Hello from sunny Alaska! While the rest of the country is covered in snow, we are thawing nicely up here! The sun has been re-emerging this week, and temps are slowly rising (although today was in the teens again, surely just a fluke.)
We have been soaking up as much of the sun as possible this past week, but most of February was spent in survival mode. With several weeks of rain at the start of the month, we were stuck indoors quite a bit. Noah was very busy with hockey, Grace is doing her piano thing, and Steve and I have been working hard at ACC. Consequently, I don't have many pictures to share (I am sure you are devastated!) Here are a few favorites from a recent walk to the beach.
While preparing to travel to Arizona in a week and a half, I put together a quick video update for all of our friends that support ACC financially, and/or like to keep up with how our students are doing. We will be sharing this video with supporters in AZ, but I wanted to share it with all of you as well. I apologize for the corniness of the beginning- believe it or not it took around 20 takes to get something even that mediocre. :)
The semester is flying by! One fun thing that has been happening on campus is the start of a pen-pal exchange between our students and a great group of Cambodian 3rd graders. These kids crack me up, every picture and video they send is so typically "3rd grade"- I see Grace in every one of them. They may have different 1st languages, different cultures, & different upbringings, but they still all love Frozen. :)
Our campus pastor, Amanda, is friends with the teacher of this class, and they have enabled the exchanging of letters between our students. The Cambodian students sent us a video introducing themselves, sharing their likes and dislikes, and asking us about Alaska (they have never seen snow). When our students decided to write them letters (which Amanda scanned and emailed so the 3rd graders wouldn't have to wait) the Cambodian students were so excited that they immediately grabbed their markers and paper to write our students back- even though they were supposed to be leaving school for the day.
It has been really interesting learning about the history of Cambodia, and the horrible genocide that occurred there in the 80s. Most of the nation's educated people were slaughtered, leaving very little hope for the future children of Cambodia. These third graders have the opportunity to attend school, which will help educate them so that they will be less likely to become a victim of the horrible human-trafficking that occurs far too often there.
One of our students ***Dolena *** (I promised to put her name in lights- larger, colored font is the best I can do) took the initiative to make a video to send back to the kiddos in Cambodia. Her video beats mine hands down!
Dolena also has a pretty great blog! Check it out at http://whatthef0x.blogspot.com/ if you want to get a student's perspective on life as a student at ACC, amongst other things.
We will be traveling to AZ for spring break in just over a week. Hopefully we will see many of you while we are there, please let us know if you would like to get together! I can't believe we are already half way through this semester. Time flies when you are having fun. :) Love from Alaska!
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