Remembering My Priorities

I feel like I am not always articulate, and I definitely don't feel like I put my thoughts to paper very well either.  It has never been a strength of mine.  That being said I had so many thoughts and emotions yesterday after an experience I had speaking to a family at church I felt like I needed to put that down on paper (ie electronic doc)

At Church this past Sunday an American Family walked in with 4 kids about the same age as our kids.  (Our kids were almost giddy to have English speaking children to talk to)  After the service we were able to find out their story.  They are a family from Utah USA.  The father served a mission in Spain 20 earlier and his work and their place in life made it possible for them to live in Spain and Travel Europe for a year. 

As we spoke to them it was easy to find the similarities between our relatively similar situations and it was easy to compare. And then at the same time it was also so easy to see how our views on what our purpose for being in the country was sooo very different. 

I will not lie, I had a moments of comparison that made me a little covetous.

During their time here they have visited England, France, Germany, and many other small countries around Europe.  They are homeschooling their children so that they can travel as much as they want. (homeschooling didn’t make me jealous I already know I never would want to home school)  But, they told us about how easy the Visa Process was for them (it has been a nightmare for us and it is not actually over yet)  They shared with us how they knew about many families that were taking a year to 6 months off of their lives to travel around Europe with their young children. (That thought made me feel yucky because I hate feeling like I am doing something just because everyone else is doing it)

Their kids were excited to tell us about how they went to Disney Land France and they had already been to Disney World in Florida and Disney land In California so they just wanted to go to China to go to that final Disney Theme Park they haven’t been to.  Their oldest child (11 yr old boy) complained about everyone speaking Spanish a few times, (Your in Spain Kid) but their daughter (10 year old girl) had a few years of Spanish Emersion Elementary so she spoke alright and felt comfortable with the language.

Like I said my natural instinct was to compare and at first glace it felt I was coming up short, which made me sad for a moment to think that somehow meeting these wonderful people was making me feel like our experience was diminished somehow because it didn’t seem to stack up to their.  Thankfully these thoughts lasted a very short time after I put our PURPOSE and EXPERIENCE into the right PERSPECTIVE. 

Comparison is the Thief of Joy!  For all I know there is someone out there following along with our family journey and feeling their life doesn’t stack up compared to what it looks like we are doing.  L. Tom Perry once said “You are not competing with anyone else. You are only competing with yourself to do the best with whatever you have received.

So I will take this time to remind myself about my own purpose for being here, the experience I feel we are getting, and the perspective I am coming from. 

First and foremost our purpose for being here in Spain is For Steven and his own Professional Development.  His entire professional life revolves around this language, culture, and relates to this country.  We are here for him.  While we have been here he works very hard to use his mornings to read and research, write and learn.  Every afternoon he works hard to be out among the people and learn from them and talk to them.  It is why we are here.  Our second purpose, which is a very nice bonus, is for our family.(having the children with us opens up conversations and connections that we would not have without them.  We want our children to have new and eye opening experiences and challenges that they could not get in the USA.  We want our children to learn Spanish, we want them to experience being the new kid in a different country where they didn’t know the culture and customs so that they can learn empathy for other that they will meet who are going through similar, probably harder circumstances,  which leads me to our Experience.

We truly are getting the experience we set out to get.  We wanted to experience true life in a different country.  See how their normal everyday life works and feels.  Experience how Spanish schools run and how they interact with people around them.  We wanted our children to struggle through the language and the culture and I am happy to report that they are doing wonderful.  Because of this experience my children will see the world and the people around them in a whole different way.  I think they will be kinder and more compassionate, more forgiving and understanding.  They have already talked about ways that they will change when they go back to school in the US.

Our perspective as a family has changed and I believe has changed for the better.  It helps to remind myself to keep the right perspective.  Making sure my children can say they have been to Disney Land is not on my priority list, but helping them become wonderful, caring, responsible, and faithful adults is at the top of my priority list.  I am not saying the other family we met is doing their trip wrong in any way I am just reminding myself that we really are doing what we set out to do and I need to keep that in perspective.

Miranda mentioned the other day that she feels like she will forever feel homesick because she feels a strong pull to our home in Iowa and knows that when we leave she will forever feel a strong pull to our home here in Spain.  She also told me how much she feels like she and her brothers have grown and changed.  I am so grateful for them and so grateful for this experience.

 "Compare ourselves to our past selves, not to others."

