Preston and Krista in China

back to normal

2012-02-12T23:39:00.000-06:00

Things are slowly returning to “normal” around Beijing following the long Spring Festival holiday. Workers are returning to their usual posts and shops, and vendors are back in service.

The sounds of firecrackers and fireworks have all but ceased as everyone settles back into their normal routines.

We are happy to see many familiar faces back on campus and on the surrounding streets. We are mildly befuddled as Spring Festival means new clothes and new hairdos for many people, causing us pause as we adjust to seeing the lady without bangs and a gray coat now sporting bangs and a yellow coat. Equally dislocating is the number of small shops where owners did not return after the holiday and whose building are being drastically remodeled or razed for new use.

We have about 150 students on campus for the February session. More than half have been sent here from an area in rural Gansu province that was hard-hit by an earthquake last year. With an over-all low level of English everyone has to work a little harder, love a little more and think creatively. The rest of the students are from well-developed areas in Shandong and Beijing, making for an interesting mix.

Plans to expand our program into new areas such kindergarten (at a separate location) and a possible partnership with a university in Chongqing province are continuing. Krista has spent the last several days helping with university representatives as they tour our program and discuss the feasibility of setting up a similar program on their campus. We both participated in a marathon relationship-building event (6-plus hours of meetings and dinner, all in Chinese!) earlier in the week with the government bureau that we work closely with.

In the continuing quest to improve our Chinese language skills, we have found a teacher willing to help us with our speaking and listening twice a week here on campus. She is a Chinese friend from our international fellowship who is married to an American. So far, we have enjoyed two very fun and productive lessons. We have also been seriously working on learning hanzi (Chinese characters), which has been fun and frustrating in equal measure. With more than 100 characters stowed in our brains, we only have a couple thousand more to go to be semi-literate.

Another friend, from our weekly English study, has been dropping by one evening a week to teach us some famous Chinese phrases from Kongzi (Confucius). It is a little like not speaking English but being able to recite the Gettysburg Address! Every little bit helps!

village holiday

2012-01-30T01:58:00.000-06:00

We welcomed the Chinese New Year – the year of the dragon – with fireworks and dumplings as we joined our friend, Bill, on a visit to his family’s home in rural Shanxi province, about 10 hours south of Beijing by train.

After a long day of travel, we got off the train at 6 p.m. in Jincheng city, about 15 miles from Bill’s hometown village, and found the city blanketed in snow and the main highway to the village closed due to the icy conditions. Bill’s “brother” eventually picked us up in his car and we spent the next four hours creeping along an alternate route, stopping several times to help stranded motorists and pedestrians. We arrived at the village after 1 a.m. and were tremendously grateful for the warm food Bill’s father prepared and a chance to lie down after a day of sitting.

The next morning, after a hearty breakfast of rice soup, tofu, large bread rolls and vegetables, Bill showed us around the village where he grew up. The snow was still falling lightly and people were out and about preparing for the New Year’s celebration. We hung holiday banners around the doorframe of the house, visited with relatives and enjoyed the village atmosphere.

On New Year’s Eve, we helped make dumplings, watched the special programing on television and played Uno with Bill’s parents and his aunt and uncle, who laughed more and more with each successive hand played. We woke early the next morning to watch Bill light his string of 5,000 firecrackers. The small street in front of the house rang with the thousands of explosions and filled with smoke as every family joined in the celebration.

The next several days were spent trouping off to various relative’s houses, all within walking distance. We ate more dumplings, declined cigarettes and beer, and did our best to match our limited Chinese with the local dialect everyone spoke. Most of the people who live in the village are farmers or work in one of the nearby coalmines. Bill’s mother, who washes dishes everyday at a factory restaurant, is like-minded and taught us to sing a Chinese hymn. We all prayed before each meal.

When we weren’t off visiting, we were practicing writing Chinese characters, learning Chinese songs or learning new words and phrases from Bill. He is a post-graduate student in Beijing and a very patient teacher, though he would rather speak English all the time! We learned to play Majiang, which is similar to dominoes.

In winter, Bill’s father raises scorpions in a well-heated shed beside the outdoor latrine behind the house. There are thousands of the poisonous creatures (both larvae and adult) and millions of small insects that are used to feed them. Bill’s father sells the adult scorpions to be used as medicine. In the summer, the family grows crops including corn, sweet potatoes and peanuts.

We had a great time visiting the countryside and seeing how families, friends and relatives gather for a traditional celebration of Spring Festival, the most important holiday in China. The slow pace of the village was a welcome break from the bustle of Beijing. It was an unforgettable experience.

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets

two of the millions

2012-01-17T18:06:00.000-06:00

With the Chinese new year, the heart of the Spring Festival holiday, just days away, all thoughts are on travel as everyone scrambles to buy tickets and head back to their hometown.

The Year of the Dragon – symbolizing good luck and intense power – on the Chinese lunar calendar begins January 23. The dragon is the only mythological creature among the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac and makes us just a little uneasy.

Literally millions of people are on the move this time of year, mostly from urban areas to more rural places. In Beijing construction has come to a stop, roadside stands have disappeared and many shops and restaurants have closed. All reports are that getting to and on a bus, train or plane is a nightmare. And, despite a new ticketing procedure, we are still hearing about long lines and computerized systems that can’t keep up with demand.

We will leave Beijing by train on Friday with our friend, Bill, to visit his hometown in the southern part of Shanxi province, near Jincheng City. Bill spent several hours online and on the telephone in order to secure our tickets for the 12-hour journey. We have seats, but Bill has warned us that the train will be packed, as many people have bought standing tickets. Trains will carry an estimated 235 million passengers – about 75% of the US population (313 million) – during the spring holiday. At this point it appears we will have to leave around 4:30 a.m. to make it across town in time for our 7 a.m. train. We do not have return tickets, yet.

We are starting to hear and see some fireworks, but far fewer than we remember from years before. While it is more shocking to have explosions come in random bursts at random times, it is less nerve-racking than the steady barrage of explosions that will kick in any day now. For unknown reasons, there are no stands this year selling fireworks in our area. Coupled with the dwindling number of people on the street, it is eerily quiet.

Our weekly English study is on a two-week hiatus and many of our foreign friends will be traveling over the upcoming weeks. The campus is extremely quiet, as the last of the students left this week. Our next session begins January 28. We will spend the next couple of days working and preparing for our trip. We are excited to be spending our fourth Spring Festival in China. Each year has been more exciting than the year before, and we are looking forward to the same this time around. Happy New Year!

happiest holidays

2012-01-02T23:22:00.000-06:00

New Year's Day Cooking Party

We wrapped up 2011 with Christmas activities and fellowship and headed into 2012 in the same exciting fashion. Our holiday season has been filled with blessings and opportunities to spend time with our Chinese friends and serve at the international fellowship.

Christmas weekend was a busy time of helping out at two services, visiting and sharing His Spirit with our church family friends. Both services were attended by hundred of foreigners who call Beijing home or were in town with friends and loved ones. Our Christmas Day service featured a musical skit about Jesus performed by the youth, several baptisms and a lunch buffet at a restaurant in the office building where we meet.

Christmas Eve we ate lunch with our good friend, Melissa, who had a lot of questions about the meaning of Christmas and the story leading up His son’s arrival on earth. We cooked and ate Christmas dinner with Bill, who recounted the five performances of the Redeemer’s Skit that he’d taken part in over the weekend. Both regularly attend our weekly English study and it was fun to share the holiday together. We spent the rest of evening sending Christmas greetings via text messages to hundred of students and catching up with their lives.

As our weekend had been full, we waited until Tuesday to open gifts and spend some personal time celebrating. We enjoyed opening presents from family and friends as well as reading cards and notes of encouragement from our church families in the states. And, in keeping with the festive mood, we snacked on candy and cookies.

We filled the remainder of the week with work and our weekly study. Krista even took a break and taught one of the Chinese staff how to do an American dance, the Cha Cha Slide. We are still busy with our video project, creating, editing and finalizing. We now have two completed videos for each of the categories, which is a major milestone and cause for loud praises!

New Year’s Eve we had a great opportunity to practice our listening at a Chinese study group where everyone recounted what He had done in their lives over the past year. We enjoyed a home-cooked meal, learned about their group and got to practice our Chinese!

We spent the first morning of 2012 with a friend on her first visit to the Chinese church. It was a very special time for all of us. As usual we saw many friends and met many new friends at the English service. After lunch, we headed back to our campus for a “cooking” party.

Krista spent the afternoon teaching several friends how to make tacos and lasagna. It was a great way to welcome the new year as people sampled the western dishes for the first time and shared about their family traditions and customs. Someone let slip that it was Preston’s birthday and a real party broke out. There were small gifts, singing and a few spirited hands of Uno as the 10 of us enjoyed a wonderful time together.

We are excited and encouraged about the new year and look forward to many more good times. Plans are already in the works for celebrating Spring Festival, which is less than two weeks away!

refreshment

2011-12-19T23:16:00.005-06:00

We had a refreshing two-week holiday! Praise Him for the rest and time of reflection. We have been able to take long prayer walks, sleep at least 8 hours a night and enjoy time together without interruption or appointments. It has all felt a bit unusual yet it was very welcome for our minds and bodies!

We took a 7-day trip to Sichuan (central China) to visit our like-minded friend Estella and her family in Xichang. It is situated in the mountains, more than 5,000 feet above sea level, and located in the southwestern part of the Sichuan province. It is called Spring City (because of the mild temps), Moon City (because you can always see the moon there) and Space City (because they send up satellites from there).

Our journey took more than 24 hours: We got up at 4 a.m.; were delayed at Beijing’s airport for 3 hours due to heavy smog; landed 3 hours later in Chengdu, Sichuan; booked seats on the train to Xichang; boarded the train at 7:30 p.m.; stayed up all night and slept a bit in the straight back chairs; arrived at our destination at 5:30 a.m. to be whisked home by Estella.

The day before we arrived it was in the 70s. We arrived to 50s and 40s – with lots of cloud cover. Yet it was an amazing and wonderful trip. We stayed with her and her husband, son Xi Xi, 16, and daughter Helen, 11, for 5 days.

