"Not All Who Wander are Lost" New Zealand Sabbatical

It has been hard to find time to post on the blog as much as we would like! Our time in NZ has been busy so far, all with good things. There is no shortage of possible topics and experiences to reflect on here, but when I finally get a moment to sit down and write it's hard to know where to start. So today I'll just post a quick update, and tomorrow or Monday we will try to share some more reflections on our goals for this sabbatical time and what "sabbatical" means to us, as well as go into a little more detail on what we're learning about the parts of New Zealand landscape and culture we've been able to explore thus far. Last time I posted, we were just getting our bearings in Dunedin & NZ in general. A week and a half later, we feel like we know our way around better and have moved into a house where we'll be for the next month. This past week, Soren has been attending his wonderful kindergarten, our lovely babysitter Kate has taken Avery on adventu...

Kia ora from Aotearoa, New Zealand! We left San Francisco at 9pm on Thursday October 13 and landed in Auckland on Saturday the15th at about 6am local time after a 13 hour flight, basically skipping Friday entirely. New Zealand is currently 19 hours ahead of Missoula (it will be 18 after the "fall back" time change). The flight was not nearly as daunting as we'd expected - it helped that we had two full rows to ourselves and the footrests popped up to make a sort of bed you could lay flat on. We all slept for the most part which was basically a miracle traveling with two kids under 5. We are lucky that our boys are pretty good travelers at this point, though they were very squirrelly by the end and we narrowly avoided a meltdown right in front of the customs agent. Thankfully they let us in the country! From Auckland (at the northwest end of the north island; NZ's largest city) we took a connecting flight to the city of Dunedin (called Ōtepoti in Māori), a university t...

 Hello!  Well, every blog needs a beginning, so we might as well start here: We are the Huseth family, and we are about to embark on a journey to New Zealand where we will live and be in a new context together from October to December of 2022. A little bit of background: Eric has been working as pastor of Our Savior's Lutheran Church in Bonner (just outside of Missoula), Montana USA for almost 8 years. He applied and received a grant from the Lilly Endowment Clergy Renewal Program in 2019 to embark on a sabbatical for 3 months. Having originally planned to do this in 2020, plans (obviously) were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. After deferring twice due to pandemic (New Zealand borders closed) and personal (we had another baby!) reasons, the stars finally aligned for this experience to go ahead in 2022.  Abby has worked for Climate Smart Missoula since 2017 and has been actively involved in local Climate Change issues for almost a decade. Climate Smart Missoula works ...