Tomorrow begins the month of March, and in one week we'll be at the midpoint of our AU spring semester. Here's an update:

Classes: Dylan is immersed in advanced Calculus (Calc 4 I believe) as well as advanced Statistics and an educational methods course. Christiy is taking two practice-focused (as opposed to theory-focused) courses on Development Management and Program Design, Monitoring & Evaluation. The practicality is great! 

Work: Dylan is student teaching at Wilson High School, where he assists with Alegbra 1 & 2. He'll be doing a two-week take-over in March where he plans and teaches all the class by himself! He really likes Wilson and is learning a lot about classroom management from his cooperating teacher, Jacquie. He'll be applying for full-time teaching positions over the next few months.

Christiy is working full-time at Public International Law & Policy Group (PILPG) as a Program Associate. As part of the Syria/Yemen team, I support our projects in the field by doing logistics, drafting reports for funders, and developing training materials. I also work on a variety on organizational management and strategic communication projects. It has been/continues to be a steep learning curve, but I'm excited to be working at such a great organization!

Church/Friends: We enjoy meeting with our church small group every week and continuing to get to know people at Restoration Church. Our social calendar is much fuller than it used to be as we get together with other couples more frequently for meals and games. We had the chance to go skiing with some friends from church last weekend, which was a blast!

We don't have a lot of downtime, but life is good and we're learning a lot. Thanks for your thoughts and prayers!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I wanted to make sure to write an update before the craziness of a new semester sets in, so here it is!

I put Ephesians 3:20 at the bottom of this post because God has so often provided beyond our expectations this year! Our first six months were spent resting and readjusting to America in Indiana with my family. It was a blessing to be able to take so much time off and spend it at home! Dylan even found a part-time tutoring job while we were there so we were able to save a bit. Then, amazingly, we both got accepted into the same university for grad school, both with full scholarships that will enable us to finish without debts.Definitely the best thing that could have happened!

We moved to DC in June and immediately found a church nearby with a small group meeting across the street from us. Restoration church is very gospel focused and we've been challenged and inspired by many of the friends we've made there. 

We both worked outside of classes this year, Dylan as a student teacher and me as a graduate assistant. Thankfully (as we don't have a car), the schools Dylan has been assigned to teach in have been accessible by public transport from our apartment. He even got to work with the teacher named Best Teacher in DC for 2013! My graduate assistantship led to working at a non-profit law firm (PILPG) that is involved in international conflict resolution and negotiation efforts. I was asked to play a bigger role in that organization in 2015, which is very exciting! 

The best thing about being in school again is the vacation schedule - we were able to take a little over two weeks to visit both our families over the holidays, mine in Indiana and Dylan's in Thailand (photo)! It was a wonderful break after the stress of the semester, and great to do a bit of traveling. We're looking forward to our families visiting us in DC this year!

We enter 2015 in some trepidation of the coming semester - both of us will be working roughly 40 hours a week as well as attending classes. Dylan will be finishing up his degree and looking for a full-time teaching job in the fall. I'll be continuing work and studies over the summer and into next year. But, God is faithful and we are looking forward to what he has in store for us!

"Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen." Ephesians 3:20-21

Actually, I'm one day late, but October 31st was indeed Reformation Day - the day, 497 years ago, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany and unofficially began the Protestant Reformation. 
Actually, Luther posted his theses in Latin and didn't originally intend to question Catholic authority. Instead, he wanted to spark a debate about true repentance in light of the trend, at the time, of selling indulgences to save people from spending time in Purgatory. It was only later that Luther did something truly revolutionary - when asked who had the final authority, the Bible or the Pope, Luther answered that it was the Bible. Based on this belief, Luther translated the Bible into German so that lay people, for the first time, could understand and read Scripture for themselves. 
We learned all this from our pastor, who dressed as Martin Luther (a monk) for the occasion of our church's Reformation Day party! Also featured were some German foods including sauerkraut, bratwurst, pretzel rolls, and apple cake (and pizza because the Reformation spread to Italy). We played, "nail the 95 theses to the door," aided and abetted by the children in attendance, and attempted to toss coins into a coffer (a play on John Tetzel's saying that, "When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs") rather unsuccessfully. It was a fun night, learning some history and celebrating God's work in the church!

