Fun with Marvin: Day 1

The day had finally arrived, we’ve waited weeks for him to arrive. Every few minutes I’d refresh my screen to see if his flight from Frankfurt, Germany had landed safely.  The plan was that our group organizer, Cindie Kelly, was to meet the students at the airport in Washington , D.C. and transport them to a more local site. All five host families met at Wegman’s this Sunday afternoon and anxiously awaited their arrival. Before he set foot in the room, just about all we knew about this 15 year old German boy was that he liked soccer and oreos and from his Facebook posts I knew he had a sense of humor. Everything else was still up in the air. 

We were pleasantly surprised at how well he spoke English! I breathed a huge sigh of relief that at least there wouldn’t be a huge communication issue.

 

We settled in quite quickly. That’s one of the blessings of social media: through Facebook, I had communicated with both of his parents as well as directly with him and Bryce had too. I am so thankful for that.

The boys jumped right into the fun (literally)…

I had done some pre-planning in anticipation of the language difference and had post its in various places throughout the house with both the English and German words to indicate where things were housed. I also thought he’d like to know our schedule, so I posted that prominently in the kitchen. This is where I would find Marvin each morning – checking out the schedule for the days ahead.

Although there is a 6 hour time difference, he stayed up surprisingly late the first night. I think it was all the excitement. When he was finally ready to crash we had Bryce’s room set up for both of the boys and Marvin passed out here…

A great ending to the first day of a wonderful adventure!