No, I'm not pregnant, so don't get any ideas in that area! What's happening is, we're going to move - to another country! After many months of discussion and prayer, last fall we decided to apply to work overseas in a missionary school. We looked into dozens of different schools in various parts of the world, and finally narrowed it down to just a handful. We settled on Morrison Academy in Taiwan as our first choice, and they seemed to like us too. We interviewed with the superintendent in the Los Angeles airport, while he was on a layover on a trip through the U.S. Later Floyd and I each had a phone interview with our future supervisors in Taiwan, and finally we got the email saying we were accepted.
Morrison Academy is a school for missionary kids, but also opens its doors to the children of other Christian workers and businesspeople. If you're interested, check out its excellent website here to see what the school is like. We will be at their Taichung campus (they have several campuses in different cities in Taiwan). I will be teaching 5th grade, and Floyd will work in the office. Below is a screenshot showing how our future workplace looks from Google Earth. Notice the soccer field and L-shaped swimming pool.
Morrison is providing us with an apartment ten minutes' walk from school, which will definitely be a blessing. (We already know we'll have a guest room there, so if you're ever passing through Taiwan, please plan to come over for a visit!) They'll also provide us with a crash course in Mandarin Chinese, which will be essential. Although English is spoken at the school, we anticipate needing some Chinese to shop and do things around town.
We will be moving over there this summer, probably at the end of July. Our initial commitment is for two years, but we're praying about possibly staying longer. We'll see how the Lord leads. In the meantime, we're excited to prepare for this major transition in our lives! But first we have to figure out what to do with all our stuff. We're hoping to either take or get rid of most of what we own, but we'll probably still have plenty of things we'll want to store here, possibly including one or both of our cars. That's especially tricky since we're not sure how long we'll be gone.
Keep your eye on our blog to see how our plans progress. And in another five months or so, we'll probably be posting from Asia!
