And so it begins . . .

Hmm, where to begin today. I guess I should start with yesterday's happenings. Nothing too interesting. When we arrived in Suli, we were granted 10 day visas, so we were set for a little while to get settled in. Yesterday morning we headed out with the lawyer to obtain our 3 month visas. All I can say is that without him, there is NO way we would have been able to figure out where to go and what to do. We were shuffled from one window to the next, back to the first one, then upstairs, downstairs, back upstairs, in one room, out another, back into the same room, etc. It took us about 2 hours to complete the process for all 4 of us that arrived last week. There are 2 more women arriving tonight around 1 am, then another man arriving next week which will bring our total short-term team to 7. I am happy to say that the 4 of us are now legal for 3 months, which means we can stay until 21 September.


Today was quite different. After our morning jaunt in the park, we got ready to head to the Bazaar. I cannot even begin to describe the Bazaar. It is incredibly overwhelming, but amazing to see. I was never quite sure where to look or what to look at. While we were there, we were on a mission for two items, running pants for me and a watch for Cheryl. Shopping is definilty a process here. I'm not usually a huge fan of shopping to begin with, but here in K'stan I'm even less so. Hopefully I'll get the hang of it, but that means I need to learn much more Kurdish. I think I'm up to about 5 words now! Luckily though, we will be getting a crash course once a week; enough that we should be able to get around.


Another objective to heading to the Bazaar was to check out and tour the Boy's center there. This is a place that boys (who work in the Bazaar) can go to play games and rest during the hot day. It was very interesting to see and talk with the director of the center. There have been team members that have been going to this center about once a week for a while to play games and build relationships with these boys. We are hoping to continue this throughout the summer. Please pr'y that there will be opportunity for us to continue doing this and help out in any way we can at this center. It is a very important place for these boys to go.


Please also pr'y for our registration process and classes that will be beginning on Sunday evening. So far we've had a pretty nice turnout for registration and will have 2 more evenings coming up. It is so amazing to see the people coming in with so much excitement about learning English!