Birds singing, trees swaying in the breeze, bright sunlight shining over everything ... such is my experience at the present moment. I am sitting in my dorm room, on a Saturday afternoon of our training conference (Pre-field Orientation, or PFO for short) here at Houghton College in western New York. If you want to find out what sort of place Houghton is, you could probably get a good idea by looking it up on Google Maps. It is about half an hour away from everything, and about an hour or so away from Buffalo, which is the nearest sizable city, so we are really out in the middle of nature for the most part. Presently, Laura and I are winding down and taking a little bit of time to catch up on some things that have been waiting for me to do them (such as making a blog post about our training experience so far).
We have been here since last Saturday, and have spent this first week "drinking from a fire hose" of information. We have had about seven to eight hours of intense information and training every day since Monday morning, and we are feeling a little bit overwhelmed with information, but all of it has been very practical and useful to us as we prepare to go teach overseas. We will continue the intense information overload on Monday morning, and will finish up with our training next Friday.
But not everything here involves working and studying and learning. There are also social times to be shared with fellow trainees, and we have developed good relationships with some of them, relationships that we expect will last long after this training conference is over. I am including a couple of pictures of some of those people below (one of them was taken yesterday evening during an excursion to a nearby state park).
A group of us learned how to make Arabic Tea, a very popular social event in Africa
Us along with several of the other people with whom we are starting to develop good friendships. (That is indeed a waterfall behind us, just in case you were wondering)
Overall, our experience here has been excellent up to this point, and we hope it continues to be so through the end of next week.
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