Estella was recently appointed a member of the Xichang municipal government’s advisory body and she is in charge of the day-to-day management of the local Christian Church in Xichang. It is a new position this winter and she has been a bit overwhelmed by all the responsibilities. They are currently rebuilding the former church building and Estella works with the church elders regarding decisions like painting, flooring, bathrooms and landscaping. While we were there they found an artist to do a wall painting and she submitted her sketch and started working within the span of a couple of days.

On Sunday we went to the warehouse where the church now meets. It was a challenge to find the location and it was very inspiring to see all of the people praising God in such an unadorned and forlorn sort of venue. Yet the power and presence of our Heavenly Father was in that place and the hearts of the people were focused on His glory. What a wonderful time they will have when they move to the new location – plans call for a public opening at an all-day Christmas program this week. Yikes! But what a wonderful opportunity.

The rebuilt church is located next to a school near the city’s Old Town. It is strategic and welcoming. We were told at least 2,000 people meet throughout the city in different places right now and this new church will be home to many fellowships and, God willing, even an English training school.

Estella is also tasked with starting an English fellowship next year – and she is praying that they can begin sometime after Spring Festival (in February 2012). It will be a blessed outreach opportunity. We were able to provide encouragement through prayer, conversation and a few resources – as brother and sister – during our visit. It was a blessing for us to see how He is working! Please continue to pray for Estella and her church body! That God will send more workers to provide teaching and training (right now they only have one pastor to serve all of the people).

Besides some lovely day visits to a nearby lake and river park as well as jaunts around Old Town, Estella also orchestrated a singing performance for us at the Disabled Person’s Foundation fundraiser held while we were in town. We sang Angels We have Heard on High with Estella, her daughter Helen, and her daughter’s friend (we were thankful for the kids because they are so cute and we don’t really sing). We ended up being one of 10 performances for the half-day event that included lunch. Everything was recorded for broadcast on TV – so somewhere out there, we will be seen again.

Then we led an English activity with a group of senior students one evening and helped with a group of primary school students the next afternoon. Estella provides free English classes every weekend and we were happy to join in the efforts and spread a lot of Christmas cheer. When we left, we were very sad to say goodbye to all of our new friends. We hope that we can visit again someday!

We rounded out our travels back to Beijing with a stop at the panda research and breeding facility in Chengdu. It continued to be unseasonably cold, which turned out to be a blessing as the park was nearly empty. We spent an entire afternoon walking the park and visiting the pandas and wondering at the creativity of our Creator – who made these creatures for our enjoyment!

We also managed to finish our Christmas shopping, lunch with friends and call others back home. Now we are back to the daily routine and looking forward to Christmas celebrations with friends Tuesday night and this weekend!

We wish you a merry Christmas! We are thankful for our Savior who came to earth in the form of man as part of God’s plan to save us from eternal separation from Him. All glory to Him. “The Savior—yes, the Messiah, the Lord—has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David!” Luke 2:11 NLT

snow & go

2011-12-05T04:10:00.002-06:00

Our “mild” winter took a welcome holiday turn last week as we woke up to the first snow of the season. It came down wet and sleety for the better part of the day and covered all the dreary brown with about a half-inch of soft white snow.

Traffic slowed and there were wet clothes and plenty of snowballs flying through the air along the slushy streets. Pres decided it was the perfect weather to finally trundle off to the department store to buy the much-needed portable radiator for our room. He flashed back to many similar misadventures as he slip-slid home with the 20-pound appliance strapped to the back of his bike. Thankfully there are no injuries or mishaps to report, and our room is now toasty warm.

Regrettably our program was on break at the time so there were no students on campus to enjoy the excitement of snowy Beijing. Like the responsible people we are, we spent most of the day cleaning and organizing while looking out the window and commenting on how we should really be out frolicking.

Overall the past week has been calm and uneventful as everyone was in repose in anticipation of the new session that begins today! It has also been quieter than usual as our friend, Sunny, who has been working here for several months has gone back to school to finish her university studies. While we will definitely miss her, we are excited about going to visit her in Shanxi and the prospect of her return sometime after Spring Festival.

This week we will head to Sichuan to visit a friend who worked here this summer and is now trying to start an English service in her hometown church. We are gearing up for the adventure and steeling ourselves for the 24 hours of subways, buses, trains and planes that we will enjoy in route to Xichang city, which is famous as the main launch site for most of China’s space satellites. More importantly for us, the temperatures are currently idling between the mid-50s and 70 degrees. The Beijing forecast calls for more snow and cold. PTL.

peaceful place

2011-11-20T20:24:00.003-06:00

We’ve found a bit of a peaceful routine these past two weeks, as we welcomed 200 students to campus and have plenty of facilitators for hands-on training as well as planning, development and recruitment projects.

Our year-long team members are self-motivated and eager to lend a hand and have been able to vacillate between student training duties and organizational office work. They have brought with them God-given gifts of leadership, love, organization, dedication and outreach. It’s easy then to see that the peace that currently pervades is a gift from our Heavenly Father!

So while in this place, we have been blessed with purpose and productivity. We have managed, with the able-help of our teammate Robin, to re-script more than 40 instructional videos. We have put together and edited 13 new videos from scratch, recorded 12 voiceovers and packaged and labeled them for final production. This Thanksgiving week, Preston will do the final touches so that we can have two videos per category to support TIP’s 15 Teacher Attributes for English teaching and learning. That’s nearly 30 videos!

We also packaged a new 4-hour session to update our Teaching English to Students of Other Languages (TESOL) curriculum. It uses the materials we were able to develop over the summer and incorporates the videos as well. Our team members Marcus and Briana led the class and said everything went great and the students learned a lot. Yay!

Let’s see… we are also learning about the Israelites and their 400 years of oppression and captivity and Moses and the plans that God had for them and him all along. Good lessons in remembering that we serve a BIG God and our problems seem to get smaller and smaller the more we depend on and trust Him, paraphrased from Mark Blair.

All that and we are very thankful as we look forward to a time of fellowship with friends and family this week as we remember all the blessings we have. On Saturday we tried our hand at real cooking again – using our toaster ovens and community kitchen. We made pizza (by request), chili and chicken stir-fry for Michael and Sunny (aka Giggle) and enjoyed a time of fun conversation and continued relationship building with them and our teammate Donna. And by the grace of God, the meal turned out edible! Sunny heads back to her university studies next Saturday and Michael will go with to meet her parents for the first time. We pray that God blesses their meeting and time together and that His plans will be evident.

This week… more cooking and eating with our English study friends. On the menu enchiladas, veggie lasagna, pumpkin pie (from scratch), apple crisp, chili and chicken stir-fry (again). Or whatever it actually turns out to be. The process gets underway this afternoon! :p

it goes like this...

2011-11-06T04:17:00.000-06:00

The last two weeks went something like this… we finished up the last day of training for the Qinghai trainers, took a four-hour nap and then met Mark and Zona for dinner at a new Dongbei (northeastern) restaurant on Sunday night.

Monday we imagined taking some time off, and we did sleep in past 5:30 a.m., but Krista needed to finalize Chinese translation materials and booklets for our Qinghai friends, who were stuck in Beijing for another week because of the packed train schedules. And Pres needed to finalize a presentation on the life of Joseph. We are thankful to know that God keeps His promises!

So we planned for a day off on Tuesday and went to the Summer Place. We rode bikes there, arrived by 9ish and walked around enjoying a “day date” until late in the afternoon when our legs could no longer sustain movement. Arriving home, we had time to pull together treats for a relaxing fellowship time with our friends that evening.

On Wednesday and Thursday a visitor toured our program, keeping Krista occupied answering questions, managing schedules and pouring tea. It was a blessing for her to hang out with a like-minded prof from Hong Kong who may be interested in bringing teachers she’s affiliated with to our program. She enjoyed the experience and was impressed with the enthusiasm of the students!

Preston continued to organize, digitize and backup newly recorded videos for editing this next month. It all takes time!

Wednesday night we also went out with Michael and Sunny from our Chinese staff for pizza dinner, conversations about relationship and communication strategies and a little bit of foosball. On Thursday evening, we also had time to copy all of the finalized Chinese/English booklets for the 5 Qinghai trainers, in time for their Saturday morning departure.

On Friday after catching up with family and friends on the phone and via email, we decided to go for a 10-yuan ($1.50) burrito lunch since we had the time to bike over! After that we spent an hour reading at the coffee shop and relaxed a bit before coming back to campus where our Qinghai trainers tracked us down and taught us a Chinese card game. We spent several hours playing with them in the living room and then went out for a goodbye dinner. It was a blessed way to cap off a rewarding time with the group.

All the while, the October session of TIP was winding down with practicums and speeches. The 360 Ss did fantastic and so did the facilitator team. It was a wonderful, smooth session full of positive attitudes, English progress and changed perspectives. So we joined the team for the debrief meeting on Saturday and then enjoyed a peaceful afternoon.

The past week was much of the same – finalizing odds and ends and fellowship time with friends all throughout. Plus we had NO water for four days and had to fill and carry buckets for sponge baths and manual toilet flushing. And BICF, our international fellowship, had flooring put on their storage/library floor so we helped move all the furniture, books, tables and “things” to a holding area on Sunday afternoon and then back to their regular locations on Wednesday morning. It was a fun time to fellowship, laugh and allow the younger people to haul all the heavy stuff! Yet, we were still sore the next day.

This Saturday we began the November session. We expect about 220 students and interviews are going well. Our goals in the next three weeks are to edit and finalize about 50 videos plus re-write the 3-day curriculum for the teaching club we offer. Preston is working on a presentation about Moses – hopefully, we’ll learn a lot about his life and how to apply it to ours.

wedding fun

2011-10-26T00:16:00.001-05:00

We boarded the express train for the four-hour journey north to Jin Zhou city just a few short hours after picking Krista up from the airport at the end of her three-day business trip to Yuncheng city, Shanxi province.

A little worse for wear from sitting in on six English classes, talking to dozens of teachers, a grueling schedule of sight-seeing and, in Beijing, last minute preparations for the following week’s training, we were thrilled to sink into our seats and nap and stare at the fields and towns slip by outside the train window.

Even though it was the day before their wedding ceremony, Angel (a former student) and her fiancé, Zhang Long, met us at the train station and whisked us off to a restaurant for lunch with family and friends. Several of the couple’s friends spoke good English and we met a young software engineer who lives and works near our campus in Beijing.

