Here’s another Q & A post! One reader asked:
I’d love to hear anything about the classes you took this year. Especially the field health class. ….Do you have summer classes? If not, what are your plans?
How does Gracia like living at the school? Are there lots of other kids for her to play with?
And another reader:
… How much longer do you have in your training? When does Gracia start kindergarten? Considering that you are going into missions, are you going to start Gracia at a public school for the experience, and then start home schooling her when you are assigned somewhere?
Classes
Do you have summer classes? If not, what are your plans?
No, we don’t have summer classes. We finished our second semester in May and will start our 3rd semester in August. Most of the students go back to their home areas over the summer, but we’re staying here, mostly because of Little Dude. God has provided multiple odd jobs for Cameron to do this summer, most of which are car maintenance jobs, and I’ve been hanging out with the kiddos.
How does Gracia like living at the school?
She really loves it here! During our classes she goes to an on campus preschool. She loves her friends and teachers there! The campus is beautiful, right by the lake and with lots of playground areas for the kids. It’s basically a kid’s paradise. 
Are their lots of other kids for her to play with?
Most of the students that come through are around our age (although we have older people come through too), so that means they’re in their child-bearing stage and there’s plenty of kids around.
I’d love to hear anything about the classes you took this year. Especially the field health class.
Here and here, I have posts on our ministry blog about some of our classes.
Our field health class was taught by a nurse who worked overseas as a missionary with NTM. We also had a couple of local doctors come in give and lectures. She taught us what things would be most important for us to know. Some of this included:
What areas have malaria, dengue, and other diseases.
What medicines are available to prevent those diseases, the pros and cons of the various options.
When you need to call in for a medical flight evacuation (which is only available in certain locations).
Worms!! We talked a lot about various worms, how to prevent getting them, how to get rid of them, etc…
Water contamination.
How we can stay healthy so we can do our job better (this included, exercise, eating habits, how to handle stress, etc..)
Suturing a pig foot!
We covered more than that, but those are the things that I remember most. We also had a couple of optional classes, which Cameron and I took and that’s where we got to do some hand-on practice:
Taking blood pressures and heart beats.
Looking in ears for infection.
Giving shots (I gave Cameron one and he gave me one).
And suturing. We used pigs feet for this.
Cameron giving me a shot.
How much longer do you have in the training?
In August we’ll start our 3rd semester and in December we’ll finish it and technically be done, but there’s 2 optional training courses after that. One is the linguistics course and it’s all about how languages breakdown and work. We get a little of that training in our regular classes, but this is much more in depth. They do one semester of it, and then several weeks of going to Oklahoma and working with Cherokee there to get first hand experience doing linguistics.
The other optional course is Missionary Technology. This is one semester of solar panels, generators, and all kinds of other tech things that are extremely useful in remote places. Right now we’re thinking about Cameron doing the Missionary Tech course. He thoroughly enjoyed the short tech class we all took, and he has a background in technical things like alarms and mechanics.
So…if he does take the Missionary Tech course that will be in January 2014 until May 2014.
1st day of preschool
When does Gracia start kindergarten? Considering that you are going into missions, are you going to start Gracia at a public school for the experience, and then start home schooling her when you are assigned somewhere?
My “baby” is 5 now, so she’s old enough to start kindergarten this year, however our plans are for her to stay in the on-campus preschool for this coming semester and then in January (when Cameron will possibly be starting the tech course), I will home-school her.
Right now I am trying to do some school type-things with her, just to keep her brain exercising. She loves doing addition problems!
When we move to the country where we’ll work we’ll probably have multiple options for schooling, public/private school of the country, missionary school, or homeschooling. Most likely we’ll continue to home-school.
I have more questions about missions. The other ones I’ll answer in a second (and maybe even third) post. If you have any questions you’d like me to try and answer you can leave them in the comments, or email me at purposelyfrugal(at)hotmail(dot)com.