We recently heard a presentation on design thinking in my development management class, which I thought was really interesting, so here's what I learned!



























What is design thinking?
Design thinking is a relatively new way to go about problem-solving that focuses on doing. There are five steps:
1. Empathy - Meet with your clients/producers/end users and talk to them about the problem they think they have and any ideas they have for dealing with it. Try to put yourself in their shoes!
2. Define - Define the problem and try to broaden it. For example, if you've been told that the problem is that there's no well in a community, you can expand that - the problem isn't necessarily the lack of a well, but more broadly the lack of drinking water.
3. Ideate - Rather than thinking of "solutions" think of "ideas". Anything goes - crazy impossible, reasonable, likely, unlikely - you should record as many ideas as possible. Put it all on a board and then group them in different ways, pull different aspects from various ideas and put them together, and just generally be creative!
4. Prototype - Immediately put a few different ideas into action. The prototype is not supposed to be perfect, in fact, messier might be better because your goal is to get critical feedback from your users. The motto is to fail fast and fail cheap.
5. Test - Let people use the product, try out the experience, or otherwise interact with your prototype. Get their feedback and go back to the beginning!
The main point - rather than spending time trying to think out all the kinks in your head, just put something together and go with it, expecting to make improvements later. 

This way of problem-solving definitely seems to have its advantages - it could lead to more creative solutions and a better, user-appropriate end product. It might also speed up the route to getting there by trying small things quickly and designing improvements quickly as well, rather than spending a longer time developing a big idea and producing it and then finding out it could have been improved in some way. 

One example is the current race to design more heat-friendly protection suits for Ebola health workers in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Check out this article: 
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3037375/can-better-design-stop-ebola-how-creative-minds-can-help


How could this be applied to the field of development?
Good question. Ideally, very localized development projects could go through these steps and discover the unique problems and solutions in each community, testing out a few different ideas along the way. Unfortunately, development tends not to work that way. Organizations and funders have specific areas of expertise or interest and that is what drives what they can do in a community, even if that doesn't necessarily correspond to people's expressed highest priority needs. For example, if a community really needs a public toilet, but the organization working there focuses on increasing participation in local politics, they are unlikely to provide a toilet. Equally, if an organization has received a grant to improve education in a community, which may happen before the organization is even on the ground where they'll be working, then they will be unable to respond to the need for job creation in that community. This is why grassroots, local organizations and workers can be really effective - they have effectively already gone through the empathy, define, and ideate phases and may just need funding/support for prototypes and testing. Organizations that have been working in one place for a long time should have this necessary background too. 

Another issue is the quick and messy prototyping idea. This seems like something you wouldn't really want to try in a development situation where the product/system/service you're testing is supposed to be improving people's lives in some way, and may be expensive to put into place (i.e. a new toilet!). Much better to think it through properly first, right? However, a few cycles of verbal explanation and feedback may be a possibility to improve an idea before it's put into practice. 

These were just some of my thoughts and the discussion my class had after the presentation. What do you think?

For work, I read the news from Syria pretty much every day and, with the rest of the world, I have been following as ISIS has advanced closer and closer to the border town of Kobane. Refugees have fled the city by the tens of thousands, leaving everything behind. Turkish Kurds watch from behind the Turkish border fence just a few miles away as clouds of smoke caused by the fighting and the American air strikes drift up from the city. If ISIS manages to take the town, not only are they likely to slaughter everyone left in it, they will tighten their control on the Syrian-Turkish border and possibly turn their attention to Aleppo, one of the few northern cities still standing. 

What a broken world we live in that 1) this is happening, and 2) that we are watching it happen and not making it stop. I realize that "making it stop" is not really as easy as it sounds. I also realize that, although this is what's currently on the news, it is far from being the only humanitarian disaster that's happening today. And that makes me even more sad. It's too easy for me sitting here, so far away from these terrible things, to just pass them off as words on a page and a dramatic picture here and there. But can you imagine what it must be like to be one of those 160,000 refugees? Or to be someone who couldn't leave or chose not to leave town and is surrounded by gunfire and bombs every day? For some people, that is their reality for the foreseeable future. And that's not okay.

I don't have a solution, and I'll continue to follow the news like everybody else. I'm rooting for Kobane and I hope the Kurdish forces there prevail, somehow.

