The Towers Fell I was a teenager when the towers fell, the first 9/11. I remember watching it happen on TV and thinking that it all had to be a movie. It couldn’t be real. No way would humans do this to each other. I got caught up in the patriotism that [...]
Finding Encouragement Sometimes it’s hard to find joy or feel encouraged in a given moment or a given day. Life overseas in a different culture can be hard. Physical comforts are sometimes lacking. Relational support is sometimes lacking. And sometimes it’s simply your own attitude that is lacking. But instead of making a top 10 [...]
Creative Teaching Solutions, Iraq Style! One of the major challenges for my students learning English as a second language was vocabulary! When I started teaching 2nd grade Humanities my students couldn’t understand and respond to the simple commands “get a pencil” or “turn to page 5”. Every word seemed like a new word for them to learn. [...]
Get Lost We went to the mall. We loaded the taxi full of our purchases, realizing too late we couldn’t tell him where we lived. A phone call and lots of wild gesturing occurred before we were on our way. We made it home and gave our driver a great story about crazy American women. [...]
SGI’s first 7 Projects 1 - To kick things off, there was a 40’ trailer of food donated (I think potatoes) that we passed out to Kurdish refugees in Nashville. 2 - Set-up the basement of one team member as a studio, and overdubbed the Jesus Film into Bahdini Kurdish dialect. 3 - Organized a [...]
Up until a few weeks ago I had never travelled internationally with my dad. I mean we did the typical family road trips, and a few father daughter canoe trips, but nothing really BIG. He’d taken my other siblings back to see where he grew up in Brazil, but I was too young at the [...]
When I think of fatherhood – and especially when I reflect on becoming a dad for the first time – it’s very much linked with my experience of living in Kurdistan. When our oldest was born (he’s 4 now), my wife and I had been teaching there for a year. Just long enough to finally [...]
I went to bed with the taste of dust in my mouth. This morning every surface of our fairly well-sealed home was covered in a fine layer of tan. The rest of the world outside was even more thickly blanketed with powder... more dust. Each footstep poofs and all of my roommates sneeze. "God bless [...]
Sarah was like many girls you know, spending her days that August preparing for her last year in high school. But one morning in 2014 terror struck and her life was changed forever. You see, Sarah is a Yazidi and she lived in the Sinjar region of western Iraq. And that August morning at 11:00 am [...]
“Can I come over and just watch how you live? I’d like to know how you guys live.” said Lydia. At the time, we thought it was a weird request from our student, but sure, why not? So she came over and spent at least a good six hours sitting at our big kitchen table just hanging [...]
