Pendleton, Oregon
December 12, 2009
Dear Friends & Family,
2009 has been a good year. We spent most of it figuring out how to move the whole family to Seattle, and toward the end of the year we were able to put a plan in motion that will see us all together in Seattle very soon. Enabling this is Clarissa's good fortune to find a nice job in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington. She has joined the I-TECH (http://www.go2itech.org/who-we-are/about-i-tech) project full-time as a language specialist participating in a variety of language-related tasks for I-TECH initiatives in Southern Africa. She is excited about this opportunity to apply her skills to an area of the world that she already knows and loves, and this job will involve travel, something she is very much looking forward to.
Speaking of travel, collectively we probably did too much of it this year. Clarissa, Paula and Oliver spent a week in Washington DC where Clarissa attended a conference for the American Translators Association, and the three of them took in a variety of sites and museums. During the summer Clarissa and the kids spent six weeks in Brazil visiting relatives and friends there. They were joined for part of that time by Sam's aunt Marge, and together they traveled to the Iguacu Falls and made short excursions into Argentina and Paraguay. The highlight of that trip for Sophia was a one-week soccer camp with the Coritiba Football Club, and for Paula a one-week drama camp that culminated in her narrating a play in Portuguese. Oliver was christened in Clarissa's family's church and introduced for the first time to most of his Brazilian relatives. During that time Sam worked in South Africa with close colleagues, and on his way home attended a meeting in Paris. Clarissa joined him there for a very enjoyable week, several days of which were conference-free and very relaxing. The only drawback was that the meeting accommodated the attendees in a student hostel(#@), but the hostel was in the middle of the Latin Quarter, so location partly made up for the lack of amenities (at least in Sam's view)! In the second half of the year Sam attended meetings in Accra, Ghana; Marrakech, Morocco; Pune, India and Mwanza, Tanzania. Sam really, really just wants to stay at home now!
The children grew and studied, laughed and occasionally cried. Oliver is an active and inquisitive 2.5 year old who is speaking a lot. He seems to have an innate fascination with trucks, tractors and anything that moves, especially balls. He loved watching his sisters play soccer and routinely tried to sneak onto the pitch to take a crack at it himself. Paula transitioned to third grade at a new school - West Hills - and is very much enjoying the whole school experience. She has turned into a great reader, writer and careful practitioner of arithmetic. She also swam, played soccer and rode bikes with her Dad. Her ambition this year is to be a scientist, maybe "the kind that controls the computers that control the space shuttle"! Paula also took up the cello and performed in her first recital. Sophia worked hard to achieve and maintain a 4.0 grade average, but her true love and perhaps her calling is music. She took up the flute, learned to read music and is apparently the acknowledged leader of her section of the band. This amazes her parents, neither of whom have even one iota of talent for music. Sophia is also a truly voracious reader and has begun writing well too. Toward the end of her sixth grade year, she was selected as one of two representatives from among all the sixth graders in Pendleton to attend a writing workshop held in Portland for accomplished writers at the middle and high school levels from across the State. And, like most other young girls her age this year, she was drawn into the Twilight vortex and is truly obsessed with love-sick, angst-ridden teenage vampires, with only a brief interlude to reconnect with the Harry Potter series when "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" opened.
Clarissa continued to translate and interpret this year and oversaw a lot of work getting our house ready to sell, or as it has turned out, rent. The entire interior was repainted and a number of things done to improve the exterior as well. Sam continued to teach, do research and increment the process of publishing papers. Four of his graduate students graduated, three more masters students and his first PhD student, and thankfully they were all able to move on successfully to whatever they wanted to do.
So, all-in-all, a very good year. Season's greetings and warm wishes for the next year!
Oliver, Paula, Sophia, Clarissa & Sam
To see pictures and know more about what's going on you can find us on Facebook.