P.S. Update 10/26 - Kurdish forces and the Free Syrian Army continue to hold (most of) Kobane against ISIS! US airstrikes and weapons/ammunition drops have undoubtedly played a role. However, Assad is taking advantage of the US coalition fighting ISIS to resume attacks against the moderate Syrian opposition in Aleppo. Somebody is eventually going to have to fight Assad...

On Friday I went to the United States Institute of Peace to hear an international panel discuss the role of religious actors in countering violent extremism. In a packed auditorium we heard from three speakers - Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayya (Muslim religious scholar and former Vice President of Mauritania), Pastor Esther Ibanga (Nigerian pastor, president of Women Without Walls Nigeria, and founder of Jos Christian Missions International), and Vinya Ariaratne (General Secretary of Sarvodaya, an NGO in Sri Lanka).

Sheikh Abdallah, an old man wearing robes and a turban, spoke entirely in Arabic - but there were a few laughs when he caught his translator saying something wrong and corrected him! He made two main points. The first was that religious extremism is rooted in an ignorance of what religion truly is and a misconception about what religious texts teach. People need to be better educated in their religion so that they will not be led astray by extremist philosophies that do not reflect the true nature of religion. There is an African parable about a monkey who became sick from eating the fruit of a baobab tree. But the cure was to eat more of the same fruit! The Sheikh says that the case of religious extremism is similar - radicals have had a bit of religion and become sick on it, but if they had more religion so they really understood what Islam stands for, they would be cured. I think there is truth to this, but it is definitely counter-intuitive, and also very hard to carry out. The Sheikh also said that many radicals believe that they are superior to others and that they alone have the correct revelations about religion. They're not likely to listen to other teaching then are they?

Sheikh Abdallah's second point was that we should put out the fire before we start asking who started it and why. Meaning, yes there are underlying causes for people turning to extremism (injustice, disenfranchisement, poverty), but we cannot address them in the midst of violence. Rather, peace must be established, and then we can work on the roots of the problem. The Sheikh stressed the need to create safe spaces for people to share their ideas and for religious leaders who promote peace, like him, to spread the word and prevent more people from joining the radical religious movements. Although I agree that it would be much easier to address the underlying causes of violent extremism if there was peace, peace seems a difficult thing to attain. Are the US airstrikes in Syria right now putting out the fire? Or addressing the underlying causes of extremism? I would say neither.

Pastor Esther Ibanga actually spoke to us via video since apparently her travel plans had gone awry. Wearing a bright pink shitenge dress and sitting behind a desk, she talked about the need for a stronger voice for women in religion and in addressing extremism. She also talked about the integral role of religious leaders in communities - they are generally respected, well-known, and can be very influential. Therefore they are well placed to monitor the situation in their communities and address any problems early on rather than waiting for them to grow. Pastor Ibanga also called for a bigger role for religious leaders in policy and government decision making. Interesting thought. Hard to see how this would work in countries with long histories of separation of church and state, easy to see cases where religious influence in government can go too far (Iran).

Vinya Ariaratne spoke about the case of Sri Lanka, which is a bit different because the conflict there is primarily ethnic, although there have been religious clashes as well. The NGO he runs, Sarvodaya, involves more than 5,000 villages in Sri Lanka in development and conflict resolution activities. Ariaratne's speech was more of a description of possible solutions - initiatives like Sarvodaya can help prevent violence and promote peace whether the cause is religious or ethnic. The conflict resolution groups in villages function as early warning systems for signs of extremism, which can be addressed immediately. Ariaratne told us he was trained as a physician, maybe that's why this sounds like a prescription for the illness of violence!

All in all, it was a really interesting event! Thanks for reading!

Street Sense is a newspaper written and sold by homeless people in DC - vendors buy copies of the paper for 50 cents and then sell them for a suggested donation of 2 dollars, so that both the paper and the vendors are supported. When I go to the metro or the grocery store there is often someone selling the newest issue, which I usually buy but recently haven't actually had time to read. Today I'm cleaning house and almost threw out the paper I bought a few days ago without reading it, but I decided to take a quick glance at the cover story and then got sucked in! Here are a couple of the stories I found particularly inspiring.