Following lunch and a visit to the couple’s new apartment, we checked into a hotel that is part of the county government complex where Zhang Long works with computers. The building seemed deserted and we were given a room on the third floor that did not have its own key. Every time we left or returned we had to find an attendant on the first floor who went in search of another worker to go up to our room and lock or unlock the door. This grew old quickly for everyone.

We joined Angel and her friends for an early dinner and returned to our room to practice the song that the bride had asked us to perform at the wedding ceremony. Using the toy guitar (Barbie’s guitar is better) we were provided and our very limited vocal abilities, we managed to put together a passable version of Michael Buble’s “Everything.”

We walked to the 8 a.m. wedding ceremony and were shown to a table in front where we had an excellent view of the host, the bride and groom and the family. The host unexpectedly called us on stage, where we managed to eek out some unrehearsed but appropriate Chinese words of congratulations to the couple and some 400 guests.

Just as the food was served, we were called to perform our song. While one family member held the microphone to the acoustic guitar (perfectly aimed to produce a steady groan of low-pitched feedback), Preston plowed through the chord changes while Krista smiled and sang. We ended to a smattering of applause and realized that most of the guest couldn’t figure out what was going on and the bride and groom had left the hall to change their clothes.

Later, one of our new Chinese friends apologetically informed us that it really was too bad that no one could hear us play the song. We have seldom been so happy!

We arrived back at the Beijing train station just before midnight and waited in line for more than 30 minutes for a taxi (public transportation was closed).

We were up early that morning to begin presenting the new training curriculum we’ve been working on to five teacher/trainer/leaders from Qinghai. While Krista taught the students to evaluate how well English teachers in their district use TIP methodology in their classroom, Preston handled the prep work and helped with warm-ups to demonstrate how cool a guy with gray hair can look doing the Hokey-Pokey.

We finished the seven-day training extremely happy with the results and exhausted. It hardly seems possible that a little over a week ago we were watching our friends get married. We continue to find much to be thankful for and grateful that through His strength and leading we are able to do and experience things that we are sure we couldn’t handle on our own.

back at it

2011-10-13T00:45:00.001-05:00

After a couple of relatively peaceful reunion days, as we enjoyed being together for the first time in more than a month, it is time to have back at it.

For Krista, who has been doing the work of two while Preston was on sabbatical, this turn of events is frighteningly familiar. Preston, on the other hand, is working to come back to grips with dorm living, schedules and responsibility and the absence of lasagna, fish fry and the assorted luxuries that were common while visiting family and friends in the U.S. Not to mention the wildly inopportune bouts of wakefulness and collapse brought on by jetlag.

Whatever the circumstance, being together is a blessing we are very thankful for.

As is usual, all things are coming due at the same time. We have spent the week trying to put the finishing touches on more training curriculum that will be debuted on Monday. Krista, somewhat unexpectedly, finds herself headed out on a two-day trip to help recruit students and meet with school leaders in Shanxi province. She will return to Beijing about 11:30 p.m. Friday. Early Saturday morning we will catch a train for Jin Zhou city, where we will attend a wedding and possibly sing a song (?). We should be back on campus several hours before training kicks off Monday morning …

Our new colleagues are doing a fantastic job of adjusting to their work and living environments and taking charge of classes, activities and planning. It has been wonderful to see so many talented, enthusiastic and energetic people spreading hope and love to the students. As we are expecting the addition of several more new and returning faces over the next several weeks, we look forward to a continuing sense of anticipation and excitement.

As we contemplate the weeks we spent apart and all the amazing things that are now underway, we are extremely grateful for the friends, family and colleagues who everyday help to make this entire adventure possible, rewarding and safe. Thanks to everyone for your support and encouragement as we continue to do our best to follow with joy and purpose wherever He leads.

here & there

2011-09-24T07:03:00.001-05:00

The last couple of weeks have been moving at variable speed – excruciatingly slow and wildly fast – as we continue making our way through our time apart. With every step in our separate time zones – Krista in China and Preston in America – we are further humbled that there is little that depends on us while everything depends on Him.

In Beijing, Krista is dividing most of her time between work, studying Chinese and fellowship.

Her continuing efforts to update, refine and enhance the curriculum and approach to TIP Part B has consumed a good deal of her attention. In addition to working on curriculum, she has been helping prepare our teammates to lead lessons during the upcoming 10-day session. She will also lead the student orientation for the 60-plus students who will be on hand for the training.

Weekday mornings are busy with Chinese class, where she is focusing her efforts on hanzi (Chinese characters) and augmenting her “street” Chinese with some instruction in more standard elements of the language. The intense 90-minute classes, the 30-minute bike ride to and from school and homework are proving to be extremely rewarding as well as extremely exhausting.

She has also been busy handling alone responsibilities we usually share including preparing for our weekly study sessions with our Chinese friends and fulfilling our commitment for our monthly volunteer/work Sunday at the international fellowship.

Preston is coming to the end of a fantastic couple of weeks visiting with his parents and family in the Milwaukee area. In addition to sharing daily home cooked meals prepared by his dad, Preston and his folks have been enjoying their time together with visits to the farmers market, the Art Center and lakefront, fish fries and coffee shops.

Preston has also been having a great time seeing his sister, who has two new jobs and a new apartment. Papa Charlie cooked up a special dinner for a visit by Preston’s sister and her two daughters, one who is a new mother (18-month-old Amare is so cute!) and the other who has just started college and is living in the dorms. PTL for so many blessings!

Preston heads back to California in a couple of days to visit with Krista’s family and spend a few days on a much-anticipated camping trip. He will return to Beijing the fist week of October.

While the time apart is filled with difficulties and times of loneliness, we continue to find joy and purpose in everything we do as we look to Him for strength, direction and hope. T-minus less than 2 weeks until our reunion in China! But who is counting?

opposite sides of the world

2011-09-10T13:34:00.002-05:00

We are deep in the throes of adjustment as we search for a schedule that will keep us sane, connected and on track as Krista continues her service in Beijing and Preston spends the month of September on sabbatical in the U.S., catching up with family and friends.

While Skype and email allow us easy access to each other, the trick is to find the hours that we are both awake, available and functioning. As in all things, we will trust in Him to give us the time and energy we need.

Krista is busy in Beijing helping and encouraging our new yearlong colleagues as they navigate their first session. With about 250 students on campus, she is focusing her time on helping the team with questions and problems with the audio/visual equipment, the computer lab, room set-up (they have had to move several hundred chairs more than once!) and the general nuts and bolts of the program. She is also gearing up to continue work on the new curriculum that will be used again at the end of the month, as well as a slate of other on-going projects.

In addition to working with teammates, she has also been able to encourage and support several of our like-minded Chinese friends. She was blessed to sit in on an academic English class taught by one friend who based his lesson around a drama about Genesis 1-3 with seven roles: the Bible, Adam, Eve, God, Sin, Satan (and Satan as the serpent) and a scientist. They wore hand-made hats for their costumes and used video about Genesis 1 followed by a reading of the creation story. The drama was well done and accurate. It was an interesting and informative way to teach about His story.

Stateside, Preston has been trying to come to grips with new time zones. After a couple of glorious days in California with Krista’s family, who treated him to home-cooked meals and generous hospitality, it was off to Wisconsin to see his family.

Only hours after landing in Milwaukee, Preston and his folks were enjoying a Friday fish fry (yum!) and making plans to visit with his sister and nieces. He spent his first morning in the dairy state visiting and biking along the gloriously green and empty Root River Parkway. About mid-month he will return to California for several more days of adventure and visits with Krista’s family.

With the kind support, encouragement and help of our families, and our faith in Him, we look forward to a fantastic month of adventure and challenge, even as we miss being together!

hello, goodbye

2011-08-30T22:50:00.001-05:00

As the summer tumult subsides and we say goodbye to the last of the more than 1,500 students and some 50 American and Chinese volunteers who have come and gone over the past two months, we are anxious to get to know the newly arrived facilitators who have just joined us for the coming year. But first we must catch our breath!

The “newbies,” an enthusiastic group of seven (mostly-recent grads) hailing from Georgia, North Carolina and West Virginia, are busily training, acclimating themselves to their new “home” and eagerly jumping in to help the students/teachers who have remained on campus for an additional 10 days of training at the end of the August session (TIP Part B Session 2).

We remain busy fine-tuning the new curriculum, teaching classes, producing training videos and trying to get our act together for Preston’s impending trip to American (Sept. 6), where he will spend time with family in both California and Wisconsin. Looking to put her upcoming “alone time” to productive use, Krista started Chinese classes this week and is enthusiastic about her teacher and classmates, as well as the pace and content of the lessons. Yay God!

While our daily schedule has remained rigorous and unpredictable, we are extremely grateful for the friendly and welcoming atmosphere of our new favorite neighborhood restaurant, where we have been eating almost daily without ever getting sick. We have become good friends with the proprietors, who prepare a wide variety of Sichuan dishes that are spicy, but not too spicy.

We are also thankful everyday that the restaurant, Yu Zhou Mei Shi, is still in business after our last restaurant of choice simply vanished one day without warning. After having our dinner recently disrupted by a small electrical fire near the ceiling, we had some concerns about the future of the establishment but everything seems to be back in order.

Our weekly fellowship with our Chinese friends continues to be a source of joy and growth, as we all have become quite comfortable and excited with our time together. We are enjoying the blessings of good health, new friends and practicing letting Him smooth the sharp edges and shoulder the load as He has faithfully promised to do.

just beyond beijing

2011-08-16T02:13:00.002-05:00

We said goodbye to the class of 70 students who’d participated in our 10-day extended training through Aug. 8, took a deep breath, and headed out to visit our good friend and former Chinese staffer, Mary.

Wearied from a disharmonic convergence of dorm living, arriving and departing summer volunteers, new curriculum, record numbers of students and poor health, we boarded the bus eager for a mindless 4-hour ride to the Zhangbei area of Hebei province.

After establishing that a teammate who’d had an early morning run in with a car while riding her electric bike was not seriously injured, only in pain, we did settle back and enjoy watching the city melt into green hills, sporadic views of the Great Wall and the insides of our eyelids.

