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Thanks for visiting our site throughout the year. Our adventure in China is over, but the experience will never leave our memory. Now that we are back home we look forward to sharing with you personally about our experiences and how God has shaped us throughout the year.
We are back home in Austin, but only for a short time. We are going on a road trip with the Hendricks family to the Smoky Moutains and will return to Austin on August 5th. Veronica will be starting work back at the 401(k) Company and David is interviewing. Check out the recent updates on the right sidebar, and if you haven't seen them yet, we also posted our pictures from our winter vacation trip to Australia and New Zealand.
We discovered while we were dating that we both had a desire to live abroad, to be able to experience life in a different culture. About a year and a half ago (July 2005), we started doing some research into different programs and opportunities in a variety of places. While Veronica tended more towards Europe, David wanted to go somewhere that did not have a Christian culture and influence. We had our own little checklist of things that we wanted: to be able to find jobs where we can work with nationals, to be able to go without accumulating debt, to be able to fellowship with Christian believers, and to have an avenue for learning the language. After we determined what things we were looking for, we asked God to provide, continued our research, and applied to several different programs.
We finally found all that we asked for in the English Teaching Program in Shenzhen, China. We have accepted half-time teaching positions in the English department of a government middle school, which is for "juniors & seniors," in our terms, this would be their junior & senior high broken down into different sections. Veronica is teaching Junior 1 & a few Senior 1 classes, which is for students of age 12 and 15, respectively, and David is teaching Senior 1 students. We are also enrolled in Mandarin classes taught by professors at a local university, which gives us the opportunity to learn the language. We also are looking forward to joining in fellowship at a church for expatriates in Hong Kong (40 min. away). Our teaching jobs will pay for the trip, and hopefully will also provide a little extra for travel before we return to the States.
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