Dear Friends and Family,

Well… we have arrived safely in Germany! Alex watched “Spongebob, Squarepants” in German yesterday. When I asked him if he could understand the cartoon he said – “Their voices speak German but how they move still speaks English”.

Here are some of the highlights of the last couple of weeks:

1) We sold our car before Christmas. We had a wonderful goodbye party on the 7th. Thank you to all of you who came. We had excellent goodbyes with family and friends who will be sorely missed.

2) Yesterday we watched the sun rise over the Swiss Alps as we flew in. None of us slept much – Alex slept for about 2 hours – I think we were too excited.

3) We were warmly greeted at the Zurich airport by our team and then made our way up to the home of E-Dot’s director to spend a few days decompressing and getting settled before we move in to our apartment next week. They have 3 kids (youngest is 8 ) so Alex has had a great time playing and has refused to do any catching up on sleep even when they are at school.

4) Yesterday we registered with the government so that our shipping container can clear customs this week and should arrive for us at our new apartment next Tuesday. Today we spent at the bank and the telephone company ordering our new phone. We also got to tour our new apartment … and I loved it! It’s not big but it is very bright and “open” feeling and everything has been well cared for.

5) One of our team members Sue, speaks Germany fluently and was also the most recent to arrive, so she is our tour guide, helper and translator. We can already tell that we are starting to pick up on things a bit. Our formal language classes won’t start until February.

So overall we are doing really well. Here are a few praises and prayer requests:

1) We are here! What an amazing work God has done and thanks to the many of you who prayed and gave and encouraged us along the way.
2) Pray for the custom’s process with our container. We don’t anticipate any problems, but prayer never hurt.
3) We had asked for prayer about the Euro- and you must be praying because it has dropped a little bit. Keep it up – particularly next week when we’ll need to transfer the money to buy our car.
4) Alex was accepted into the kindergarten next door to us! Pray we’ll have wisdom when to have him begin and that he will transition smoothly. Only one of the staff speaks English so it will be a full immersion class for him.

I know this was long…. Check out Courtney’s bog on our website to keep up with our day to day journey. Our e-mail will stay the same.

Love,

Courtney and Krista Roes
www.roesgarden.com
Courtney@roesgarden.com
Krista@Roesgarden.com