We spent the next couple of days hanging out with Mary and her husband, John, who joined us for meals and activities as his job as foreman for a construction company allowed. John’s leaders and co-workers “treated” us to an afternoon at a spa/indoor swimming pool built over a hot spring in the countryside outside of town. Mary’s early pregnancy kept her poolside while we splashed and swam in the very warm water among dozens of extremely curious locals.

We wandered the city streets, ate interesting meals and enjoyed the couple’s spacious apartment on the sixth floor (no elevator) of a new building. About a dozen of Mary’s relatives popped by for an afternoon of eating, speaking English and Chinese and watching the kids play hide and seek in an apartment without closets.

Mary and John were fantastic hosts and their apartment is wonderful, even if the guest bed was little softer than the floor.

Late Friday afternoon, we set out to meet a former student from a stint we did at a middle school a couple of years ago. Kerry (guess who gave him his English name?) and his family had invited us to join them for a couple of days at the “grasslands.” We enjoyed another four hours on one of the worst bus rides ever – hot, cramped, slow – to meet the family in Zhangjiakou. Our hotel room had soft beds, though Krista spent most of the night in the WC after eating some delicious food that really did not agree with her.

The next morning, we joined Kerry and his family in a three-car caravan. We drove through rolling hills, small villages and passed craggy peaks in route to the grasslands to the north. Most of the day was spent in the car, but we did catch a short hike through a forest and visit a huge museum in the in the middle of nowhere that featured a host of exhibits detailing how where we were used to be somewhere.

We had a great time practicing English with Kerry and his cousin, a high school student we’d met before, and watching the scenery outside our comfortable, air-conditioned sedan. The family was extremely gracious and patient with our limited language skills.

After hours of driving, we reached our destination, which turned out to be an amusement park built on the prairie-like grasslands just across the border in Inner Mongolia. As storm clouds rolled in, we watched a troupe of Mongolian acrobats do tricks on horseback, a couple of low buzzing ultralight planes giving rides and an amusement ride shaped like a Viking ship.

We mounted our horses for the long awaited horseback ride just as the wind picked up and heavy drops of rain started to turn the dusty track into mud. Once underway and on our own, our horse handler decided it would cost a little more to ride in the rain. For the equivalent of a couple of bucks, we enjoyed a wet and windy trot around the deserted track.

After our ride we joined the crowd cowering under a tin awing as the rain beat down and we felt cold for the first time in weeks. Having been separated from our friends, we returned to the cars discussing how little energy we had left for communicating in Chinese. With our friends nowhere to be found, we spent an exciting hour in the car with the driver and guide who didn’t speak English, but did want to know what Jesus teaches.

God moves in mysterious ways.

The next morning we caught the bus back to Beijing. We arrived on campus mid-afternoon feeling exhausted, happy and quite sure we needed a rest. Ok, back to work.

Telling the stories

2011-08-02T03:21:00.004-05:00

Everything was business as usual  in our TIP city for the last 20 days – everything except the sky! It poured for days and we enjoyed lightening storms and thunderclouds. All the rain was a huge blessing, however, as it kept students from leaving campus, at least for the most part. (Only one student was sent home this session; and he was a headmaster. He left campus twice and was granted mercy; yet week three he was still speaking Chinese in the bathroom while he was smoking. No repentance there.)

It has been a typical TIP summer, training and working with short-term recruits and enjoying the blessings of fellowshipping with them! We try to help them enjoy their time in China and understand that they only requirement in TIP is to love the students and encourage them to speak English. It is always amazing to feel renewal and refreshment from the passion they bring for sharing and caring for the Chinese people.

Also, we were blessed to have  16 Chinese volunteers come help with the session. They were a special group. Estella, a former TIP student, is staying for two months and ended up being the volunteer group leader (a challenging job). She also has  the privilege of starting an English service at a Chinese registered church in her hometown in Sichuan. She says she feels a bit like Moses, “I don’t know enough of the Bible; I can’t speak English well.” So it has been a joy to spend time with her and connect her with the Haidian church in Beijing and other friends around the country who can help her. Still another volunteer said the best thing he learned about starts with the letter “J.” Regardless of how exhausted our physical bodies are, our spiritual ones are definitely full after these 20 days.

While we were busy finalizing curriculum (or trying to) for the  10-day extended TIP training that began July 29, we still got to help with the July routine. Krista got to work with Sarah, the Chinese director, who pulled off six sets of orientation in three days. Krista enjoyed spending time with her and practicing a lot of Chinese!

Preston subbed in daily Morning announcements the first week, as one of our good friends and colleagues came down with viral meningitis. Krista ended up recovering the first week, as she too ended up in bed with a virus and food poisoning.

Fortunately, our July 16 training session was canceled, so week two we managed to focus on videos and curriculum amidst the normal, running around to put out fires, answer questions and listen to great stories about what was going on in the students’ hearts and heads. For week three, Preston took over friendly Class C, as their facilitator finished her summer adventure early. Pres led activities and listened to 33 speeches. Of course, his students loved him tons. Krista was able to join in the relationship building fun too. Now we have great new friends to continue talking with in the days to come.

As we finished the session, we were excited to embark on the new 10-day TIP Part B. Seventy-five students stayed for more training. But it’s a bilingual environment, so the students are more relaxed. Still, we are tired and Krista got bronchitis. But God is good. Thanks for praying us through!

900 plus 20 or so

2011-07-16T00:28:00.000-05:00

As you can imagine, sharing a campus with 900 students all named Mary, Jack, Lucy and Alice can be somewhat confusing. We have 20 classes and six different large groups. Two different color groups. Some classes have 55 students again this session. Fortunately, we all speak the same language – Chinglish – so communication hasn’t been too much of a problem.

Like most summers at TIP, we’ve run into a few bumps along the way. Registration was a bit strange, so we ended up interviewing all of the students twice and some three times. Krista (aka Spring) helped with orientation – so that the mics, air conditioners and trash were all on or picked up, e.g. under control. Krista had a great time hanging out with Sarah, our Chinese staff director and good friend, and she learned that her Chinese is progressing. Classes got started about 30 minutes late and it was a rough Monday for the summer facilitators, but that’s not too bad considering!

Let’s see… we’ve had a fun and satisfying time helping the summer facilitators thrive as we fellowshipped together and prayed through all of the challenges. There have been WAY more praises than petitions; but still plenty to bring to Him for consideration.

We managed to keep the showers open until 10:30 p.m. Tuesday night, even though Peking University staff wanted to go home instead. We stumbled upon the “kicking students out” scene after walking a friend out to the bus stop. We got to use a lot of Chinese and networking that evening. It was rewarding to see the doors stay open a little longer, even if the students only got cold showers that night.

Preston has run around each morning helping print things, ferry supplies and offer encouragement helping the class facilitators spread love throughout TIP. Unfortunately, one of our team managers, Karen, went to the hospital Tuesday night and was ultimately diagnosed with viral meningitis. Preston took over her morning management duties, which included morning large group announcements. Krista managed to get sick too Wednesday morning (food poisoning and virus combined) and has basically had to rest for the past week. Fortunately, Preston is strong enough to take care of her and do his other duties as assigned.

We joyfully made it through the first week (thanks to God’s grace and mercy). We know that it’s all downhill from here! And the most amazing thing, as usual, is that many students have come with good soil and soft hearts: the rewards are eternal ones. Yay!

ready or not

2011-07-01T20:36:00.003-05:00

The past week has been somewhat frantic as we wrap-up our yearlong term and gear-up for the summer sessions.

Last weekend our organization successfully celebrated 30 years of openly Christian service in China with a string of receptions, dinners and a daylong symposium held on the main campus of Peking University. We spent the day helping some 350 students navigate the public bus between our campus and the festivities, held a couple of miles down the road.

A slate of notable guests were on hand, including representatives from the U.S. Embassy, Peking University, the Foreign Experts Bureau, the Ministry of Education and a prominent Christian NGO. While the event was mainly held in Chinese, simultaneous English translation was available.

Most of the 15 summer volunteers arrived in Beijing early to attend the event and help out. While it has been fun getting to know our short-term colleagues we have been mainly focused on preparing for the arrival of close to 1,000 students next week and the departure of several more of our yearlong teammates. It is always sad and exciting to see friends move on. Where did all the time go?

This week we also visited the Bethel orphanage for blind children, located a couple of hours outside of the city. We tagged a long with a colleague who is currently hosting about 15 teenagers from the youth group from his home church in New Jersey. We were somewhat familiar with the orphanage, run by a French couple, but had never visited. It is an exciting place where they raise crops and livestock and utilize an old hotel as a school and headquarters.

The children are amazing and friendly. They study English, Chinese, and French and Braille in addition to a host of academic subjects, music and life skills. The entire environment is filled with love, encouragement and hope for about 70 children, who come from extremely dire circumstances. Visitors and residents alike spent a special afternoon playing and talking and learning.

Even as the sad and crazy times keep us on our toes, we are finding joy and comfort in following His direction. Our weekly study with our Chinese friends continues to be a great support and encouragement. With His strength we are ready for anything!

celebrations

2011-06-17T20:09:00.005-05:00

After learning our new Chinese friend and program volunteer does not like sweets – cake, cookies, and ice cream – we had to get creative about doing something special for her 21st birthday. Inspired by the example of a former colleague, we set about creating our first Chinese fruitcake.

Here’s how: Cut several thick, round slices of watermelon. Remove the rinds and stack the slabs. Garnish with sliced Dragon fruit, apricots and bananas. Yum!

Lanie enjoyed cutting and serving, as is customary in China, and no one felt any guilt about having seconds or thirds. Our guest of honor, who is helping with student needs while she is here, regaled us with details of her job duties, which have included purchasing 25 pairs of shoes and accompanying students on a half-dozen trips to the hospital.

In a different type of celebration, we held a farewell dinner for three teammates who have completed a year of service and have now returned to the states. We are sad to see them go but enjoyed the opportunity to get together and visit everyone’s favorite Mexican restaurant. More changes are in store, as several more teammates will head home at the end of the month, just as the first wave of summer volunteers arrive. It is a chaotic and bittersweet time when the piles of clothing, sundries, gadgets and ill-considered gifts and souvenirs that are no longer wanted (bu yao) become as popular as a thrift store or rummage sale. Of course, this year’s treasure is next year’s bu yao.

