Well, I mentioned in my last post that we would probably have some NEWS to report soon.  With much thanks due to many of you who helped us with this decision, it seems like we have been given some CLEAR direction about what to do with our next year here in China (Qinghai).

If things go as planned, it looks like in August we’ll be moving again to a countryside town.  Don’t worry, we aren’t moving our house; we’re mainly just moving our bodies to a new place with new possibilities and responsibilities.  Our friends who live in this town called Jianza (3 hours by bus from Xining) have recently opened a Library / Cultural Exchange Center.  They sent a request for some help running the center over this next year as the team will be in transition as each member has plans to visit their home countries.  After deliberating with them and with One or two others, we thought it would be a great opportunity for us (our family) to continue improving our language as well as experiencing the culture in a more concentrated and practical way.  We love libraries anyway, so it made a lot of sense for us to plug in here.

Since we can house-sit for one of the families while we are living there in Jianza it made the decision a little more straight-forward and hassle-free.  (This is the same house where we spent this last Easter weekend.)  We have plans to send out a more detailed explanation of the how/why we came to this decision, but in the meantime here are some pictures from our trip that we took out there this past weekend.  In a sense it was an "orientation" weekend for us to learn about the intricacies of "small-town" life.

Thanks again for helping us find this way forward in our cross-cultural experience. 

Here are the pics…