Sniders back in Beirut

Last picture in Lebanon before our trip home


Wow, well we haven't been using our blog very much recently (last update Feb 2008), but thought I should post something new in order to not get kicked off and to keep everyone updated.

We just got back from a two month trip to TX/AR and are currently recovering from jet lag. Jamie is due with our baby girl next month (our first) and we'll have her here in Beirut at the American Univ Hospital. Jamie's doing great and traveled well, but we are glad we have the long trip behind us. It's nice to be back in our home, with our own bed and car, where we can finally unpack our suitcases and live more settled in.


Us at Waco baby shower


John has one more class and his thesis this fall before he graduates with an MBA from the American Univ of Beirut. If all goes well, he expects to graduate in February 2010. He'll continue working at AUB this fall as a graduate assistant, which pays for tuition, where he basically just serves professors in whatever capacity they ask.

We were so thankful to see many of our friends and family stateside this summer! I'll try to post more pics than usual on this post so you can see how our time was there. We spent time in Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Waco, Dallas, Fayetteville, and Little Rock. Our friends and family blessed us with 4 baby showers, and we were able to go to 2 weddings and 1 great concert (Coldplay).





We love you and are blessed by God to have such great friends and family.
Stay in touch!
John and Jamie

February Update

As most of you already know, we took a bit of a last minute trip to the States over the holidays. This was necessary in order to renew Jamie’s tourist visa. Because John has a residence student visa, we are hoping that the Immigration department will allow Jamie to also acquire residence on the same visa. This hasn’t been approved yet, so please continue to pray with us for an approval.

However, it was really great to see family and friends over Christmas and New Years. We surprised our families during the week of Christmas as they didn’t know we were coming home. We were so thankful for this fun opportunity to have a brief unexpected visit. We were in the States for 3 weeks and have now been back in Beirut for about a month.

John’s final exams took place the last week of January and we are thankful he passed all his MBA classes and is able to continue the Graduate Assistant program again in the Spring. AUB pays for his tuition in exchange for him working 20hrs/wk at AUB assisting 2 professors. Second semester starts Feb 10. Please pray for new relationships with classmates in the weeks to come.

Jamie is still really enjoying volunteering for an NGO where she is able to serve and love others. She has mainly been serving in administration and this allows her to build relationships with the other women in the office. Please pray for those relationships to deepen and for the women to truly know God’s love for them.

Please also continue to pray for peace in Lebanon and that the political sects would give way to humility and compromise. The people here are tired of war and terrorism and are hoping for political leadership that allows for this nation to flourish and be as it once was. There has been more unrest here than usual in the last month, so we are hoping for things to calm down and not escalate further. But we are all doing great and feel relatively unaffected by the situation around us and still feel safe and unthreatened by the conflict. In fact, we feel safer walking around Beirut than most of the American cities we have lived in, since crime, theft and homicide are so low in Lebanon.

We love and miss you all.
John and Jamie

November update

Life has been going at a rapid pace this last month. John has entered the season of midterms, which means a lot of late night studying for his exams and an increase in work hours proctoring exams for professors. Jamie had been busy with marathon training and finished all 26mi (42k) on 11/18 in 5hrs 30min. She was a bit dehydrated due to the water shortage (no water was provided for the last 20km), but was so blessed to have John accompany her for the first half (he ran 13mi) and had the grace of God to finish the second.

This past month we were so honored to host a group of doctors from Los Angeles, California. They came full of energy and vision and sowed so much into Lebanon. The first 3 days, they set up clinics in a few villages in the South and were able to administer medical aid and pray for people. They prayed for a 3 year old girl from a poor family who had not yet begun to speak and a week later the toddler was speaking her first words. Praise God! Her parents told Clint Miller that she began speaking shortly after our friends prayed for her. Amazing! The team also did medical screenings for 120 kids in a Palestinian refugee camp. Most of these kids had never been seen by a medical professional and we were able to begin a medical history chart for each one of them that will be used by future medical teams. It is such a blessing to have people come here to Lebanon to really serve and love the people here.

We just finished a 3 day Thanksgiving getaway in the mountains and had an amazingly refreshing time. We went up there with our close friends that also live here in Beirut (Mindy, Marci, Blake, Anna and Jade). You can see pictures from Thanksgiving and of the marathon by clicking the box at the top right, labeled "Funnies".

Please continue to pray for this country. There is currently some political instability regarding the President. The former President was forced to step down this last Friday and the office was left empty because the parties involved couldn't settle on a replacement. The army has taken over for now, but there will be an election this Friday 11/30. Pray that a leader will come forth that will be a peaceful compromise between all political leaders involved.

Lastly, here are some upcoming events..
11/27 Jamie and John's 3yr anniversary!
12/1-5 John takes a trip to Dubai
12/9 Jamie's 27th birthday!

We love you guys!
John and Jamie

JOHN'S GOING BACK TO SCHOOL
Our goal when we arrived in Lebanon was to spend our first 6 months diving deep into Arabic, and seeking God about his vision for our lives here. We are really excited because it seems God is speaking more direction to us personally about our calling and His purposes for us.

This summer, God opened doors for John to go graduate school at American University of Beirut. AUB has a reputation for being one of the best universities in the Middle East and offers a competitive MBA program that is also fully accredited in the US. You can take a look around campus by clicking here: http://www.aub.edu.lb/tour/admissions/map.html

AUB has also offered John a graduate assistantship where he is working 20hrs/wk on campus with 2 different business professors, which will pay for all of his tuition. This position will also create more natural relationships and business contacts around the world. His classes began on September 27th and he has really enjoyed his time so far. Please pray that God would allow John to build relationships and open doors for him in this new season.