On the work front, we continue on with our special projects and preparations for the organization’s 30th Anniversary activities, which will take place next weekend (June 24-26). Some of the many guests and dignitaries expected to be on hand for the event will be staying in our dormitory. We enjoyed catching up with long-time associates and recruiters, Reed and his wife, Shirley, who flew in from Seattle this week. They arrived late one evening, caught a few hours sleep and headed off to help out in classes the next morning. They are both in their 80s.

When it comes to anniversary activities, most of the team is focused on plans to take all 350 of our students to the main campus of Peking University, about 3 miles away, on public transportation. Part of this effort will take place during the morning rush hour, when the local buses are all ready maxed out with commuters. There is no shortage of worst-case scenarios being bandied about. At least the students can speak fluent Chinese if they get lost.

We are enjoying the thunderstorms, complete with spectacular lightning shows, and heavy rains of the past couple of weeks. Everything is green and growing and the heat has not been too terrible, yet. We continue to be blessed in our daily walk and have been getting up each day around 5 a.m. anxious to see what He has in store for us.

quiet time 4 friends & work

2011-06-03T19:15:00.002-05:00

As we are between sessions and most of our colleagues are off traveling, we are enjoying our mostly deserted dorm building, quiet work time and visiting with our friends in Beijing.

While we are technically on break, project deadlines and demands are keeping us busy. Krista is neck deep in research and writing in preparation for our organization’s 30th Anniversary, which will be celebrated at near the end of the month. Preston presses forward with training video production with a knowing nod to Sisyphus.

In a major leap forward, we have been allowed to use an empty dorm room on the second floor as an “office,” relieving the pressure of working and living in our room and giving us a secure place to leave our things. Preston had a great opportunity to practice his Chinese as getting the ok to use of the room took a full day of conversations with building managers and custodians. Who would have guessed?

Outside of work, we were excited to spend time with two Chinese friends from 2008, who met us at church. We refer to these two young men as the most famous people associated with our program. Over the years they have joined us as students, volunteer workers, friends and teachers (teaching Mandarin to facilitators). After their initial stint at our program, they returned to their university and established 3-day English immersion camps of their own. This year marks the 12th session of the effort they initiated.

They also continue to recruit volunteer workers, or administrative assistants (AAs), to spend a month or more on our campus helping students and facilitators. Essentially they trade their time for the opportunity to live in an English-speaking environment. We can’t say enough about AAs; they are indispensable to the program.

Their latest recruit, a 20-year-old woman from Sichuan, arrived this week. We have enjoyed sharing meals, getting to know each other and helping her get situated. As our Chinese staff is off through June 7 for the Dragon Boat Festival – Duanwu jie commemorates an ancient Chinese poet and statesman who committed suicide (one of many stories) – the new volunteer is basically alone in her dormitory. It is a blessing that we have time while she needs friends.

We are expecting more than 300 students to be on hand for the June session, which begins June 9. We will help get the session started but then we will head back to the office to continue project work. While we will not have a lot of day-to-day contact with students, we will continue our weekly study with the Chinese staff, helping the AAs and getting to know the students He puts in our path.

bits & pieces

2011-05-25T05:18:00.001-05:00

We continue chipping away at our various projects aimed at promoting our program and creating resources that we hope will help Chinese English teachers learn and employ new teaching methods.

Krista is working with the president of our organization to prepare materials – a speech and scholarly paper – that will be presented at an event in late June celebrating the organization’s 30 years of service in China. It is a tremendous opportunity to showcase the success of our Total Immersion Program and build relationships with the educators and leaders who can send more teachers for training.

Preston continues to work on a series of teacher training videos that hopefully will be valuable resources as follow-up training for teachers and for those unable to attend our program. While our current workload is keeping us out of the classroom, we continue building relationships through weekly meetings with our Chinese staff and organizing visits with students here in Beijing.

While a majority of our time is spent focused on computer screens, we have been fascinated to note the many changes taking place on the street outside our campus.

Just outside the campus gate, a new vendor selling Chinese bread products has proven irresistible as we return from our morning walks. The sellers are friendly and excited about talking with foreigners and the wares include warm buns filled with red bean and flatbread covered in egg and vegetables. Of course they are also fried in oil!

Up the street, we found our favorite restaurant gutted and gone without warning. We will miss the delicious and inexpensive food as well as the friendly owner who patiently spoke Chinese with us and didn’t mind repeating the names of the dishes every time we stopped by. Sadly, we wonder if we had smiled and nodded when she told us the restaurant was closing.

While we contemplate the question of the disappearing restaurant, the mystery of Internet shopping in Beijing has been solved. We have discovered that we can translate into English the website of a local shopping network, order online and have the item delivered for free by a bicycle courier, who can be paid in cash! Krista is enjoying a new ergonomic computer keyboard – remember the speech and paper – and no one had to venture into the electronics market, where all manner of electronic gear is available from aggressive, bargaining vendors.

The current session comes to end Friday and the next group of students will arrive June 10. We are planning to use the time to visit students around Beijing, visit the American Embassy to renew our passports, press on with our projects and prepare for the arrival of the summer volunteers. We continue to look to Him for strength and perseverance and remain thankful for the opportunities to serve.

no rest for the weary

2011-05-12T01:22:00.002-05:00

After an exciting and exhausting trip to Liaoning province, where our students’ motto seemed to be no rest for the weary, we are back to work in Beijing on teacher training videos and preparations for our organization’s June celebration of 30 years in China.

During our 10-day adventure we stayed in the modern apartments of former students and their families, visited countless historic sites, feasted on local dishes, visited with many students who had been through our training program and led English activities for a group of about 100 middle school students.

We kicked-off our trip in the provincial capital of Shenyang, an historic and industrial city about four hours by fast train north of Beijing. Located near the North Korean border, Shenyang was the capital of the Manchu people in the 17th century and later occupied by the Japanese and an important battleground between the Nationalists and the Communists in the mid-20th Century.

There was no shortage of famous sights, which included temples, museums, parks, gardens and re-enactments of ceremonies performed by Manchu emperors. We stayed with Betty and her family and came to fully appreciate the “timetable” she’d prepared before we arrived.

As our visit coincided with International Labor Day, or May Day, there were special events, scads of traffic and throngs of Chinese tourists and workers enjoying their time off work everywhere we went.

We spent our first day touring the mansion of a celebrated family of warlords of the early 1900s and a cold, rainy stroll through the grounds, temples and buildings of the city’s Imperial Palace, a smaller version of the Forbidden City.

Later we spent a day with Kitty and her family touring the walled fortress of temples and buildings set among a forest of pine trees in Beiling Park, where we took in a re-enactment of an imperial ceremony featuring hundreds of people in period dress. Following a similar performance, we were persuaded to don period clothes and found ourselves the center of attention before a crowd of camera wielding tourists fascinated by the crazy foreigners.

Our hosts and their families were tremendously gracious with their time and making sure we sampled every famous dish and sight available. We collapsed exhausted into bed late each evening with Betty assuring us we could have a good rest as we wouldn’t be setting off until 8 or 8:30 the next morning.

We enjoyed a special dinner with nearly a dozen former students and had ample opportunity to practice our Chinese as we were led on several excursions by our former student, Sasa, whose conversation was undaunted by her very limited English. Thankfully, Betty proved to be an excellent tutor and translator.

We wrapped up our trip in the city of Jinzhou, where we stayed with Angel and her husband at her parent’s flat. We enjoyed home cooking and joined the family in making jiaozi (dumplings) and visited the parks and riverfront near their apartment. We enjoyed learning more about dong bei (east-north, as the area is known) history at an interesting monument/museum detailing the history of China’s civil war. We also took in the wind swept cliffs and seashell beaches outside the city. We had a great time catching up with Angel and hanging out with her husband.

After another dinner with former students and their family and friends, we spent the final days of our trip with Rose King and her family. Rose King took us to the wedding of a colleague and program graduate as well a visit to the Chinese church near her house.

On our last full day in Jinzhou, we climbed Yiwulu Mountain, about two hours away from the city, with Rose King and her family and friends. It was a beautiful day and the colors of the trees, mountains and sky were on spectacular display. We laughed, we sweated and took photos galore as we traveled all around the mountain and viewed the various temples and structures.

Rose King was a spectacular host and her family, who spoke little English, was equally gracious. We look forward to heading north to Liaoning again one day, as it was a tremendous experience regardless of how exhausting.

april flowers

2011-04-26T04:28:00.001-05:00

April has melted away in a flash of colorful spring blossoms and long hours at the computer shaping hundreds of hours of digital tape into training videos that will be useful to thousands of Chinese English teachers.

Working out of an unused classroom, we kept to a rigorous schedule that allowed us to make some real progress on the project despite the siren call of blue skies and the happy voices of students in adjacent classrooms and on the playground outside our “office” window. We finished writing scripts for just over half of the 100 videos we plan to produce and created several demos. The 5-6-minute videos will focus on teaching methods and how to make learning English exciting.

As we were not directly involved with students this session, we also served as the “go-to” people for several other projects and developments that required immediate attention including a visit to a foreign language high school and hosting a local scholar who toured our program.

While we missed having our own class and interacting with the students, we feel blessed to be working on the training videos that have the potential to reach thousands of people, many of whom may have little or no other opportunity for training. Our flexible schedule also allowed Krista to spend some quality time with a student she’d had in class two years ago who’d changed jobs and returned to the program for the second time. PTL!

To preserve a healthy slice of the day for ourselves, we climbed out of bed a little earlier than usual and headed out on our daily walk in the park. We were richly rewarded for our efforts.

Early morning is the nicest time of day in Beijing and with Yuan Ming Yuan Park adjacent to our campus in full bloom; this was particularly true this month. The ornamental fruit trees were dressed in brilliant pinks, whites and reds, For several days the short-lived yellow flower of a particular shrub glowed in first light. Purple flowers carpeted the ground beneath greening trees.

We took hundreds of pictures like we do for every change of the season, as the labels on our photo archive attest.

The ponds were restocked with fish and dozens of early morning anglers appeared to wet their lines and disregard the “NO FISHING” signs. As the fish, mostly carp of various colors, are far too small to eat, we can only guess that the fish are taken home and allowed to grow?

