Originally published in our July 2024 newsletter This water balloon barreling towards Rousel feels like the perfect picture of life in Lebanon right now.  Is she going to catch it and move on with the game, or is it going to burst, soaking her? Living with our eyes on the balloon can so quickly paralyze... Read More ..read more

A few months ago I was contacted by a mom who is moving with her family to Beirut this summer. She was looking for school recommendations, specifically she wanted to know where teens of faith-based workers generally attend. I had a gut feeling on how to answer, based on the chatter in my expat mom group about schools, where my friends’ kids go, and the kids from different international schools that I’ve worked with through different community projects I’ve been involved in. While I’ve tried to get the data from the schools themselves, that’s been a bit of a dead-end, mostly because any student ..read more

When I was a kid, my family had an advent calendar that we used every Christmas season. It had little paper doors and behind each door was a part of the Christmas story. When Isla was a baby, I wanted to recreate it to use as our advent tradition as well. I rewrote the story a bit (gotta use that theology degree!), adding some pictures to help them remember the story before they could actually read it, and made a paper chain that we hung on our Christmas tree. Each night we’d pull a ring off the chain and add to the story bit by bit. By halfway through the month, the kids would have the story ..read more

Way back when it was time to choose a school for Isla, we were a bit lost. A colleague of Caleb’s at the time, who we shared similar values and goals with, recommended the school where his kids went… so we did the interview and registered her. We had no clue how very different the many options were from each other, nor the trajectory the school choice would put our kids on. Now after many years in Lebanon, moderating groups with 400+ expat parents, and working with kids in multiple schools, I have a much clearer picture of the educational system and options available. At the beginning of 2020 ..read more

Beirut is not the easiest place to learn Arabic. It’s completely doable to live here for years and never pick up more than basic phrases. You can shop, socialize and entertain yourself all in English or French if that is your desire. But just because it isn’t easy, doesn’t mean it’s impossible! We are positive proof that foreigners can (and should! but that’s for another post) learn Arabic while living in Beirut. It will take hard work. You have to be annoying about forcing yourself to practice speaking, even when people continually answer you in English. You have to be intentional about getti ..read more

It’s been almost two years our kids have been home. They’ve had a few weeks of semi-normal life here and there before the Revolution kicked off, before covid lockdowns started, and at the end of last year when things were starting to open up again in Lebanon, but for the majority of the past two years, they’ve been home. School was online, youth groups shut down, and even play dates were limited as roads were closed and then as we tried to maintain a smart social bubble to protect our friends and families. Our kids’ school did a great job with online school, and to be honest I was never really ..read more

What would you do with 10 hours of electricity? The immediate thought, when you are dripping with sweat, is AC. Or do you turn on the water heater so that you can take a shower at the end of the day? Ooh, ooh, what about laundry? Do you use the internet or try to get some meal prep done and use the microwave, food processor or blender? Ah, scratch that last option, you can’t prep anything too far in advance because your fridge no longer has enough power to keep food cold enough. You get 10 hours, only 10. What do you choose? And by the way, this isn’t government electricity that you can use a ..read more

My 11 year old writes a name on the wall with a piece of chalk, while another volunteer uses a broom to cover the space with a homemade paste mixture. Some of the names are familiar – Alexandra, Isaac, Sahar – but most are just names. The next step is simple… grab a rolled up poster, line up and stick the bottom, and then unroll it upwards, revealing a portrait. I knew the art installation would be powerful, but I had no idea how moving the act of pasting the portraits to the wall would be. When I saw the call on social media for volunteers, I knew immediately we’d help out. We’ve been a fan ..read more

It’s been almost 18 months since this season of school closures began for kids here in Lebanon. When the Revolution broke out in the fall of 2019, we found ourselves home for weeks because of protests and road closures. Some of the big international schools have contingency plans for such situations, but most schools were left scrambling when the days turned to weeks. Our kids and I developed a really nice and fun rhythm of home learning during those days, and that served us well when just a few months later, schools were closed again when the first corona cases were diagnosed in Lebanon. Like ..read more

When our eldest child was five years old, we were spending the afternoon at a secluded park in North Carolina, surrounded by trees and not much else. All of a sudden, I realized my daughter was nowhere to be seen, and after a quick and frantic search, we discovered her in the public bathroom. We had to have yet another conversation with our daughter—born and bred in the Middle East—about life in America and how she shouldn’t wander off alone. “Yes,” she replied, “America isn’t safe like Lebanon is.” A little devotional I wrote was recently published on Parenting Pathway, the parenting minist ..read more