Szia (hello) is Sarah’s favorite Hungarian word at the moment. She calls it out to just about everyone she meets. We’ve been here in Budapest two months already, and we’ve already settled in nicely. Every week brings at least one new adventure of some kind or another. Mostly, just going to the store and finding what you need presents it very own set of challenges. Thankfully, most products are easy to find in one of the huge (American-sized) supermarkets or shopping malls. It’s when you can’t find something that the fun begins.

Daily Life

That is how I found myself this week in the hardware store – looking for something with which to treat our septic tank – talking to a French employee who spoke excellent English, but very little Hungarian and a Hungarian employee who spoke some English, but didn’t seem to know what a septic tank was, not even when I translated it for him on my phone (yes, there’s an app for that). With the help of some Hungarian and a drawing the Frenchman made, they managed to find it for me.

Jolanda has been taking Sarah to a weekly “Baby & Mother club” in the village where we are living. There are a surprising number of ladieswho attend who speak English, so Jolanda always has someone to talk during these times.

The girls

Sarah and Lisa are doing well. Lisa gets homeschooled every morning by Janneke, the Dutch teacher who came along with us. Unfortunately, she will be leaving us this coming Friday, but we already have the next two teachers lined up who will be joining us.

Sarah is attending a local, private pre-school and is enjoying it. She seems to be understanding some Hungarian already, but when we ask her to say something, she starts making stuff up.

Ministry

I, Rodney, continue making the daily (one-hour) commute to the office everyday. The office is located, along with Carmelita’s, with whom I am working, in YWAM Budapest’s ministry center (pictured below). Working with Carmelita just these past 5 weeks or so has already been very fruitful. Working with a leader like her is good not only for my personal development as a leader, but also for EuroCom as well. It’s good to have someone you can talk to about challenges you face, ideas you have, etc. As I have mentioned before, as good as Skype is, there’s just no substitute (yet) for working in the same office.

It has also been good for her having me in the office; someone she can bounce ideas off of and get my feedback when it’s needed.

At the moment, YWAM Budapest is also running a DTS (Discipleship Training School, ). There are four students and four staff from five different countries (pictured right).

Sightseeing

In our free time, we like to get out and see some of Budapest. It’s a beautiful city with lots of things to see and do. We are slowly getting to now our way around using buses, metros (subway/underground) and trams.

The girls, of course, enjoy the malls and indoor playgrounds.

Furlough

We are planning a visit to the US in July, partly because my parents will be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in July, but also because it will have been more than two years ago that we were in the States.

One BIG prayer point is the finances for this trip. It will cost us a grand total of about $3500 for the four of us to fly out there. We see this as being very important, obviously to be with my parents for the big celebration, but also to visit you, our friends and ministry partners.

Thank you again for reading our update. If you enjoyed it, hit the “reply” button and let us know.

Snowball!

It was not without a certain amount of fear and trepidation that we started out on Saturday morning, December the 18th traveling in two cars from Holland to Hungary. And in spite of the wintry weather conditions happening all over Europe the week before (and even that whole weekend in Holland), the trip went incredibly well.

It did take us longer than we had hoped to get to our friends’ house in Austria on the first day, but it was if the clouds and wintry weather had been cleared out before us. We were driving on roads with snow all around us, but only a few, watery flakes fell on us as we were driving. The sun even managed to peek out and greet us on our way. Thank you all so much for your encouraging comments and prayers.

Visitors from Holland for Sarah's 4th birthday

We have been here three weeks already, and we are already settling in quite well in the new house, city and culture. The girls had Christmas break the first two weeks and enjoyed the fact the Jolanda’s Dad and Arlen, an American YWAMer from Heidebeek were with us here. Arlen flew back to Holland on Wednesday, and Jolanda’s brothers flew in on Sarah’s birthday (the 27th). We showed them all around the city for a day, and they drove back, together with Jolanda’s father to Holland two days later.

