Happy Thanksgiving!

The baby is finally here! Rachel Kristen was born on Tuesday evening at 8 pm.


The complete, happy Corder family

Mom, Dad and Glenn arrived at the hospital an hour before she was born, and the doctor arrived just 5 minutes before! Close call! I had studied my book that I had in Africa called Where There Is No Doctor and tried to get Glenn to keep it in the car "just in case" he needed it; he refused to even consider the possibility that he might need to deliver little Rachel on the 45 minute drive out to the hospital. We thank God that everything went smoothly and for His beautiful gift to the Corder family!

Unfortunately though, Carolyn was still in the hospital and missed our Thanksgiving get-together on Thursday at the Eden House. We saved her some turkey and all the trimmings though!


It barely fit!

We ordered 2 turkeys for the 16 adults and 12 children. Karen cooked one and I cooked the other. As you can see, the turkey barely fit into my oven! I had 2 inches on the bottom and 1 inch to spare at the top!



But it turned out just right! Glenn actually cooked the turkey while I was up at the Eden House setting up and decorating for our Thanksgiving feast.

Just a note here: In Budapest, we have to order turkeys ahead of time because they don't sell whole turkey's in the grocery stores except at Christmas time. Most of the year, if you want a turkey and catch them at a meat store before they cut the turkeys up, you can buy one that weighs about 20 kilos (44 pounds). They don't kill them until they are huge because they usually cut them up into pieces to sell. Only at Christmas can you buy a whole turkey that is "small" at about 20 pounds. (Hungarians don't celebrate our American holiday called Thanksgiving in November. They do, however, celebrate it as part of the big celebration on August 20th commemorating when Hungary became a country.)


Glenn carves the turkey

We had invited all our co-workers in Hungary to join us but most of them were doing something with their "team" so it was mainly the ones who live in Budapest, the Corder family (minus Carolyn), one of our language tutors, and our friends, the Snyders. We had tons of food and 12 baskets left over!

The fellowship was sweet!

James loved the black olives!

On Saturday, we drove about 1 1/2 hours to the western part of Hungary to enjoy another Thanksgiving meal with the Brown's. There were a total of four families at that gathering. We had a great time, and it was nice to get away for a day!

Doesn't he look at home in the pulpit?

Glenn was asked to share at our church on Sunday a testimony of Thanksgiving. Fortunately, Gabor was there to translate for Glenn since the Hungarian language is still "in progress". Glenn shared a little bit about the commitment he made while we were at ILC (this time last year!) to memorize Scripture and how God has blessed him through it. At the end of the worship service, one of the ladies in the church asked him which Scriptures he had memorized because the Lord convicted her that she needed to be doing that too! Glenn gave her the 6 verses that are known as the Roman Road (the road to salvation) to start with, but he really has a stack of them! It was encouraging to realize that God can speak through a translator too!

Well, now it is officially the Christmas season!

Cile at Campona Mall

We didn't see Christmas decorations in the mall until about 2 weeks ago, but they have had decorations for sale for over a month. However, we did notice that they were NOT for sale before November 1, unlike in America!

We will be flying to the U.S. for a Member Care conference in Richmond, Virginia at ILC from December 10-14. From there, we will spend some vacation time in Tennessee with Chris and Kate (son and daughter in law) before going on down to Marietta to visit with our parents, brothers and sisters. We were blessed by friends Dennis and Karen at our church in Marietta with a gift of sky miles to fly Kari and Jonathan (daughter and son in law) from France to Marietta for Christmas to be with us!! It will be wonderful to have the whole family together! We have not seen our son in almost a year, so I am counting down the days! Thank you Karen and Dennis!

We will return to Budapest on January 7. While we are gone, the Eden House is going to be "covered" by 3 couples, each taking a week to 10 days. Pray for these couples, and thank God for each one of them!

Have a good week!

Slow Week, thank goodness!

This week has been slow, at least in terms of blogworthy news and pictures! I will have more pictures next week because of the upcoming Thanksgving holiday. Even though the Hungarians don't celebrate Thanksgiving, they do eat turkey so we will be eating turkey (galore) and the typical sweet potato casserole, dressing, cranberry salad and pumpkin pie just like the rest of America.

About 20-25 of our missionaries and their children will gather at the Eden House on Thursday to celebrate together. Glenn and I are responsible for picking up the turkey from the Grand Market Hall in downtown Budapest, and the last we heard, we could expect our turkey to weigh about 20 kilos. That is 44 pounds! We found out that you can't get small turkeys at this time of year; they do, however, have "family size" turkeys at Christmas time. I think we are going to cut the turkey in half and Karen will cook half and I will cook the other half!