We plan to be back at the video project early next month after a short trip to visit several former students in Shenyang, north of Beijing in Liaoning province. We have been looking forward to this trip since fall and we are confident we will have an exciting and exhausting adventure.

ancestors and ancedotes

2011-04-09T00:02:00.002-05:00

After finishing up a very satisfying March session, we pulled on our traveling shoes and headed to Shanxi province, several hundred kilometers southwest of Beijing, where we spent time with a half-dozen students in two cities, visited three schools and took advantage of some awe-inspiring sightseeing opportunities.

We took the 3-hour bullet train to Taiyuan, where we hopped a country bus for the remaining three-hours to Pingyao city. We stayed in an out-of-the way Chinese-only guesthouse within the walls of the well-preserved ancient city, where people still live and work. There are thousands of buildings from the Ming and Qing dynasties, mid-14th to the early 20th centuries, including China’s first bank.

Our former student, Betty, and her husband, family and friends took great care of us, lending us bicycles to ride, introducing us to many delicious local foods and helping us find lodging during what turned out to be a busy tourist weekend (Qing Ming Jie). It also turned out to be a bit colder – as a cold front brought in some snow for our enjoyment. Thankfully the kang bed kept us very toasty.

We spent a morning at Betty’s rural school, where we led a class of about 50 high-spirited middle schoolers in English songs, chants and other activities. After class we strolled the unpaved school grounds and visited the outdoor latrines while other classes continued to belt out the lyrics to the song we’d taught earlier: “…if you are crazy, turn around.” Very surreal.

Later we visited the middle school where Betty’s husband teaches physics and took a tour of the school museum, where one of the English teachers gave a blow-by-blow recap of the school’s 80-plus-year history. During dinner, school leaders impressed upon us their desire for more English teacher training and suggested we do a program for students the next day. Why not?

The following day, we lunched with two students, one of whom invited us back to her home where we visited with her 3-year-old son and her in-laws prior to the agreed-upon event at the school. Standing at the door of the auditorium, we greeted over 400 students wildly excited to find that their school day (Sunday) suddenly included two crazy foreigners. We led songs, discussions and presented ideas on ways to make English fun. Mostly, we encouraged the students and English faculty to think outside the box.

Many students and faculty said they came away re-energized about English. Betty’s husband, who knows English but refused to speak before, uttered his first sentence and declared that he was going to speak English at home from now on. God is good.

The next day we traveled south to the city of Jiexiu, where we met up with Spring 2. We visited the town she grew up in, Zhang Bi, which features an underground fortress of tunnels below an ancient village where people still live and work. During the Cultural Revolution, many of the village temples where decommissioned and/or defaced. One of the main attractions was a temple that had been used as a school when Spring 2 was growing up. As we toured the town, members of her family invited us into their house for special snacks made for Qing Ming Jie (a holiday honoring ancestors).

That night another student, Amy, and her family prepared us a fantastic dumpling dinner at their apartment. We were happy when she asked to give thanks for the food before we ate. PTL!

The next day we walked for miles as we visited Mian Shan (mountain) and the many beautiful temples built into the cliff walls. There were thousands of steps and thousands of people as the mountain is the birthplace of the Qing Ming holiday. We saw no other foreigners and we posed patiently for pictures with strangers more than a times than we can count.

We spent the morning of our last day at our friend’s school. In an astonishing act of kindness, the random taxi driver we hailed took us to the school refused to let us pay (a God thing). We later learned that his daughter was a student there. With an audience of more than 40 6th graders and several English teachers, we again led a rousing session of singing and activities. The students were really wound up and we could see by the reaction of the teachers on hand that we had perhaps generated a bit too much enthusiasm for English.

We arrived back in Beijing just before midnight (the guard was still awake!) after an unexpectedly easy day of travel that featured the discovery of the automatic ticket machine at the Taiyuan train station that allowed us to bypass the 50-person lines at the ticket windows.

Back on campus there are about 120 students on hand for the April session, however we will have little contact, as we are full speed ahead on continuing our work on producing training videos, helping the Chinese staff with a translation project and working on plans for ESEC’s 30th anniversary in June. We are assured that He will direct us and motivate us as in the work at hand over the next few weeks.

Photos to be posted as soon as we can!

march sweet sadness

2011-03-27T05:49:00.010-05:00

While the end of the March session is still a couple days away, we are all ready starting to feel the pains of separation creeping up – each passing activity marking another last time. As expected, we have all become very attached to each other in Class G and no one is really looking forward to saying goodbye.

With only 12 students in our class, we have been blessed with a unique opportunity to really get to know each other as we talking about our lives and our different experiences in China everyday during class and lunch and dinner. Having come from higher elevations in Qinghai and Xinjiang, many of the students ended up with an incredible amount of extra-oxygen energy as they acclimated to sea level in Beijing. As all of them came from very rural and remote areas of China, they all brought great attitudes and enthusiasm for learning and growing. Our students for the most part are middle and high school teachers with a broad range of interest and experience (and vocabulary). Many would have liked the opportunity to have studied something other than English or have been able to work or teach in a different field. All were extremely talented and had the capacity for acquiring knowledge. Several were fluent English speakers after a few days of using their language skills.

We enjoyed the intimacy of a smaller class as well as having the time and energy to concentrate on things that have transformed our group into a close-knit family. Because of the small class sizes we had mixed levels of English speakers. It was so rewarding to see the higher speakers encourage the less-confident ones and watch them all make progress together. It will be a great habit for them to use when they return to the classroom. The initial tears of worry and anxiety of the lower speaking students have given way to comfort and enthusiasm as real camaraderie has freed everyone to let loose. At dinner each evening we created a new class tradition: sharing the things we are thankful for and what we will do to make tomorrow a better day.

As everyone gained confidence, we ended up with three very fluent speakers and a medium-to-high-level class full of students eager to learn new teaching methods, idioms, proverbs, songs and activities. We had great fun participating in special activities including an afternoon of “Olympic” games (Class G took gold!), a St. Patrick’s Day festival and a craft night, where the students ended up showing us more than we showed them.

With ample time to visit we shared many stories. Three of the students teach at the same school and will be required to speak only English in their office when they return. We all find it very amusing that their headmaster doesn’t understand English. They said they didn’t really know each other until their 20 days in TIP and they said they were pleased to find colleagues and new friends who were outgoing and resourceful. Another student recounted how she ran away from home at 16 seeking fortune in the factories in the southeast. Her father eventually persuaded her to return to her home (by flying there to pick her up) and pursue her dream of studying English. He continued to encourage her even as she struggled to find a teaching job – she failed the teacher’s exam three times. Today is she is an incredible teacher and her aptitude for English means she remembers all the idioms.

To help celebrate the student’s success, we will haul our small oven and hot plate over to the classroom and spend an afternoon cooking and baking together. Krista will lead us in mixing up a batch of Snicker-Doodle cookies while Preston will handle pancakes with syrup and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Hard to know what the students will think of our American “classics’” but it will be a sweet way to end.

march on

2011-03-12T03:27:00.001-06:00

The March session is off to an exciting start even as we all adjust to having a particularly small group of students on campus. While hosting 36 students means smaller class sizes, schedule changes and adding activities to keep everyone engaged, we are blessed by the opportunity to spend more time with individual students and build strong relationships.

We are working together with 12 students from Qinghai and Xinjiang in Class G, which includes a range of speaking levels. What the group lacks in size, they more than make up for in enthusiasm and interest in improving their oral English. Several of the students have told us that when they return to their schools their headmaster will require them to use more English in their high school classes and speak  English exclusively in their department office. Real incentives!

While there are fewer students currently enrolled in our immersion program, there are dozens of other students studying English (and speaking Chinese!) also on our campus. Keeping track of “who is who” will prove to be interesting.

We spent the four days since the last session ended attending to household chores and helping some of our former students. We had a fabulous dinner with a student and his family as we have been enlisted to help the student’s “little brother” (cousin) prepare and learn about going to high school in the states in anticipation of attending an American university.

Like many families concerned about the ability of their child to get into a top Chinese university, they are looking for opportunities in other countries. It is an incredibly expensive proposition and requires a great of courage as navigating the education system in a foreign country and language is daunting, to say the least. Fortunately we have been able to introduce the family to a like-minded friend (who speaks and reads Chinese!) who lives near the private school the student hopes to attend in southern California. She has friends at church who are currently hosting Chinese students from the same school and they are familiar with the institution. (definitely a God thing)

On the home front, our hot water heater died several days ago. The REALLY good news is that ours will be replaced soon. The good news is that the recently remodeled community showers in the women’s restroom are working (sorry, the men’s isn’t ready). The bad news is that the school will replace several units similar to ours at the same time which means work will not begin until all the heaters arrive and the workers can schedule time for a big job instead of our small job. Stay tuned - Preston is beginning to smell.

We are looking forward to continuing the conversation with one dozen of our new best friends in Class G, helping our former student and his family and taking a hot shower in our own bathroom. We continue to find joy in each new situation and remain confident that He will take care of every situation as long as we do our part, and stay out of the way!

going to the countryside

2011-03-04T23:55:00.008-06:00

Guangxi travels continued…. We arrived at the Nanning station before first light to find hundreds of Spring Festival travelers sitting, lounging and milling about waiting for trains outside the small depot. We joined a crush of people jostling through the small doors onto the platform to catch the train to Ningming, about 3 hours southwest of the provincial capital near the Vietnam border.

We found our seats and settled in and then watched with growing trepidation as the only other westerner we’d seen on the train made his way down the aisle toward the empty seats across from us. Strangely, “familiar” conversation is usually not what we are hoping for when traveling on a train crowded with Chinese families. Not to mention, facing seats means that the smaller stature of Chinese seatmates is more comfortable.

Wolfgang, who was on holiday from Germany and speaks English, and his Chinese lady friend were also headed to the small village outside Ningming to take a boat up the Zuo River to see the ancient cliff paintings at Huashan. Hong yin li, a single mother in her late 30s, is an unemployed primary school Chinese language teacher in Nanning. Her English was pretty good but her confidence was low. As we are extremely familiar with Chinese teachers, we were soon having a great time learning and teaching English and Chinese. It was a bit much for her older traveling companion, who was soon fast asleep.