Lisa and "Ms. Janneke" her teacher

Sunday, January 2nd, “Ms. Janneke” flew in to Budapest. She and Lisa got started on homeschooling on the next day (Monday). The first week of school went well, and Janneke and Lisa both enjoyed it. Lisa is (still) enthusiastic about “going to school” in her own home.

Jolanda has also been homeschooling Sarah a little as well during reading, crafts or teaching her numbers, letters, colors, shapes, etc.

Last Friday, we visited a private pre-school in Csömör (the local, public ones are all full) and on Monday the 10th she had her first day of school. She’ll go five mornings a week in the beginning until she gets used to it and then she’ll probably go three days a week after that. After our visit on Friday she was really looking forward to going and kept asking “Do I go tomorrow?” It’s going to be interesting, since none of the teachers speak any English. Three guesses which one of us in the family will be speaking Hungarian first!

Church in Csömör

We celebrated Christmas together with the small YWAM team of the Central European office. We had a great time together at Wolfgang and Chris’ (and their three kids) house along with two other YWAMers.

We have visited a local Baptist church in Csömör twice. Some of the hymns are vaguely familiar to us (and especially to Jolanda). It’s good to be making some contacts in the village around us.

It was just our little family celebrating New Year’s together. Jolanda and the girls had a good time deep-frying yummy, Dutch “oliebollen” (kind of like donut-balls with raisins).

Oliebollen!

In fact, they made so many that she and Sarah decided to bring some around to three neighbors in the street. They were all quite pleased to make our acquaintance and also a great way to make some contacts in the neighborhood. The neighbors have also already helped us out with questions we had about how things work here in Hungary.

I (Rodney) started working at the office last week. Jolanda will be spending most of her time at home for now, there’s certainly enough for her to do there. Now that Sarah will be going to school some mornings, she will be looking into what she can do either form home or here in the office. We’ll keep you posted.

I have already dove into learning Hungarian with my usual gusto, and have been following some lessons I found online. I’m the kind that likes to study first before I start using it, whereas Jolanda likes to start using what little bit she knows to try and converse with people. Interestingly enough, we are picking out a few words which are very similar to Bosnian (which we learned when we were living there). We hadn’t expected this, and it is a pleasant surprise.

Köszönöm (thank you) for reading our update. We also appreciate your emails, Facebook comments and prayers very much.

We will keep you posted on our adventure with God.

View from the Fisherman's Bastion

The Next Level…

In our last update, we informed you of plans we had to move to Budapest and our idea to go on a 2-week trip to check things out. Our purpose for taking this trip was to “spy out the land” to see what the possibilities were and what God would speak to us while we were there in Budapest.

The trip was good and we feel confirmation that we are to proceed to the next level – to go to Budapest for a trial period of 6-7 months to see how things go with the girls’ schooling and with working and living there. We still need lots of wisdom on the timing, though. We had originally hoped to be leaving in November, but we need to raise up more partners who will stand beside us, supporting us in prayer and also financially before we go.

Since having more partners is crucial in us fulfilling our calling we want to give priority to this, so that will mean we will push our departure date back until sometime later this year or early next year.

Bus, Metro and Tram

The house in which we were staying is located just outside of Budapest proper in a little village called Csömör (click for a Google map). To get into Budapest by public transportation, we first had to take a 30-minute bus ride which cost a whopping $1.35 per person (and the kids could ride for free).

This bus took us to a shopping center with an Ikea and a relatively large mall where we could then catch a metro (also known as underground or subway) further into the center of town. The whole trip from the house to, say the YWAM office (another Google map) took about an hour, although it didn’t feel like it took that long.

Lisa and Sarah loved going by public transportation and even got mad at us one day when we decided to go somewhere by car.

YWAM Budapest

While in Budapest, we visited the offices of YWAM Budapest several times. We met there with Carmelita Clarke – the Central European director with whom we will be working – who has her office there. We also attended YWAM Budapest’s weekly staff meeting to share our vision, where they also prayed for us.

We were also very blessed to be able to meet with a Hungarian staff lady, Gabi who was able to give us a lot of information and answer questions about schooling, and other aspects of life in Hungary.