On Saturday, we are going to the town of Gyor about 1 1/2 hours away to celebrate with some of our other missionary friends. Fortunately, I am not cooking that turkey!



We are still waiting on the mom at the Eden House to give birth so Glenn and I are staying close to the phone. Earlier this week I took one of our missionaries to the medical clinic we use in town, and I thought you might like to see some pictures of it. It is very clean and modern, and looks like any doctors' office you might see in America.



This is Kriszta. She is the liason between our missionaries and the clinic. She schedules our appointments and goes with our folks to specialists who are "outside the clinic" in order to show us how to get there and to translate for us if the specialists don't speak English. Kriszta has been witnessed to by many of our missionaries through out the past couple of years, and she became a follower of Christ about 7 months ago! Keep her in your prayers, please.



Glenn has used his electrical know-how this week to install an electric gate opener for me! He worked outside in the cold and dark (even though it was about 5:00 pm!) It is so nice to just punch a remote in the car as I drive up to the house and have the gate open for me! Glenn was able to do all the work except for the welding!

I am going to be teaching conversational English to our landlord's son once a week. He is about 5th or 6th grade and has been learning English at school, and does a pretty good job of it. It won't demand much of me; I'm just supposed to give him an opportunity to talk and help him with his pronunciation. Would you pray for my time with him? Pray specifically that I will have an opportunity to share Christ with him.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Winter wonderland!!!

The week started off pretty normal-doing laundry, as usual.



It has been nice having Carolyn and her family around while I was working there. Carolyn has 5 children and is expecting her 6th any day (any minute!) now. We had a couple of things that had to be done on our end, so we asked Carolyn not to have her baby until Sunday afternoon (today). She says she is waiting until she gets her last thank-you note written and the basinette cleaned.



Glenn and I went in the opposite direction of town, out to the country where they have built all these mega stores such as IKEA, Kika, Cora, Auchan, etc. to do some shopping for the Eden House. We need to make some purchases but had to wait until close to the end of the year to make sure there was enough money in the budget. I am always amazed at this site. The commercialism reminds me so much of America, and as many times as I've come out here, it still shocks me! These stores are all built out in the middle of nowhere. However, I remember when Towne Center Mall was built back in the late 80's, it was out in the middle of nowhere and I wondered if people would drive all the way out there to shop!



Dad, I just want you to know that if you don't get your green elephants back from you know who, I can pick you up some nice blue ones. These are from Vietnam too!

Big news this week! We're having an electric gate opener put on our front gate so we don't have to get out of the car in the rain (and snow!) to unlock and open the gate. This man came to do the welding for us. The big news is not that we are getting an electric gate, but that we found someone with whom we could talk! We invited him in for some homemade potato soup, and we were able to practice our Hungarian. It's really sad that we have to bribe people byfeeding them to get opportunities to practice our language, but hey, we'll do what it takes!

Sunday morning, early, very early, we took Darrin and Kesha to the airport to catch their flight to America. They have finished their ISC term and are going home for a while. They are open to returning to CEE in the future but they have some things they need to take care of beforehand. We will miss them. They were our closest neighbors and they were the first couple we got to know when we went to Poland in June 2006. May God bless them!

We got Darrin and Kesha off just in time! Their flight left at 7:30 am, and this photo was taken about 6 hours later! We had to call Carolyn up at the Eden House and ask her to postpone the birth of her child until another day since we didn't want to have to take her to the hospital in all this snow! First snow of the year, November 12th.

We decided to go for a walk (I know, we're crazy) to enjoy the beautiful snow

and to check on the folks at the Eden House. Everyone there was all snug like a bug in a rug; only, we don't have bugs in our rugs at the Eden House, thanks to Szylvia, the housekeeper!

Isn't it gorgeous?

Watch out for yellow snow!

We left our house about 3:15 pm for our "little" walk, and

returned about 5:00 pm. It gets dark at 4:30 pm. It was great to walk down deserted alleyways and see everything sparkling and crystal white clean. Saci (the dog we're babysitting) loved frolicking in the snow too. I know I may get tired of snow by time April comes, but I'm going to enjoy it for now!

Of course, it was a little sad to see what the snow did to my rose garden!

Glenn is now relaxing in front of the TV, watching "24", thanks to Karin and Eric loaning us their 1st season DVD's! I am going to cuddle up with a good book, and Saci, well, she's

conked out in the mud room. Well, she's supposed to be in the mud room because she's not allowed in the house, but as soon as she thinks we aren't looking, she likes to slip just inside the door. I guess it makes her feel like she's a part of the family.

