My partner and I have been visiting our family for a couple of weeks now. Our first visits were a bit awkward. There was a little trouble with getting a hold of the family and into their building but after that the language barrier was also a lot harder than I had expected. The one family member had only been in the US for a couple months now and spoke very little and the rest of the family  had been here for a couple years now and spoke some english. Still it was hard to keep up a conversation because there were many times I could see that they had something they wanted to say but didn’t know how to say. This could be frustrating at times but we were still able to spend our visits just getting to know one another. I was happy to learn that they had been farmers in their home country and I felt a bit of a connection with them having grown up on a farm myself. We had brought them a gift of apples on the first day and they often would bring out food for us during our visits so many times we were also able to just sit around and enjoy some good food. The family seems most  interested in having us help them with learning english so for our next visits we will probably be scrambling to figure out some lesson plans and find some new ways to practice english.

So this pretty much sums up our first couple of visits. I’ll try to keep a regular blog after each visit from this point on.