We had a great time having our picture taken, holding babies and goofing around with children in the adjacent seats. In no time, we were saying goodbye and trying to hire a motorcycle cab outside the station. Under Preston’s experienced guidance we set off down the road with a man with gold teeth who said he would drive us to the village. As we got farther and farther away with no vehicle in sight, and the equanimity of our partnership disintegrating, we ran into Wolfgang and Hong Yin, who determined the man with gold teeth was taking us to a boat. Wrong.

Sharing a motorcycle cab with our new friends, we headed off to the small village of Shanzhai about 10 miles outside the city at the end of a rutted road that twisted between the river and fields of sugarcane and the karst mountains. Our train mates were a blessing on the train and off.

At the village we boarded a small boat and spent the next couple of hours chugging up river surrounded by towering, karst hills covered in green. On the boat, a noisy diesel, we were joined by a couple of very friendly Chinese families as we took in the sights and the 2,000-year-old depiction of people and animals drawn in red on the cliff faces high above the river.

Back in the village, we were told there was no place to stay the night and then led up the hill to a recently built four-star hotel, which was essentially deserted. Several Chinese families were having a barbeque across the road and set off a long and colorful fireworks display directly outside our window late in the evening. Our hotel had screen doors on both sides of the room and we enjoyed the luxury of the warm breeze blowing through our new digs.

We walked to a nearby “ecological park” where we were told it was too dangerous to hike by a rowdy group of friendly Chinese teenagers having a beer party and playing pool on an outside table. We arose before dawn the next day to hike instead through fields of sugarcane and climb the karst hills before it got too hot. It was a beautiful rural escape – as we found no other hikers or inhabitants (a rare thing). Preston got in a hiking fix, as we were gone for nearly 5 hours. Our new Chinese village friends, of course, thought we were a bit mad. As the only restaurant was either swamped with tourists from the boat tour or closed, we subsisted on instant noodles, duck eggs, sugarcane candy and homemade zhongzi (rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves – which we acquired in Nanning from Amy) bought along the street in the village.

After two extremely peaceful days (Amen!), we headed back to Ningming to catch a long-distance bus to our next destination (still under discussion). The rural-bus back into the city was crowded with children, grandparents and farmers headed to market with their goods, which included bamboo cages of ducks and chickens, giant sacks of raw peanuts (that the farmer insisted we sample) and fat bundles of six-foot strips of bamboo rattan. A bit disorientated, we disembarked near the train station only to discover that we needed to find bus station which was on the other side of the city. So we hired a motorcycle cab and found the bus station and tickets back to Nanning. Next stop: Beihai.

To view more photo go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets/

shoestrings and sewing

2011-02-25T03:42:00.001-06:00

We hurried back to Nanning Sunday evening to catch up with a couple of other students, Susan 2 and Lily 2, who had traveled from Liuzhou (northern Guangxi) to hang out for the afternoon and evening. God gave us so many opportunities to catch up!

Not being in complete control of our schedule, we arrived two or three hours later than we originally intended. That however, did not deter the festivities! It was so fun to visit with Susan 2 and Lily 2, learn about their classes and play UNO well into the night. Mark and his wife, continued in their role as hosts and we had to almost physically deter them from taking us on the train to our next destination.

Susan 2 is a master teacher, who works at the No. 1 middle school in her city. She explained her demanding schedule and we got extremely tired just listening to the in’s and out’s of it all. She is tasked with sharing all that she had learned at TIP with many teachers in her area. For example, she does demonstration classes where up to 30 other teachers come and sit in on her classes. She is able to teach in English for half of each class – a huge accomplishment.

Lily 2’s son had been accepted into the art university in Nanning for the coming fall – another cause for celebration. It was a blessing to be able to enjoy the evening together (more seafood, Cantonese style), and we were tempted to travel back with them to Liuzhou even though our plans called for heading west for some hiking in rural China. So we have reason to return in the future!

We were pretty exhausted after only three days of traveling, sightseeing, chatting and practicing Chinese. While it was exhilarating to spend time with students, there was no down time. :0 As a result, when everyone bid their farewells Sunday night we decided to spend an additional day in Nanning to relax and explore before catching the 8 a.m. train to Ningming on Tuesday.

Our last day in Nanning was still an adventure. We secured tickets to Ningming after waiting in the long lines outside of the train station (yay!) and then we headed to the river for a leisurely walk. Nanning remained quiet and relatively deserted because of the holiday, even as we enjoyed watching crowds of people playing and dancing in parks and squares all around town.

As it was our anniversary week, we decided on sundaes and people watching on the plaza for lunch and Pizza Hut (which is more like a western diner) for dinner. It proved to be a HUGE praise that we remained in Nanning an extra day, as Krista’s only pair of shoes broke and her backpack fell apart.

Shoe shopping in China is no easy task. 1) imagine looking for a pair of shoes you can hike in and walk in for the next 8 days, 12 hours each day; 2) understand that your foot in larger than most Chinese women; 3) note that western brands and “good” shoes can cost $100 to $200; and 4) most shoe stores only sell one brand and different brands have different sizes. After walking the entire downtown for 2.5 hours in a vain attempt to find the hiking store we thought we had seen one evening, we settled on a familiar Chinese brand of athletic shoes, mastered Krista’s shoe size and laughed our way into a fine pair of shoes (with pink shoelaces) that served their purpose. And that evening we sewed up Krista’s backpack and we were ready for the next adventure.

After the ordeal was over, we decided that it was truly a blessing to add China shoe shopping and backpack repair to our list of accomplishments.

friends, fun and fire dragons

2011-02-21T21:42:00.003-06:00

We had found an affordable flight to Nanning, Guangxi where many of our students from November 2010 professed to be from and where the weather reports promised unusually warm temps – in the mid to high 70s. Having notified nearby students of our pending arrival, we were excited to find out that two of them planned to meet us for on our first weekend there – we were excited to see them and experience a southern Spring Festival together.

Traveling in China is taxing and tedious – but we were excited to be flying out of winter into spring to a place where we would be forced to practice our Chinese. It was also relaxing to know that we had secured a room in a hostel before our departure (which proved to be much more comfortable than our daily living conditions) and that our friends would meet us at noon the following day (since they all actually lived in villages or cities within 3 hours journey of Nanning).

Nanning the capital of Guangxi proved to be a ghost town the first week of Spring Festival. It was a nice entry into the trip – not having to be smashed onto a bus as we searched for our hostel, which was in an apartment complex and a bit difficult to find at dusk. We found the hostel abandoned by the owners, yet full of friendly folks who offered to watch what meager things we had on hand as we went off in search of sustenance.

Saturday morning we happily donned short-sleeves and skirts (okay, only Krista wore a skirt) and set off walking around and exploring the new place that we found ourselves in. We saw leaf after leaf and flower after flower. Enjoyed a walk along the river and toured old town. The tropical climes of Guangxi were a welcome relief from the stark snowless winter we had lived in for the past three months. We soaked in all the color, the birds and the creations God brought our way.

Saturday afternoon we met Mark and his wife, Alice and Susan 3, all from class C in November. We all traveled to Qingxiu Mountain together and had such a fun time taking pictures, catching up and enjoying the time together. We heard from Mark, a primary school teacher, that his students really enjoy the activities that he learned from TIP and he showed us a performance of his students doing the Chicken Dance with new moves and all. He has been married for 4 years and his wife is a Chinese teacher. They live in a village about four hours from Nanning – but came to meet and spend the weekend with us!

Saturday evening we visited the night market in downtown Nanning that was blessedly empty of people. We had fun meeting Alice’s “sisters” who were selling purses and clothing. Krista and Mark’s wife, Qiu Hua, enjoyed getting charms made with their names. It was the last time we could move around freely in Nanning without bumping into a million people!

Alice lives about 2 hours outside of Nanning in WuMing. On Sunday she invited us to Hua Hua Da Shi Jie (Flower World – 花花大世界) where we enjoyed the beautiful scenes and many photo opportunities before being treated to our first fire dragon dance! It was so loud and smoky that we had to relocate ourselves several times or suffocate. We ended up with our fingers and tissues in our ears for most of the 30-minute performance. It was amazing to watch the performers and spectators who paid to join the dance as they lighted and threw firecrackers and got burned in the process. More than once we were pelted ourselves by flying matter. One wife dragged her husband from the show – we guessed she had enough of watching him skirt danger. It was an exhilarating experience overall as we had searched three years for a dragon dance. (Susan 3 suggested we visit her hometown Binyang, where the firecracker dragon dance was born 1,000 years ago. Binyang hosts 100 dragon dances each year on Lantern Festival Day, the end of Spring Festival. Maybe another trip.)

Both Mark and Alice are patient teachers, so we learned a lot of Chinese and were so happy to spend the day with them and their families. Alice even gave us an introduction to a traditional Spring Festival gift – Hong Bao (Red envelope 洪保). Chinese parents and married couples give Hong Bao filled with money to children and singles. Alice gave us very small gifts of 6 and 8 RMB (less than $1) but in increments that were full of blessings for a healthy year filled with fortune and happiness. For lunch we went into WuMing proper and met Alice’s family – her husband and daughter. We had specialties like sour noodle soup and seafood!

happy year of the rabbit

2011-02-18T21:53:00.001-06:00

We spent the evening of Chinese New Year (Feb. 2) talking and trading text messages with literally hundreds of our friends and former students from across China. We didn’t intend to stay up well past midnight, however, it was very rewarding to chat and catch up with everyone. Outside our window, the Beijing sky was filled with the colorful glow of a non-stop barrage of fireworks and the rolling boil of explosions and concussions that continued in force even as we fell asleep.

In general, our friends were welcoming in the Year of the Rabbit on the lunar calendar with family and watching the annual New Year’s Eve program on television. The words of many of the text messages we received were laid out in the form of rabbit ears or bunnies.

New Year’s day was spent wandering around the city enjoying the mild weather, holiday decorations and joining the crowds at a temple and street fair. There was food to sample; arts and crafts; and various traditional performances. We especially enjoyed a watching the band of costumed drummers and horn players that paraded through the narrow lanes around adjoining the Changdian Temple Fair.

