Preface

“Flight attendants please prepare for departure,” boomed the familiar expression over the loud speaker on the airplane. We taxied around the last corner and then came to a halt as the jet engines began to roar louder and louder. Then in an instant, we were all pressed back into our seats as the plane raced down the runway, shaking and rattling as it lifted quickly into the early-morning, pink, autumn sky. Spread out below us was our home town of the last nine years, Boise, Idaho. As the buildings and cars grew smaller and smaller below, I looked fondly and a bit sadly on the home we were saying good-bye to for at least the next two years. As the city turned into farms and then merged with the endless desert below, I turned my head back to the front of the plane and relaxed as the plane leveled off in the sky.



I realize that most Americans would not pack up their household goods and fly on an airplane across the ocean to relocate their lives to a foreign country. But then, we’ve never been “most Americans.” Almost everything in our adult lives has been a bit unconventional or a little to the side of “normal.” Not that being different is the goal within itself. We’ve never set out to be different, just for the sake of being different. No; it is that this life of faith has led us down a different path than most others.

My husband and I fell in love and got married before we finished college. We had a child within the first year of our marriage (10 months afterwards—to be exact). I chose to stay home full time with my newborn son , even though I was the one with the college degree, at the time, and my husband was working a job that paid less than $5 an hour; a pretty meager wage even back in 1993. And when our son turned five years old, we began homeschooling him. He’s sixteen now and we are still home schooling him as well as his three younger sisters. We have now been married to each other for seventeen years which is also something of an anomaly these days.

So, we are used to being a bit different and to taking risks. For us, it is a life of faith and a wonderful adventure. Not that we expect everything to work out wonderfully or even as planned, as you will see in the following pages, but we do expect to learn and grow along the way; to learn about this great, big wonderful world and the great, big wonderful God who created it and to grow closer to Him and to each other throughout our lives.

I think the dream of taking our kids to live in another culture began a long time ago for me, probably in high school as I had considered being an exchange student even then. But for my husband, Cory, it began with our trip to Italy in 1999. Cory came home from work one day and while he was in the kitchen putting together a salad for dinner, he casually asked, “So, how about going to Venice for Valentine’s Day?” He had a slight smirk on his face and I thought it was a joke. Now, I know of Venice, California but I was thinking, ‘Is there a Venice, Idaho?’ because if there is, surely that is what he is thinking about.

I questioned, “Venice?”

And Cory replied almost laughing now, “Yes, Venice.”

“Venice, California?” I said still not catching on.

“No, Venice, Italy, you silly.”

“Well, yeah! I’d love to go to Venice, Italy for Valentine’s Day but how exactly would we afford that?” I replied.

So, Cory finally revealed his poker hand and handed over the day’s mail which included an offer from our frequent flyer program of not one, but TWO round trip tickets from ANYWHERE in the US to several locations in Europe for $199 roundtrip plus 10,000 frequent flyer miles. You just had to call and book the tickets in the next few weeks and you had to use them by the end of March or something like that. I had been flying the same national airline since my college years when I would go visit my grandparents in Oklahoma or on other trips and had never used up all my frequent flyer miles. So, we immediately picked up the phone and called Cory’s parents to see if they would be willing to have their grandkids come visit for a week or so.

We ended up flying from Seattle to Bologna, Italy and then took trains to Venice, Rome and Florence before returning to Bologna and then back to Seattle 10 days later. It was wonderful. We loved Italy and the Italian people. We loved the fresh food, walking everywhere and exploring old churches and neighborhoods and we loved their open, public plazas. And so the dream began, “We have got to come back and bring the kids.”

Fast forward seven years and two more kids later and we still hadn’t gotten there. But, neither had we forgotten. And so, when the fateful call or email job offer came in the mid-summer of 2006, we immediately said, “Yes! We will go.” Actually, at first, I didn’t believe it was really going to happen, but if it did, the answer was a resounding yes!