after being out 90 days) and will keep doing the work we’ve begun here and we’ll see what comes of it. We have friends here who will continue to seek an exemption for us to homeschool. We don’t know what God’s plan is for all of this.
Please be praying for me and my family through all the transition. I love being home, so it’s hard for me to not have a place to settle into.
Our new look was short lived. It’s not working properly today. Hopefully WordPress will have it worked out shortly. I’m sorry for the crazy top menu. I can’t do anything about it at the moment.
This has been fixed. I’m thankful it was just a temporary glitch.
