Birmingham

What’s next? Why Birmingham? What will you be doing there? Where will you live? What job will you do? What church will you go to? How are you feeling about being back in the UK?

We’ve been asked these questions a lot in the last few weeks – and we don’t mind – we appreciate the interest and the care. But it’s hard work answering them, especially when the answers to so many of them are “We don’t know!”

The kids room gets filled up

But today the new adventure began, and hopefully some of the answers to these questions might start to become clearer.

This morning we moved to IMC in Birmingham. This is the training centre we moved to in September 2007 to train to go to Nepal. This will be our temporary home for the next few months. We have a small 2 bedroom flat in the building, but with the communal and outside space being quite significant we shouldn’t feel cramped!

The kids have both got into a school about 2 ½ miles away from IMC. The school is in an area called King’s Heath, and we will look to find a house and a local church to attend in that area. We are starting to research these things now in preparation.

Dan is signed up with a local supply agency and hopes by the end of September to start work as a supply teacher in local schools. Like so many things in our life at the minute he is excited and nervous about this.

View from our flat at the gardens

We have decided that initially Becky will not work but take time to settle the kids and scope the area. She intends to work teaching English to English language learners, but in what context we don’t know yet.

So this week we have packed up, loaded up and come up to Birmingham. Made slightly more challenging by Dan’s recent medical issue, as he can’t lift anything, but we’ve had plenty of help from family and friends.

11 years to the week after we left our last English home in Liverpool we are heading on our next new adventure and to our new home town.