Jamie will continue taking Arabic classes and working with CDK. She has also started volunteering at an NGO doing some accounting and administrative work with their child sponsorship program.

FRIENDS LEAVING BEIRUT
Over the past 3 months, four of our closest friends have moved elsewhere. Through God’s direction, Jason and Katie decided to move to Little Rock, Arkansas, to be involved in the Journey church whose pastor is Jason’s father, Doug Sherman, and also for Jason to begin work at the Breckenridge Group. They are still very much involved and invested in the businesses they begun here in Lebanon. They officially left in July, and we have deeply felt their absence and personally miss their friendship a lot.

The next two to transition out were Clint and Rachel. Since the earlier months of this year, God has been initiating with them to move to the south to love and work with the people there. They are such faithful and wonderful people and we are sad to see them go, but thankfully they will only be about an hour away.

MARATHONS IN BERLIN AND BEIRUT
Jamie went to visit one of her closest friends, Stephanie Johnson, in Berlin the last week of September to run the last half of the Berlin Marathon with her. They have been running partners for the last couple of years and ran the Austin Freescale Marathon together in February 2006. Currently, we are both training for the Beirut Marathon on November 18th; Jamie’s taking on the full and John’s running half. Pray that we finish our training well and continue to stay healthy and injury-free.

PLEASE PRAY FOR LEBANON!
If you have been following the political situation here, you may know that the past year the country has been basically shut down politically. There have been a handful of violent bombs throughout the country, a few members of Parliament have been assassinated, and they have again postponed Presidential elections until the end of November. Please pray that the next two months would mark a time of peace in the country and in the decision making process. Pray for unity in the country and for an end to this recent outbreak of violence.

We love you and miss you all!
The Sniders

Transitions

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=6308&l=ae15d&id=722369852

here is a link to some pictures from the last few weeks.

Yesterday we dropped Jason and Katie off at the airport and are now recovering from a few weeks of non-stop craziness. We are so sad that we won't be living daily life with them here, but also excited and expectant for what God has for them in Little Rock. A couple of months ago, we began talking about our involvement in the businessess they began here. Being full-time Arabic students, we weren't fully sure how much we would have to offer. However, as we prayed about it, we felt God leading us to jump in with whatever capacity we had and believe that he would meet us in that place of faith. As of now, Jamie is managing things for CDK on this side of the world, and John is taking on an advisor role at ILC, meeting with the employees weekly and being in on all major decisions. Jason and Katie are still fully involved, but are focusing more on growing these businesses state side and creating a bigger market for them in America. We are excited about the change, but so extremely sad about having our closest friends leave. Please pray for all of us and all of our friends here during this transitional time.

If you would like more information on CDK or ILC and how you could get involved with us, the websites are are posted under "links".

Back in B-town

We are back home after our trip to the States for Jamie's sister's wedding. The wedding was on June 2nd and we arrived back here on June 6th. The pic is of us in the car, where we were often found driving all over Texas and Arkansas, visiting friends and family and helping out with the wedding (see other pics of us in the States by clicking under "Funnies" at the top right of this page). Travel was good and we are about over our jetlag and are returning back to Arabic class today.

We are excited as we are feeling more at home now, as we were able to move more of our things here on the trip back. We also purchased some furniture and a shower door thanks to our generous friends and family! We should have them sometime later this month. Please pray for us as our group here is in transition with some of our friends leaving and others having some visa problems. Please also pray God's wisdom for us as we are deciding on what type of visa we will apply for and how we will specifically be serving the people here, in addition to continuing Arabic.

We were so excited to get to see some of you while we were back home. We truly miss you more than we can express. We are so thankful for your thoughts and prayers.

Love, John and Jamie

Jamie's got a gun...

As you know, we have been studying Arabic full time. We thought we would give you an example of what life is like as a full time language student. First of all, our days are filled with laughing at each other, frustration, confusion, and small moments of breakthrough. Every once in a while we feel that glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe we will begin to speak arabic well and be able to fully share our hearts. If you know anything about Arabic, you know that there is the Formal language, FusHa (like the mean hyenas in Madagascar), and there is the spoken language which is different in every region, every country, sometimes every city, and sometimes every neighborhood and religious community within the city. Needless to say, there are no fixed grammer rules for anything but FusHa, making it difficult to learn spoken arabic. As we have been on this journey, we have made a few huge mistakes in our pronunciation, in our sentence structure, in everything.

Last week, we were doing our conversation homework which consists of us going around our neighborhood and asking people different questions in Arabic. Jamie, feeling very confident that day, walked into a small store up the street to speak with the very nice woman who works there. Jamie smiled, gave her the normal back and forth greetings, then said to her, "I have homework, can I practice with you?" She immediately made this weird, panicked face, raised her eyebrows (which is the Lebanese signal for no), and said "la, la, la.", or no, no, no in arabic. Jamie, really confused, asked again, not knowing what went wrong...same reaction. The exact same thing happened to John at a pharmacy down the street. We got our homework done, but had no idea why everyone was so freaked out by us. People usually love when foreigners try to speak their language. When our teacher came to our apartment for class, we asked him, "Why does everyone act weird when we tell them we have homework and need to practice with them?" He started cracking up laughing at us and said, "No, you are saying it wrong!". Come to find out that the arabic word for "gun" is "Fared" and the word for homework is "Farad", and the verb "to practice" is the same as the verb "to train"...SO basically we were walking into stores and saying to people, "Hi, I have a gun, can I train on you?" Yikes!!!