Notes on a musical evening

No pun intended. :-)

Tonight I visited a neighborhood choir as part of my attempt to become more connected with the local community. Pro Musica has been around since 1981 and happens to meet within walking distance of where I live, so I decided to give it a try. While the director was away this evening (which means that I will return next week to witness a more usual rehearsal), I was struck by the sheer lopsidedness of the choir: 15 altos, 9 sopranos, 3 tenors, and 2 basses. Ouch. I'm told that usually there are a few more men present, but it's still pretty bad odds.

On the plus side, tonight re-introduced me to all the French terms in music, especially random words we use in choir practice like "off" or "pick up to..." It's all words I know already, just not in the musical context, in the same way that a non-singer would get used to musical lingo after joining a chorale. The terms for notes are quite intuitive: black notes, white notes, round notes and pointed notes. You do lose the advantage of labeling each note with its relative value (quarter, half, etc.), but it's easy to learn quickly. And to think I went through this process backwards 12 years ago! I particularly remember wondering why "do" wasn't called "A" instead of "C," since that was the "first" note. Now I almost have to translate from "mi" to "E" and back again.

Overall, I enjoyed getting to sing Mendelssohn again tonight, but we'll see if they really need another soprano or not in the coming weeks...

Multilingual adventures

This week marked the beginning of English classes at Marhaban. Since the other teachers are all British, we had a few humorous differences of pronunciation--anywhere from how to say the letter "z" to whether the last syllable of Moscow sounds like "ow" or "oh." The students enjoyed hearing the differences in our language, especially since many of them have different accents in French, too!

We have three classes of students, and I teach the middle, or intermediary, class. Each session opens with time for tea, biscuits and discussion before everyone splits into their groups. This week one of the ladies brought sesame cakes to share, a traditional sweet from her native Syria. A few of the students are French, but most are expats from any number of countries--Germany, Algeria, Argentina, and Madagascar were all present in my class as well.

This afternoon the family I tutor for held a birthday party for their younger daughter at Marseille's beautiful "Park of the 26th Century." (Not many cites are 2600 years old!) Almost all of the other families there spoke Italian, so I had fun trying to follow the conversation between the bits of Italian my sister has taught me and the commonalites of all Romance languages.

Next weekend will be back to English again as ICCM and friends head to the Cévennes mountains for a time of fellowship and refreshment. Many on the trip are new to France or Marseille and some have never been to an ICCM event before, so please pray for growth and edification in relationships. It's amazing to see how God brings people together from so many different backgrounds to form his Church!

Bits and Pieces

After finishing my draft update letter for September, I figured it would only be right to actually update my blog as well while I'm at it... :) I blame my lack of posting on the much more regular work I'm doing over at ICCM's blog, so do please take a look to see what we've been up to. This week was full of family events, including the birth of my nephew (and an adorable baby he is!) and my grandmother's arrival in Marseille for a series of heart tests. Thankfully some of my major activities have not yet started, so I had a little extra time I was able to spend with her at the hospital.

On Thursday this week I was also able to attend a prayer meeting co-inciding with the "Night of Power" in Ramadan, with believers from all over the world. After about two hours of prayer and worship (powerful indeed!), we had a time of fellowship and refreshments, including many cookies traditionally served at the Feast of Eid, celebrating the end of Ramadan. Between those and another set of honey cakes I'd been served earlier that day, I spent the rest of the evening on a sugar high...

This afternoon I met with my new friend Marion, who started coming to the Friedland church at the same time I did. We're trading useful skills--I'm helping her with English and she's going to help me re-design some of the ICC brochures since she's a graphic arts major. Hurrah! This gives me hope after I spent three hours laboring over this Sunday's bulletin, with rather miserable results. (Next time I will remember to switch my MSWord settings from letter format to A4...) With all the international work I'm doing, it's nice to get to know a culturally French person for a change. ;) Not that I don't love the international community! It's just that I need a reminder every once in a while that I actually live in France, since I tutor for an Italian/Dominican Republican family, work in an office with ten different nationalities, go to church with people from about twelve different nationalities, and live with an Egyptian-American family. But that's what I get for living in a city where probably less than half of the population is actually of French background (especially if you keep in mind how many Corsicans are here! ;) )

And on that note, this Swiss-French-Corsican-Irish-American is going to sleep. :-D

Happenings of a week in Sanary

This week has been a good transition time, with plenty of work but also time to rest. I've mostly been becoming acquainted with the various ongoing ICC projects and helping out with a lot of the tech and web stuff. My experience with blogger here is helping me manage the ICCM site, which is great. During some of the more technical side of my work, I found the attached chart and showed it to Dan and Nancy... :-) [click for larger view]

Wednesday evening included two unusual events--a thunderstorm (the first rain I've seen since arriving in the south of France, the first in France at all this summer except for a brief downpour in Anduze in early July) and a trip to Castorama with the Painters. Castorama, esentially a French Home Depot, isn't that unusual in and of itself, but this evening they happened to be serving champagne (in plastic cups) to shoppers at the store entrance! Apparently this was a special sale for frequent buyers, which the Painters have become after all the work that has gone into the office.

