Letter from America - VF
I had a message from my good friend Maria this week. She has taken over my role in Teen Sabbath School in Auckland (given than she used to always help me AND used to teach kids this age ie 10-16, I think she will do an even better job than I did). Anyway, she wanted some ideas so I decided to write the kids a letter so they could know what Im up to and also send some questions for discussion. Here is part of it. The rest was about the lesson of the week, but it will be too long to fit one posting here. I included the Michigan map above.

Friday 29th October 2004

Hi everyone in TeenSS

I thought it was time that I wrote to you (or wrote you as they say here in the USA) and seeing as Maria said when I spoke to her this week that she was taking Sabbath School this week, I thought I would send a letter via her along with some thoughts on this weeks lesson.

I am having a wonderful time so far. Things have been very busy and we have done a lot of flying (out of the last 8 weeks since I left NZ, I had a week at my parents house in Sydney, 3 weeks in my new home and the other half of the time has been in hotels). I know Maria showed you the video she took of our wedding (even I haven’t seen it yet!!!) so you know that we had such a great time. I am going to send her a CD of photos soon too. We had a week in Hawaii before our wedding and a week after with lots of our friends and family so that was great. The weather was so warm after coming from winter in Auckland! You could only go the beach for a few hours as it was so hot. The local people seemed to be able to stay there all day with their radios tuned to an interesting Hawaiian-reggae mix music station. We zoomed back to NZ for a few days in order to get my international drivers licence, new passport and have the interview with the US immigration people (no it wasn’t quite like in the movie Green Card). We were back here in Michigan for 3 weeks and have been away again for a week as Jamie (it’s weird saying 'my husband’) had a conference in New Orleans which is further in the South. New Orleans was a weird, creepy place. I think it is because they have a lot of things going on there that are definitely not Christian like voodoo and the people are very open in flaunting their various lifestyles and behaviours. It was quite strange as you could definitely feel the undercurrents and I don’t think I have ever been in a place where you can feel it like that.
Michigan is way up near the top of the USA on the Canadian border (in fact there is a part nearby where Canada (a city called Windsor) is actually south of the United States which I never realised before - a good Trivial Pursuit-type question to be aware of! Michigan also is bordered by 4 of the 5 Great Lakes (Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, Lake Superior and Lake Eirie; the other one Lake Ontario is further to the east bordering New York state. Here is a map so you can see.

The city I am now living in is called Berkley, it is part of what they call the greater Detroit area. This is about 5 hours flying from Los Angeles, so after flying 12 hours from New Zealand to get to America, there is still a long way to go. Detroit is also known as the Motor City (AKA MoTown) as this is where the headquarters of the main USA car manufacturing companies are. It’s quite strange when you are driving along and you get to Ford Road and through suburbs called Pontiac and Fairlane. These are all (obviously) near the world headquarters for Ford. Driving is pretty interesting in itself. Not only am I having to drive on the right side of the road, but remembering to go to the left side of the car to get into the drivers side is quite a change. Once you get going it’s easy as no matter where you are in the world, you only have to remember to keep the steering wheel in the middle of the road! But going around roundabouts the other way to what I am used to is a bit weird! After not having a car in Auckland for 5 years, it is nice to have a car to drive around in whenever I feel like it.

I have been to church here quite a few times. It is about the same size as Royal Oak and the people seem quite nice and friendly. Some friends of ours take Pathfinders so we might help them out occasionally when the weather is warmer if there are camps to cool places like by the lakes. Right now it is getting colder because we are about to come into Winter. I guess I didn’t time the moving too well because I will have two Winters this year. There are lots of trees in Michigan and they are all turning the most incredible autumn colours (I refuse to say “fall” and will always say Autumn!). It is quite like Christchurch where I grew up, but there are a lot more trees. In the garden outside there are lots of squirrels - black, brown and grey ones and there is obviously an oak tree somewhere nearby as they scurry about picking things up so I assume they are getting acorns for the winter. When I was here over the Christmas holidays it snowed. Apparently we can expect snow in the next few weeks. It can snow anytime between late October and about March. When it snows can be half a metre or more deep, so that will make driving rather interesting! We are planning to come back to visit sometime over winter here to get some New Zealand and Australian sun. At the end of January, my parents will be moving from Sydney back to New Zealand so that will mean that we will visit New Zealand more seeing as we wont have to go to Sydney to see them. They used to go to Royal Oak church before they moved to Sydney so I assume they will come back to Royal Oak. But even if they don’t I will still visit whenever we are in Auckland on a Sabbath. The first time should be sometime in the first part of next year.

I had a look on the General Conference website for the lesson. That’s the one I showed you on-line in Sabbath School before I left. I really encourage you to join up as they have good on-line discussions about all sorts of things as well as the lesson each week. The url is http://realtimefaith.adventist.org/index.htm