L Tom Perry

Niebla

 So Much to say about this place and the pictures so I will do my best to make sense.  Niebla, Spain is not to far from where we live and so it was great day to visit it with our Friend Inma and her family.  We went to Niebla after seeing Moguer first so our first stop was lunch.  I have found that it is often interesting eating a nice lunch outside in Europe because you can look around you and just see ancient history.  Today was very much that way because we were eating lunch next to a castle that dates back to the Roman Times.
After lunch we went for a tour of the castle.  The outside walls are very well in tact and they had the side rooms furnished to help you get the feel of what is would have been like.  The kids had so much fun with their friends running around free inside a castle. 
Of of their favorite parts was the dungeons.  They had all sort of torture devices and pictures set up to help you understand what kinds of horrible things a prisoner would have gone through.  It was pretty nasty but also interesting.
After all the fun we had at the castle we walked around the town a little bit and also stopped at the coolest Church.  Hundreds of years ago it was a Cathedral, because it was the church of a Bishop.  It had an amazing courtyard and so beautiful,  it was also packed with people because that day was the day of first communion in Niebla.

Moguer and the Home of Zanobia and Juan Ramon Jimenez

Saturday we we able to go on a great adventure with some close friends we have made here in Chucena. 
Our First Stop was Moguer, a beautiful town only about 20 minutes away from us.  The main attraction we went to see was the Home of Juan Ramon Jimenez

Juan Ramón Jiménez (23 December 1881 – 29 May 1958) was a Spanish poet, a prolific writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956

When you are married to a literature Professor this was a must see in the area.

We learned a lot about him and his amazing wife and it really was a cool visit.

 His amazing library was set up and Juan Ramon Jimenez stipulated that all his books should always be available to read so you can go and sit at the study table in his library and read his books. 

 One of his most famous works is called Platero Y Yo.  Platero is a small donkey, the above picture would have been his stall and then there was a statue of Platero that every child could not resist sitting on.

Holy Week In Spain

"Holy Week In Spain is the annual tribute of the Passion of Christ celebrated by Catholic religious brotherhoods and fraternities that perform penance processions on the streets of almost every Spanish city and town during the last week of Lent, the week immediately before Easter."

We have been seeing and participating in a few of the celebrations this Semana Santa.  Last Night our town had their big procession.  It was full of the "Nazareno" with their distinctive hoods and cloaks of the Spanish Holy Week (around way before the KKK)

We had lots of friends participate and it was fun to go and support them.  The procession had 2 main "paso", sort of like a float but not.   One of them was the crucifixion and the last one was for the Virgin Mary.  They were both beautiful and huge.  The crazy thing about them is that they are not on wheels but are carried for the entire time.  They practice before hand and have teams and a rotation to carry them so it is being lifted and carried and then set down multiple times during the night.

Also all the Nazareno have their own huge candle as well as all the lights on the floats are all real candles.  I have a hard time not looking at them as fire hazards but one of the childhood traditions is to go and collect the candle wax that people are dumping off of their large candle and make a ball out of it.  Jacob wanted to do it so but bad but we were not going to watch long enough for him to make any sort of ball so it didn't happen.

  Our friends Monolo, Mariela, and their son Carlos (in the outfit)

 Our Friend and Neighbor Juani dressed as the "Mantilla" the official mourners of the procession.

The feet of the men under the Paso of float

Friends In Huelva

 Our good friends from Huelva, Modesto and Cinta, invited us to come and spend lunch with them in their flat in Huelva.  They live right off the main walking city center of Huelva and it was so fun to be with them.  They had family in town as well so it was great to get to visit will all of them.

Cinta fed us a delicious lunch, the kids played games and watched movies while the adults ate and talked.  They have a great little balcony to look out on the city street and we had such a great time talking and laughing.

Because it is Semana Santa and they live right by where the procession was going to be that night the streets were crowded and busy when we walked back to our car.  Many people were getting ready to watch and participate in the procession.  We headed back to Huelva so that we could participate in our own local procession.

Mines De RioTinto- The Mines of the Red River

 The Kids have the entire week off of school this week because it is Holy Week, so we have been trying to go and see some of the local attractions.  These are not the types of things that foreign tourist go to but things that the local people visit.
Today we focused on the Rio Tinto Mines.  As always if you want to know the full details about the mines you will need to do a google search but I will explain the things that I learned and thought was interesting.
First, people have been mining this area since Roman time, we went to a museum first that told us about the Roman mines that had been found in this area and it also had a replica of the mine for us to walk through,  it was well done and very cool.
Originally it was a normal underground mine and then in the late 1800 and British Group bought the entire thing and turned it into an open mine.

The water is Red coming from the ground water for the mine and the makeup of the water is so similar to findings on Mars that NASA is Studying the area to try and see how it is happening.  We were told not to touch the water because it would stain our clothes and told that the water had a PH Balance of  Coke, funny enough the boys had already named the river the Coke Cola  River.

We went to the mines with friends Laura and her son Mateo and it made it all the more fun

During our trip we took a train ride through a part of the open mines on the Train that was used 100 years ago to transport the workers.  It was old and it felt old. but it was also fun.