Happy New Year! Best wishes to you for a good new year filled with hope and blessings.
I promised, as I ended my last post, that I would give an update on the news of our sons, Robert and David. First, however, I’ll give a brief accounting of my medical news. My recovery is still going along slowly but moving in the right direction. It’s been 3 months now since I’ve needed a transfusion and my blood counts are steady and slowly inching without the help of any boosters for white blood cells or red blood cells. Another aspect that shows some progress is that I am now being scheduled for appointments at Dana Farber every 4 weeks. Until recently I’d been going weekly. I feel strong most of the time and have managed to avoid catching a cold or flu (always a concern.) I’ve been getting decent exercise shoveling snow, a great upper body workout. To keep my legs limber and strong I’ve been peddling along on my exercise bike (not as satisfying as snow removal though.)
David is now home. He returned from studies at the Corvinus University in Budapest, Hungary. He was there for a semester learning about Hungarian language, art, literature, economics and politics. Budapest is a beautiful city and he had fun exploring it both on his own and with his classes at the University. He has acquired a little skill in speaking Hungarian but only a little. It is a hard language to pick up and not much like English in structure. He lived in an apartment with 2 other students in the program for international students. The apartment was in a good location downtown where he had easy access to public transportation and shopping and cafes. Dave enjoyed the hot mineral baths for which the city is famous and toured the museums as well. One sad event of his stay was that his apartment was broken into and his camera and laptop were stolen. This occurred in mid-November, making the remainder of his school work a bit less convenient, he had to go to the University’s computer lab to write his papers etc. The greater loss was the digital images he’s already taken and that he couldn’t take any more. An important record of his stay there was lost along with the laptop’s hard drive.
Dave was able to visit other places in Europe. During his 4 months abroad he went to Munich, Prague, Vienna, Amsterdam, Transylvania and Slovenia. David wrote about his trip to Munich,
“ So I'm safely back from Oktoberfest, and it was a lot of fun. Myself, ryan(my roomate), andrew and chris went up in a night train that left about 930 and after 10 hours got in around 7:30 in the morning in Munich. We took a metro ride to Andrew's family friends which turned out to be a very friendly, very wealthy german family that lives in a nice suburb of Munich. It was some of the first home/family hospitality I had seen in a long while so it was very nice to be sat down and fed a great german breakfast (they have very good bread). They also had some of the best practical gadgets for cooking and such. They had an industrial bread slicer mounted into the center of their kitchen and had a tea maker that was shaped in a half dome with the pot resting on a ring with a candle mounted just to heat the very bottom of the tea holder. So german. So after we had breakfast there we went to Munich and to Oktoberfest. It was raining and pretty cold out but it we managed to get a seat within one of the massive tents. The beer that I was drinking at one tent has been brewed since 1397. The day was very fun and then saturday when we went back and all of the tents were filled by 8 am(we arrived at around 10 thinking we'd be sort of early) we managed to make friends with Italians and sit outside on a table, when it was a beautiful day out. So the weather fit perfectly to how our days had gone. I met up with Greg and Sawyer on satuday and spent the day with them and my friends from Budapest. It was a very tiring weekend and I got home around 11 o'clock sunday night. Things are well here, the weather is still very nice out, and I think I'm going to go Margaret Island after my next class for a few hours.”
The term abroad was a terrific experience for David and upon returning home on Christmas eve he talked about how nice it felt to be home and that he felt ready to conclude his travels, for now.
Robert will not be home from West Africa till sometime next summer or early Fall. He re-upped with the Peace Corps signing on for another year of teaching in Guinea. He was assigned to a different village for this trip. In his previous village he was on the ocean and benefited from the sea breeze. He said that village, Kanfarande, was one of the most beautiful places he’d ever seen. His new village, Bintimodia, is farther inland so a bit hotter but it does have some advantages. His current lodging is a proper house, not a thatched hut, his new school has smaller classes and better students. He can use a cell phone from his new village (though he barely catches the edge of a cell.) He is now a short bike ride (1.5. hours) from a place where he can get on the internet and swim in a pool, yes, that is a big deal. Robert wrote of his new home,
“My new home is a veritable mansion, I used to live in a one room hut with a thatch roof, and I have moved up in the world quite a bit. I have tiled floors, three bedrooms, two bathrooms with actual porcelain toilets (not pretty mind you, but no squatting involved), a large living room, and a great porch where I have strung my hammock. I of course still do not have electricity or running water, and cell phone coverage exists only under a specific mango tree (hilarious, no?) and down at the river.
I am no longer a physics teacher as I was in Kanfarande, but now am the math teacher for the 9th and 10th grades at the school in Bintimodia. Learning the new curriculum was something of a challenge, and I am now teaching a whopping 18 hours per week (a full 30% increase over my prior workload). It is less difficult in some regards than teaching a highly conceptual subject like physical science. I have the opportunity to work with concrete numbers and examples, repetition and practice are the mainstays of my courses. My 200 some odd students number about half of what they were at the old site, and as they are the older students, they have proven to be less difficult to control, a welcome relief.”
We are very proud of both of our boys and their interactions with the wider world. Theirs make my young adult life seems so plain and pale.