The cover story, first of all, was about a Detroit-based organization called Enchanted Makeovers, which redecorates homeless shelters across the US to make them more welcoming. What a great idea! The founder, Terry Grahl, says that she especially wants to create places where women and children can feel comfortable and be healed. She has also established a couple other projects to work towards this goal - the Sacred Sewing Room project and Capes for Kids. The first project works to transform bare shelter sewing rooms into cheerful, better-equipped work spaces, and the second provides homemade capes for kids "to help channel their inner superhero, strength and imagination." Check out the website to learn more!

The next piece that caught my eye is a short one with just a couple paragraphs titled, "What Constitutes a Good Day?" Good question, what does make a good day in your opinion? To this author, Scott, every day is a good day. In spite of being hit by two cars, he is alive. In spite of struggling with alcoholism and a broken past, he has complete trust and hope in God, which shines through in these few paragraphs! When talking about how he has prayed to be released from his desire for alcohol, he says this: "Sometimes God will put us in a battle empty handed. So that when we get the victory, we will know that it was him that got us through, not ourselves." This struck me as a really great insight. He continues, "I walk with the favor of God daily. To be awake to see fireworks is a good day. To make a child smile is a good day. To sell papers in the snow is a good day. To stand and wash cars is a good day. So every day is a good day!"

Today is a good day! 
Psalm 118:24 "This is the day the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it." (NKJV)

We are learning SO MUCH! It's great! 

Dylan has officially begun his first semester as as student teacher. He's thrilled to be working with a middle school math teacher who was voted the best teacher in DC for the 2013-2014 academic year! He's also working in a fun environment at a relatively new charter school with a small group of three other math teachers. They've been doing get-to-know-you and communication activities these last couple of days and have professional development activities for two more weeks before students come.

I had the privilege of meeting with one of the professors I'll be working with this semester as a graduate assistant at the downtown offices of his NGO - The Public Law and International Policy Group. PILPG does pro bono legal work with groups in conflict or post-conflict countries, helping them draft new constitutions or incorporate reconciliation and peace-building processes in their communities. I think this is fascinating and central to sustainable development and I am so excited to get started! I will be working with the Syria team.

While Dylan had a bit of a holiday the last two weeks, I've been finishing up my first grad school class (Economic Theory) and working at a language immersion summer camp for preschoolers. The second half of my econ class was all about macroeconomics (the first half was micro). We learned how the government can affect the economy through fiscal and monetary policy, about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, and about the difficulty involved in making accurate economic predictions and therefore good economic policies. We also discussed long-term economic growth and the success of some countries (mostly in Asia) and the disappointing progress in others (mostly Africa) due to investment, or lack thereof, in human and physical capital and technology. 

On a much less academic note, at summer camp I have practiced changing diapers, playing make-believe, and doing various crafts involving paper plates, paint, markers, and glue. I have also used my French much more extensively than at any point in the last five years, which is great! I'll be working at the summer camp until the end of next week.

I don't have a lot of pictures from these activities, but here's one of some of the kids listening to a presentation by the Tooth Fairy!

Believe it or not, this past Friday was our fifth wedding anniversary! It's so fun to look back on all we've done in the last five years and see how we've grown individually and together. It's hard to believe that five years from now we will just be finishing our time in DC, whereas our first five years were spread out over three countries!

Our exploration of the city has slowed down a little as Dylan had increasing amounts of homework for his summer classes and I started working part-time at a French-immersion preschool. On our anniversary we took time out for dinner at La Liguras, an extremely good Indian restaurant (it even rivals India Palace in Wheaton). 

So glad that God brought us together and has led us through so many adventures. =)

We read and heard a lot about the crowded chaos of going to see the fireworks on the Mall, but figured we should at least go once and then we could decide whether or not to ever go again based on experience. Now, based on the experience....we're still not sure if we'll do it again. =) I will say it was really cool to see the fireworks up close and right behind the Washington Monument; I think we're pretty spoiled with that view!

We headed towards the Capitol building around 6pm and the metro was pretty full, but not any fuller than I've seen it at rush hour. We went to a friend's house for a barbecue (yum!) and then walked the mile or so to the Mall around 8:30.

There were a LOT of people there. The lines for the port-a-potties were 20-30 people long. The grass portions of the Mall were completely covered with people sitting and when we arrived the roads cutting across the Mall were just starting to fill up with people standing. We actually had a really good spot  on one of the cross streets looking straight at the monument over the people who were sitting!