October update

Hey World !

Here is the longer update about life here. I decided to do one for each month, so this is for November.

In this message I will cover a few parts of life as a London Gapper.

Household

At the moment we are 4 girls in the house. It’s very multicultural and none of us is from here. We have 2 Americans, 1 Lebanese and me (1 Belgian). Very challenging, but it brings a lot of beauty too. Although the house is very small, we have a lovely little garden to escape too when needed. J Up till last weekend we had another Lebanese girl in our house, but she moved out to live closer to her university.

One of my jobs is to lead this household. Being new to London too does not make that any easier. The biggest challenge is to try to find a way of living where every culture is comfortable.  But, we are all very motivated to do the best we can and serve one another in this way, and I can see the progress during the last few weeks.

It is a blessing being able to share my life with other Christians who really want to live a life for God’s greater glory.

‘Work’

With ‘work’ I mean everything we do that is planned between 10.30AM and 5.30PM. I work full time for Koinonia, which is the university student outreach in London. It is a very diverse job! In the mornings we have a training-slot. This covers topics like time-management, discussion groups, discussing cultures …

Afternoons are filled with meeting up with people, coffee stalls and other services outside of Koinonia.

I really enjoy it. Meeting new people and having good conversations are a big blessing here in this inpersonal city and the trainings are thought-provoking and informative. (My fellow Gapper Camille told me I could use these descriptive words. I would just have said ‘Interesting’ being interessant like in French or Flamish or in any other normal language, but for some odd reason ‘interesting’ does not work in modern English any more… Bummer!)

Community

I have been in community all my life. Up till September that has been the Belgian community (called Jerusalem). It is very interesting (I think I’m using it right this time) to be part of another community. Things are very similar in a lot of ways, but still very different in other ways. People in Antioch (the London community) all live very close to each other and you can feel a very lively way of life here that I hadn’t found as such in Belgium. Although I admit that Leuven is getting there…

Another big difference is the amount of youth running around. It is crazy how silent and small Antioch becomes when the kids aren’t there J

One of my services this year is to have a little youth-group with some of the girls. Last weekend we did a sleepover. Very nice, very loud and very active J

So that is mostly the official part of my gap-year this month.

I’ll add the non-official things like last month whenever it comes up.

Have a nice month!