Today I was able to ride into Marseille with Dan for ICCM's weekly prayer breakfast. It was my second-ever time on a motorcyle, and my first time on the highway with one, so it was quite the adventure! The end of the ride turned a bit sour when I burned my ankle against the exhaust pipe, but now I'll be a lot more careful in the future... After the prayer breakfast I was able to connect with Jean-Raymond, the local pastor and host to ICCM, who shared more details about the opportunities to connect with the church and in the community. It looks like I will be helping a new Italian family that just arrived in Marseille, tutoring their daughter as she starts in the French school here. There is also an opportunity to volunteer at the Marhaban ("welcome" in Arabic) center, both for English classes and French classes, which I'm hoping to explore. I recognize the need to keep a balance amongst all these different activities, but am really excited about the chance to help out!

This weekend I will worship with Dan and Nancy in Sanary before heading back to Marseille in the evening for ICCM's book study on Tim Keller's The Reason for God. I brought a copy with me with the intention of reading it over the summer, but now I'm signed up to explain the first two chapters and will definitely have to read it! (An excellent way to get me past the three other books I am reading at the moment to focus on this one for a bit...)

Here are a few prayer requests for the rest of this week:

• --Healing for my burn, which the pharmacist tells me is second degree
• --Favor in dealing with my French bank account: I found out this week that my card chip somehow was de-magnitized, which means I need to send it in for another one, but this can't be done until I update my address to Marseille, which will have to wait until at least Tuesday
• --Wisdom in balancing all the different ministry opportunities available in order to be a wise steward of my time here
• --Praise God that my French cell phone arrived--that's one less administrative thing for me to worry about now. :)

Prayer Guide for the Muslim World

Every year YWAM publishes a 30-day prayer guide for the Muslim world to coincide with the month of Ramadan. You can download the whole guide or sign up to recieve daily email updates this month (August 22nd to September 20th) on their website at www.30-days.net or www.30jours.org for the French site.

Harvest Time

Before leaving Corsica this week, my family stayed overnight with cousins who live close to the airport since my mom and brother had a 6:30am flight the next morning. We were pretty sure our departure time would be before anyone else was up, but that was counting without the grape harvest. Both our cousin and her husband work in the vineyards around Bastia, and the harvest is just starting. As an administrator, my cousin could start work as early as 5:30, while her husband, who oversees the actual harvesting, had to get up at 1:30 to be at work by 3am.

Having never participated in a grape harvest before, I had only vague ideas of the work involved, and definitely no understanding of workdays starting at 3am. Reality check: a harvest is hard and involves long, tiring days. But there is fruit at the end of it! Even if that fruit has to be crushed and hidden in barrels for years before it is ready, the end is a plentiful harvest, if the workers are there to bring it in. Since my time in Marseille will include both administrative work and more "hands on" opportunities, I was glad to see how both are important in the grape harvest as well. Please pray that I will have the same determination and perseverance as these harvesters in my work this year, even in long and tiring days, being a faithful steward of the harvest in which I am called to labor.

Then [Jesus] said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest." --Matthew 9:37-38

Summer Reading

I've used a lot of my down time in the past few weeks to catch up on reading that I hoped to do before my work starts in Marseille this fall.

The first book, John Piper's Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of God in Missions, is one I've had for a while but am finally starting to read. The first three chapters examine in turn the aspects of worship, prayer and suffering in missions. I was especially struck in the chapter on prayer by the way prayer truly points to God's sovereignty and glory in missions--we recognize that it is only by and through him that the work is accomplished. It also made me very thankful for the many people praying for this year of mission!


My second read (because I always end up reading multiple books at once) is Bernard Lewis's The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. A professor in college introduced me to Dr. Lewis's works on the Arab world, and I had the opportunity to read several of his other books for school. This particular work I found a yard sale right before leaving, so I was quite happy to complete my collection. It includes a lot of good backround material on the Middle East before the arrival of Islam or even Christianity, and then goes on to describe the years following Mohammed's life from a scholarly and fairly balanced perspective. I recommend this and any of Lewis's other works to those interested in the history and culture of the lesser-known parts of Arab history.