Merry Noël

All is going well here. The Valdocco is continuing to grow, our CCD classes are in the middle of preparing for confirmation, the boarding school now knows how to play baseball, basketball, and football(American), and we're all prepared and ready for Christmas!

In the last couple months there's been a lot of progress at the Valdocco.  We've added another 10 kids, to bring up our total to 21; and we've also had to add two more part-time tutorers to help with the afternoon homework sessions.  For October, the schools in France had a sort-of fall break for two weeks, so that gave us an opportunity to put on two mini-camps. The first was a joint camp with the Valdocco from Lyon at a youth center outside of Avignon.  One of the major goals of this camp, aside working with the kids, was to help the new youth leaders learn how to organize and lead different activities for future camps.  Half of the staff would work with the kids while the other half would participate in classes and discussions.  It turned out well, with all the new youth leaders,

With each group comes new challenges,
 you can see one of our challenges in this picture.

to include myself, being able to organize an activity for kids; I teamed up with another new youth leader to put on a variety show with a skit, trivia game, and relay race.

For the second week of vacation, and for Halloween, we had our second camp back in Nice.  For this camp we combined activities in afternoon with homework sessions in the morning.  We had on average 8 kids coming each day, from the 2 different schools in our quarter.  Some of the activities we did were mountain biking, a small soccer tournament, and then on the last day we all went out to a local park to play baseball, football, run an obstacle course, and paint ourselves (the kids) up like ghostly zombies.

Here they come!

After fall break and for November and most of December we've been back to work focusing on improving the Valdocco, working with the 3 CCD classes, organizing activities with the boarding school, and I've been talking to more English classes. The CCD classes are all coming along, they seem to be learning and more importantly maintaining there motivation to come.  Two of three classes that Manu and I teach meet during the lunch periods on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and for December we combined the two so that we could organize a small skit for the school's Christmas show. The show turned out to be a combination of a Christmas blessing (from two of the resident priests), a small awards ceremony, some singing of French Christmas songs, and the CCD's skit.  It went well!  The kids performed a modern version of the Nativity that lasted for about 15 minutes and had 8ish good sized parts to play, with the rest of the kids serving in supporting roles (curious bystanders and farm animals).  One of the awards was the presentation of food that the school had collected in a drive to support a local mission, we filled up two shopping carts with cakes, canned food, and other holiday treats.

The Nativity, you can barley see Mary holding a baby Jesus in the middle.

Jennifer perfectly reciting her lines. 

I've been staying busy with the boarding school too, helping by planning activities for Tuesday and Thursday nights. As of lately we've been playing a lot of American sports, and it's not cause I'm pressuring them to play with me, but because I think they actually enjoy playing American sports, with the real rules! (not like the baseball adaption that I saw in the PE class where there's 5 bases..) Since the last post we've had 12 evenings that we've payed sports ranging from: volleyball, ping-pong, soccer, basketball, baseball, and football American.  I thought about badminton, but they seem to be more into physical sports, and they're not real big on things from England (except soccer, rugby, and tennis..).  On Monday's we've started helping out at the local soup kitchen mission.  The same mission we donated the two carts of food to during our Christmas show, is who we've been working with.  We typically have a small group of three to four kids from the boarding school and a professor who'll drive us to two spots to help with the distribution of soup, sandwiches, and drinks.  All together the group of volunteers range from 15-25 people and we probably serve around 45-55 needy locals.

Three Soup Kitchen volunteers from the Boarding school.

The Parish had it's Christmas party last Sunday.  It turned out well, and we had a good amount of the congregation show up. The Sunday flyers had it advertised as a Karaoke party so I was feeling pretty good about it, I was sure to practice all my country Christmas classics beforehand.  The way it ended up going was that we divided up into four teams with each team judging the other. The teams sang four times, in the categories of French Christmas songs, English Christmas songs, Disney songs, and random Christmas songs.  Our team ended up coming in third, despite dominating the English Christmas song category (we sang George Michael's Last Christmas). In the end everyone had a good time, and it's probably for the best that I didn't go solo, all be it I was more than ready.

Manu explaining the
rules to "team-karaoke"

That's about all that's been going on here.  For the Christmas break the Valdocco will be having a week long camp in which I'll be sure to get some pictures posted from that.  I'm planned on talking to more English classes in January, and I'll let you know if anything new comes from there.  On the personal side of things I've been pretty lucky in that I've been given some time off for travel.  My brother came for Thanksgiving which was great.  We met in Munich, went to Austria, and finished in Nice. It was nice to talk freely in English again and to have someone to watch college football with (especially on the night of the Iron Bowl!).  For Christmas and New Years I'll be staying in France and visiting some friends in Paris.  It's good to hear from everyone, and to know I'm in your thoughts and prayers.  Let me know if y'all have any questions are thoughts.. or maybe want to come visit!!

À toute à l'heure!

Cultural differences:

I think I've pretty much become used to living here, so things seem less strange and harder to recognize as different... the only things I've notice recently are:

The weird Students/teachers schedules.  Every student has a different schedule with each day being a different combination of classes with different times of finishing for the day; sometimes they'll finish at noon and other times at 5:30.
The teachers are the same way, crazy schedules and on top of that they don't stay in the same room, they move for each class.  That leaves the classrooms undecorated and gives them a sort of cold/sterile feeling.  And for some reason the teachers have to go get there classes, usually standing together in the court yard, before each class.

The other difference is a good one, and that's all the Christmas markets.  It seems like each town organizes a couple spot in the city center for all the local business to set up kiosks to sell all kinds of good Christmas gifts and snacks (hot churros, crepes, hot wine, and other junk food).  And there's always an ice rink, which gives you something to watch while you're eating or drinking.