Nous l'avons fait! (We did it! We have finally graduated!)

Here we our with our certificates after our graduation. We hope to be fluent within the next ten years!!

Ok, so it has been a while since we posted. Things have been really busy for us during the past two months with final exams, graduation, Kristen's parent's visiting and packing to move to Africa. We finally finished our French course and graduated on June 24th. It was 10 months of intense language learning. Honestly it was a lot harder than we expected, but we have progressed so much in our French. We can understand almost everything we hear, about 95% or more, and we can communicate enough to build good relationships and preach and teach. We are still learning and will have a tutor when we get to Africa.
After graduation, my parent's (Kristen) came to visit us. It was so great to get to see them after being gone for 10 months and before leaving for Cameroon. They stayed with us and we took them around our region, which is the Rhone-Alp region. We went about 30 minutes from where we live to a city called Beaufortain, where they have a cheese factory. We showed them the cheese factory, bought some cheese and french bread and had a little pic nic. After that we drove through the mountains, which mom was not too happy about, and made it to a beautiful crystal blue lake, where the cute cows with there big bells on where being milked. We also went to Geneva, Switzerland which is only an hour and half away from us and Mont Blanc, which is the highest mountain in Western Europe. Anyway we had a really great time with them and were glad they could come see the beautiful placed where we have been blessed to live for the past 11 months.


Here we are in front of the famous clock in Geneva. We have done Geneva several times, but it was good to be able to do it one last time with family. I think we could have worn a little more green...


Here we are at a castle which is about a 15 minute drive from our house. Chateau de Miolans was built in the 15oo's and has an awesome view of the mountains and of Mont Blanc.


Only in France can you find a bread vending machine! We couldn't believe it but the bread was actually hot and fresh. Yum Yum....


Larry was really wanting to go to Euro Disney while here in France but settled for a short ride in this Mickey Mouse car outside an arcade in Chamonix, which is a city at the foot of Mont Blanc.


And for what is going right now-packing, packing, and more packing. We leave for Cameroun in 10 days. We will be leaving our house at around 3:30am to get to the airport in Lyon, which is an hour and 3o minutes away on July 24th. We are almost finished with packing all 9 of our bags. I know it seems like a lot, but only having 9 bags of stuff to live in Cameroun for 2 years is not that much considering that you can't find many things there. We have are necessities like our water filter, meat grinder, pressure cooker (for me), wind up flashlights for when we have no power, flip flops, flip flops, and more flip flops (of course for me-K), clothes and a partridge and a pear tree. We are excited about finally leaving for Africa. We should get our STL truck soon after we arrive, but we will have to find a place to live. Please pray that God will help us to find a nice little house or apartement to live in with an outdoor area for our dog and to hang our clothes out. I am so excited that we will finally have a dog. We plan to be getting a puppy from another missionary family. It will be a german shepard and if we get a girl I think we'll name her Ally and if we have a boy as well, we will name him Bama. Please pray for us as we travel that God will protect us and give us favor with customs once we arrive in Cameroun, and also that we will get all our bags and none will be stolen. Thank you for praying for us, keeping in touch, and encouraging us. We'll try to blog as often as possible while in Cameroun but we are not sure of our internet situation. We most likely will not have internet in our house but we are hoping that the city we live in will have an internet cafe. When we lived in Africa before we had to drive 3 1/2 hours to get internet connection, but after four years I'm sure things have progresssed a lot more, well, at least I'm hoping. That's all for now, we have to get back to packing.


One down and eight to go. Here is Joel weighing our bags.