Housing

The house in which we stayed was built by YWAMers who have moved away (they’re in Arizona now, oh the irony). They built it as a YWAM house to be able to house many people. If we feel like this is the place where we are supposed to stay, then we could probably move in tomorrow.

One drawback is that it takes an hour (one-way) to get in to the office by public transportation. This could also be seen as an advantage since it means when you’re home, you’re completely away from the office. It also means that if Jolanda is there alone with the kids, it makes it harder to “pop in” to the office or meet up somewhere for lunch from time-to-time.

There are plenty of other houses and apartments to be found on numerous websites, but most of them require a minimum of a one year contract which could present a problem if we go for only 6-7 months.

Why 6-7 months?

In Holland, we enjoy financial benefits from the government, such as child support and health-care subsidy. Altogether this amounts to more than $450 a month that we receive from the government. However, to enjoy these benefits, we have to be resident in the country no less than 4 months out of a 12 month period. That is one of the reasons we have chosen for a trial period of 6-7 months. That way we can go check things out without having to immediately give up that extra financial support.

We hope you have enjoyed reading our update as much as we enjoyed putting it together. Thanks again for your time.

Blessings from The Netherlands,
Rodney, Jolanda, Lisa and Sarah

We are sending you this extra update this month to share some plans with you that we have been making and feel God has put on our hearts.These plans have to do with our future as a family in missions for the next season of our lives. We are writing this to you even though the plans are as of yet still in the early brainstoming and praying stage.

We are looking into the possibility of moving to Budapest, Hungary to move the EuroCom office there and to work with YWAM Budapest.

Even though it is early days yet, we are sharing with you to ask you to think and pray with us for this big decision we have to make.

Why Budapest?

Budapest by night

You may be wondering, “Why Budapest?” There is a YWAM presence there in Budapest, plus the Central European office is located there. The director of Central Europe, Carmelita Clarke is my contact with the European Leadership Team now that Jeff Fountain has stepped down as European director.

When I was there in April, there was a real click in my heart with Budapest. When Carmelita invited us to join her team there, I was very open to it.

EuroCom Office

I, Rodney now work 100% for EuroCom – on a European level – even though I am staff here at Heidebeek. When Jeff Fountain was director, I worked in the European office which was located just down the road from Heidebeek. Now that he has stepped down and there is no obvious replacement for him, he asked Carmelita to be EuroCom’s contact person on the European Leadership team. She is, in a very real way, my boss.

For me (and for EuroCom), it would be better for me to be closer to what is going on at a European level. Budapest is also a very international city with easy (and cheap) access by air which makes it easier to organize Europe-wide meetings. It will also make it easier to attract more international staff to come and work with me on the EuroCom team.

What about Jolanda?

Besides being a full-time mom, Jolanda is great at walking out her front door, meeting people and creating ministry opportunities. That’s one of the advantages of living someplace like Budapest. Although, she will be greatly missed here at Heidebeek by the people and ministries in which she is involved.

It will be a fun challenge to find the opportunities in Budapest for us to be involved together in ministry as a family (and I think there will be more of them, too).

Spying out the land

Another reason we are emailing this now is that we are leaving on Saturday, 3 July to take a 2-week “spying out the land” trip with the whole family to Budapest.

A glimpse of the house we will be staying in this Summer

We will be staying in a house built by YWAMers to be used as a YWAM base, which we are very excited about. This house is one of the many options for us for housing in Budapest. There is one disadvantage (or advantage depending on how you look at it): it is located in a village on the outskirts of Budapest, not very close to the YWAM office or other houses.

We will be looking into other options for renting something for ourselves.

We would appreciate your prayers very much in this time. If all goes well, we will look into moving to Budapest sometime later this year for a 6-8 month trial period. If we go for less than 8 months, we can still keep our Dutch insurance and all of the subsidies we receive from the Government.

Be sure and keep an eye on our website and Facebook profile pages for updates while we are there.