"Couch" Surfing Part I

Who knew that when we moved out of our cozy 1 bedroom apartment, we'd be moving into a mansion of sorts.  After Sara was done with work on Friday we biked to Fitchburg (about 30 minutes away on bike) to stay at our marriage mentors house, who were at their cabin at the time.  We are so blessed with people's generosity.  They let us have full access to their very nice, large home and everything in it.  To put it in proportion:  their master bedroom is bigger than our entire apartment was.  

We'll be staying here until tonight when we bike to Middleton to crash into Jon and Mary's house.  Watch out, the word on the street is if you leave for vacation we'll be at your house in 24 hours.  

Update on our travel plans.  Anne and Sara talked to a principal of a school in Pune, India and it was very promising.  Here are a collection of my notes about the school for those interested in details: 

 The school is KC Thackeray Vidya Niketan English Medium School.  Long title, so hopefully they have a shortened version of that.  It is a gov't and private funded school (the private funds come from an education foundation: Thermax Social Initiative Foundation)). They have 13 staff and about 300 kids (in elementary grades).  All or most of the students are from very low to middle class.  They really need help and seem open to exactly where we'd help but have also had help before and have structure already to their system.  They need help with 1 on 1 with students, reg. help after and before school, support staff to help with teachers, help with curriculum...she said a lot of their students need help to stay up or catch up to their grade level.  
The school has a computer lab, a library, projector, and English is spoken all the time.  It would be about 10-15 minutes from the area we are looking in to live.  
When asked about what challenges the school has Shalini responded: there are many different levels of abilities in the classrooms and trying to meet all those needs is very difficult.  They also need technological help to analyze the data from the school to measure their progress.  

The plan is to leave still in the middle of September and we are waiting for one or two more emails regarding addresses and apartments to apply for our visas and buy our tickets.