In closing, would you thank God with us for the welder and the opportunity to practice our Hungarian? It was a blessing to have someone who would give us time to painfully stumble through a sentence, correct us, and then keep the conversation going like we were old friends.

Pray for Carolyn and Barry as they have their 6th child. Pray that getting Carolyn to the hospital 45 minutes out of town will go smoothly and that the baby will be born without any difficulties.

Pray for Darrin and Kesha as they adjust to life back in America. Pray for them to find those people in whom God is speaking about following Him overseas so they can share their excitement and experiences with them! Pray that they will "accomplish" all the things in their hearts that they desire to do.

Hungarian road signs

Thought you might enjoy this! I loved it when I ran across it!
I'll write more on Sunday.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

It's definitely fall season here in Budapest and the weather report is calling for below freezing temperatures this coming week. This past week started off grey and overcast, and just downright depressing, but as we were heading into the weekend, it was just beautiful! Thursday was All Saints Day here in Hungary, and is a big holiday so all the stores and businesses were closed. People go to the cemetery and clean up around their loved ones' gravesite and place candles and flower arrangements on them.



On this particular day the sun was shining brightly and it was supposed to be one of the last beautiful days of the year so we decided to do something we've talked about doing since we'd arrived here. We walked into Budapest!!! For those of you that have been to visit us, you know that is quite a walk. For those who have yet to come, it is about 6-8 miles from our house into the heart of Budapest!



The first place we stopped on our walk into town was a local cemetery. Now, we're not morbid and we don't know anyone that is buried there, but we were told by our language tutor that we needed to go to the local cemetery near our house about 4:00 pm because that is early enough to walk through and see all the beautiful flower arrangements and then when the sun goes down about 4:30 pm you can see all the candles that are lit. Well, we ended up going about 2:00 so we didn't get to see the glimmering candles but it was beautiful with all the flowers!



We skirted the Danube River for the first couple of miles, and then headed into an industrial area. It wasn't too scenic, but we did get to watch them putting up this huge sign at the Tesco that is at the Ujbuda Center. Sure didn't feel like Christmas but the stores all have their Christmas decorations out for sale. They basically have the same kinds of decorations as we do in America-only not as much! The only thing that I haven't seen much of are the big colored light bulbs and the tiny white ones. They don't have huge trees like we see in America, but I think that is probably because their houses are much smaller.



As we got into the commercial area, we saw this sign for bumper cars. When I see things like this, it makes me laugh. I am still amazed at how progressive and modernized Budapest is, and when I see things like these bumper cars, it's hard to believe I'm not in America! Honestly, I hate to see some of the things Hungary is importing from America!

We arrived at the Grand Market Hall (you've seen pictures of this building several times) and then walked down the famous pedestrian street, Vaci utca, which is pronounced "Vat-see oot-sa". (The letter "c" is pronounced like a tz, and utca is the word for street".)

By 4:30 the sun was going down. I took this picture as we were crossing over the Danube River on the Szabadsag Hid (Liberty Bridge). Daylight is sooooo short here, but the neat thing is that the evenings are so long! When it is dark by 4:30, I'm ready to eat dinner by 5 or 5:30, which gives me a good 5 hours in the evening before bed! (Do you believe me, or do you think I am trying to convince myself that there's something good about short days and long nights????)

This week has been incredibly fast. The Eden House is totally full. Got a mom about to have her 6th child. Her whole family, including her parents from the States are here, and we have 5 rooms booked for a collage fair that a local Christian school is hosting tomorrow. Glenn and I have 5 teens and a chaperone from the Czech Republic camping out at our house tonight because "there was no room for them in the inn". They are coming from a Christian school in Prague to attend the college fair. Full House means lots of fun!

We say good-bye to friends Kesha and Darrin Harryman next Sunday am. Glenn and I will be taking them to the airport for them to return to the US. They have finished their 2 year ISC term. They were our closest neighbors and the first couple we met from Budapest the first time we went to Poland to help counsel. We will miss them a lot.

We will be heading to the States in a month for a Member Care conference in Virginia and then taking some vacation time in Georgia to visit with family and friends. Kari and Jonathan are coming from France, thanks to the wonderful sky miles gift from Karen and Dennis at WCBC!!! We will spend some time in Tennessee with Chris and Kate before we all head to Marietta. It will be good to see everyone again but there is so much to do before we head that way. We have 3 couples that are going to be covering for us at the Eden House during our absence so we would appreciate you praying for them and thanking God for them!!

See you soon!