Our first week at school

This week has been super busy, teaching lots of lessons and also having classes ourselves. One of the highlights of the week was teaching cookery classes, in which we made shortbread biscuits. The school covers school years from pre-school all the way up to year 11, but every class got stuck in and loved the cooking. Next week we think we might make some bread with them.
Josh and I also took our first music lesson which was a very interesting experience. We were so nervous and stayed up until gone midnight planning it but the kids engaged so well, and the activities we had picked worked well. It's really hard having grown up as a hearing musician to try and comprehend how the deaf respond to music and vibrations, and to know what activities will and will not work. Thank you so much to everyone who responded to our frantic prayer requests the night before and for all the suggestions of activities to try, they've been so helpful .
One of our main aims for the week was to help decorate the classrooms, which we have nearly completed. Decorations ranged from a tree of fruits with everyone's name and birthday written on their favourite fruit, along with the fruits of the spirit, to a solar system with people's names and birthdays written on the planets and a little space man holding the Colombian and British flags.
We have sign language lessons twice a week from 2-4 to help us improve our communication with the children. They are great fun but also very helpful and our communication gets better day by day. I am also getting more confident with my Spanish and often surprise myself with how much I can understand (I still have a lot to learn though!)
Other highlights of the week are: Dinner on Sunday with an amazing group of Colombians from Abi's church (the food was fantastic and the conversation was even better. We felt so welcomed, it was really amazing), cooking a roast dinner to celebrate the birthdays of a couple of Latin Link Striders (the next type of placement up from step) and the chance to meet a couple of native people from the Cachua tribe from the Colombian Amazon. They are working with some missionaries to translate the bible into their native language and was so interesting to hear how in the past 35 years the tribe has gone from worshiping native gods, with no knowledge of the one true God, to half of the tribe becoming Christians.
There's been a few times this week we've been completely out of our comfort zone and been quite nervous of how things would go, especially the music classes and the assembly. But through this, God has really shown his faithfulness and every time we have turned to God saying "HELP!", he has filled us with a sense of his peace and the things we had worried about went very smoothly and the inspiration we needed for different things from our assembly drama to what to decorate the classes with has been provided and has been so successful. Thank you God!!

My Blipfoto has been updated again. There are photos for each day  since I arrived, you can use the little calendar on the right under the picture to navigate through the days.

Prayer requests:

• Definitely need to thank God for his faithfulness and that He is with us even though we are miles away from home in a strange country and culture
• For a restful weekend, as we are all quite tired after this week
• That team relations continue to grow and that the fun times will keep coming!