After a quick visit to Tian’anmen Square, where we found security high but a surprisingly thin crowd, we celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary with dinner at a western restaurant that we had been planning to visit but had been too busy to cross town to enjoy. Gotta love a cross-cultural celebration! We are blessed!

Having spent hours catching up with so many former students we were even more excited to use our extended Spring Festival holiday break of about 10 days to go visiting. A stop at the train station quickly confirmed what we all ready knew – train tickets were not to be had as everyone was in route to or from their hometown. Back to plan B: scour the internet for cheap airfares.

After a long search, we were able to get a cheap flight to southern China to visit students in the comfortable climes of Guangxi Province, which borders Vietnam on the Gulf of Tonkin. With little time to prepare, we set about packing, putting our affairs in order and letting our students know we were on our way. We’ll talk about our visits and travels in subsequent blogs and post photos soon! Happy 兔 Year!

merry wedding

2011-01-30T22:48:00.001-06:00

Our Chinese friend and colleague, Mary, has been entertaining and baffling us for years with stories about the difficult living conditions, strange customs and special wedding traditions in her rural village north of Beijing. Having been on hand when her fiancé, John, proposed a couple of years ago, we were excited to be invited to the January 1 ceremony in the couple’s hometown.

As Krista was in California, Preston braved the single-digit temperatures and stiff wind, heading north with several foreign and Chinese friends. We didn’t know what to expect.

The long-distance bus let us off along a deserted stretch of mountain highway, where John and some friends picked us up and chauffeured us across a barren field littered with gravel and rocks and through the village, which was carved into the dirt bluffs above a dry river gorge.

We spent the day eating and trying to visit with John’s family, who spoke a local dialect that was challenging for our Chinese friends and impossible for the rest of us. We spent the majority of our time sitting beneath the blankets on one of the large heated “kang” beds that dominated two of the three small rooms in the house. Conversation focused on the bitter cold and how to avoid using the hole outside in the yard that served as the latrine.

The next day, Mary arrived in a three-car procession wearing a red dress and a red shawl over her head and face. John carried her into the house past a drift of dried corncobs, a cow caked with dried mud and several snarling dogs. We all packed in around them. A short time later, we were invited in as various relatives taunted, shouted and grabbed at the couple urging them to give up articles of clothing, an activity that the couple seemed to enjoy less with each piece of clothing forfeited. They retreated beneath a blanket for privacy and warmth, as the family bought and sold their clothing in the other room. We averted our eyes.

Following the auction, about ten of us smashed into the back of a small van for a painfully long drive to a restaurant in the nearest city, about 30 minutes away. As January 1, 2011 was one of the two luckiest wedding dates (the other being January 11, 2011), there were many wedding parties going on at the restaurant simultaneously. Chaos and confusion reigned. We spent hours eating with John’s relatives.

Back at the house, the couple joined us for a home-cooked dinner and a never-ending parade of toasts and counter toasts. It was made abundantly clear that our presence was particularly special, as foreigners had never visited the village before.

Later in the evening, fueled by a day of excitement and toasts, relatives and friends demanded the newly wed couple entertain the guests with “games” and “performances.” Modesty and warmth eventually drove the couple beneath the blankets, which they held onto for dear life, but not before their “clothing” was reduced to a towel and a cardboard box. John wore Mary’s brassier on his head.

Later Mary told us that the games had concluded early because people were concerned that the festivities might be a little much for the foreigners. We were curious, but not curious enough to ask. In Beijing, Mary inquired hopefully if Preston had taken pictures of the games. Um, no.

joy of January

2011-01-14T17:29:00.000-06:00

Thankfully January in Beijing has proved so far to be milder than December was, and it has been a welcome treat to get to go outside for P.E. time this session. Our Class C, led by Preston, is made up of 15 students mostly from Gansu who are medium and lower-confidence level speakers. Krista, while still in the US until Jan. 18, is providing advice, admin support and encouragement along the way. Students are excited to be planning a welcome-home party for her that will also be their first meeting. It will most likely turn into a “photo” hour or two.

Class C discussions have ranged from body parts to nuclear proliferation. Needless to say, lesson planning has required some additional creativity in order to build in appropriate challenges for the majority. So far the class is very happy with their learning environment and they appreciate Preston’s speaking cadence and his ability to ensure they conversation starters for lunch and dinner. It’s always the little things that count. :0 We also have a 16-year-old from Beijing in the class who volunteered to be the Party Planner. His mother calls daily to check in on his progress. So you can see, the class is a highly motivated yet diverse bunch.

The student population dwindled to less than 50 students this month because Spring Festival falls very early this year on Feb. 3. That means that teachers are off in mid January so they can be home cooking, cleaning and preparing to celebrate the 15-day Chinese New Year with their families. It also means that the batch of students who did attend is overly anxious about securing train tickets home. We anticipate that next week they will only have eyes for Spring Festival – even as they prepare to give their speeches!

That said we prayerfully are looking forward to February when there is potential for a typical training session or TIP Mandarin like last year, where we can practice Chinese. Regardless, we hope to see a former student or two and meanwhile recover from the nasty colds that have plagued us both even as we live on separate continents.
Krista will be back in Beijing on January 19 and we are looking forward to the reunion. Aunt Joyce is undergoing radiation treatments and her health situation, while not improved, is stable. Krista’s parents and brothers will be taking over support and care for now. Despite the challenges of caregiving, Krista has enjoyed the time in California where she got to play many hours of Mexican Train (dominos) and Spot It (cards) with her nephews, Mom and Aunt. She also was blessed with a visit from Tracey, a friend from China.

Preston is working on a post about Marry’s fabulously interesting and cold wedding, but the photos are already online. Take a look! And thank you all for your prayers and support as we have often struggled through this time apart.

Marry's Wedding: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets/72157625607284225/

holiday haze

2011-01-01T16:24:00.004-06:00

Living within two cultures can sometimes be a bit overwhelming. Take for instance, holidays. It takes quite a bit of brainpower to learn about and remember to offer or participate in celebrations that pertain to our China home. Trying to top that off with all the traditions we have in the US means something’s gotta give – and that something is usually the American customs, usually because we don’t get those days off!

Yet our students love to participate in and learn about Thanksgiving, Christmas, Halloween, New Year’s, Easter (you name it), as well, so we get to share and celebrate a host of different “ways of living” almost monthly. It feels like we are always talking about one holiday and gearing up for another.

It’s important for us not to confuse the different customs if at all possible. For instance, New Year’s in American has little relevance to most of our Chinese friends and so we have adopted the Spring Festival and Chinese New Year ways of looking at things – so that we can meet our students where their interests are and also visit them when they have time off. Our friends in Tibet celebrate yet another New Year’s date! Fortunately, our eastern friends are all very gracious and don’t hold our missteps against us as we have adapted and learned to write the right text messages to the correct people. (Now if we can only remember to use the appropriate names: is it Preston and Krista or Pres and Spring?)

So we are grateful to have made it past another “holiday,” and we are ready for the rest that January (a relatively holiday-free month) brings. There’s just a wedding and three birthdays to squeeze in before Spring Festival begins on February 3.

Happy 2011.

frozen lining

2010-12-18T20:50:00.002-06:00

Winter finally decided to rear its bitter cold and windy head just one week after the December session started. While Krista was enjoying the rather warm rainy climes of the mid-valley in California, Preston and the TIP team were hunkering down inside trying to avoid staying outside too long in the negative numbers.

This was the first taste of Beijing’s biting chills for many of our team and it meant that everyone was seeing a lot more of each other in the halls, rooms and common areas as hanging out elsewhere was not an option. Roommates have become somewhat restless in having to spend so much time together in-doors and students were confined to in-door activities for P.E. time. A recent email bulletin urged us to conserve energy because our consumption was even more drastic than usual, apparently. All the pain of winter, but none of the delight as snow is still not in sight. :0

Preston continued to brave 25-minute bike rides into Wudaokou for Chinese classes, until even he was driven to take the bus and avoid the gusts and uncomfortable feeling of frozen nostrils, eyelashes and crunchy clothing. We are all too familiar with the long, dark winters of Beijing and often push the envelope to enjoy the outdoors – regardless of the consequences.

The frozen weather has not deterred the enthusiasm of the 150 on-campus students, who are excited about speaking English, making new friends and celebrating Christmas with all the facilitators. Even as the team is homesick for family and friends during this special time of year, it is heartening and rewarding to get to share traditions of the season with so many people for the first time. This week there will be caroling in the dorms, a Christmas play and class celebrations where we can talk more about how this season of giving started with the first gift – Jesus Christ.

While we are far apart in miles, we are both well connected in our purpose for being on this earth: magnifying our Lord and serving in His name. He, fortunately, gives us ample opportunity! Krista gets the blessings of time – with family, for Chinese studies, to edit hours of TIP videos and to connect with friends in all parts of the world – even as she is assuming many household duties at her aunt’s house. Preston is enjoying building friendships with students, managing and encouraging the video project team and boosting his Chinese pronunciation skills.

Merry Christmas!

i say flowers

2010-12-07T08:28:00.001-06:00

Following a short and restful break, we are again in the thick of things this week as a new group of students arrived on campus and Krista left for the states. Roughly two-thirds of the students joining us are from the northern climes of Inner Mongolia and Liaoning Province and the remaining third are up from the south China province of Guangxi and desperately anxious to see snow for the first time.

Krista headed home to northern California in support of her family and to stay with her aunt, who was recently diagnosed with cancer and is not able to get around well. We are praying for healing, peace and wisdom for the doctors as next steps are considered.

This session we will be working on creating video resources that can be used by teachers that are not able to come to our campus in Beijing and by our students back at their schools. While Krista is busy imposing order on the hours of tape that have already been shot, Preston will be managing the taping and working behind the camera.

During the break we received an unexpected call from a former member of our Chinese staff who we have not seen recently. Anxious to meet with her, we readily agreed to a puzzling request to spend an evening helping to deliver “flowers.”

The “flowers” turned out to be flyers for the English language school our friend now works for. Feeling a bit awkward and more than a little conspicuous, we found ourselves outside a subway station trying to entice evening commuters. Later, at an apartment complex, we went door-to-door trying to recruit new students.

It was amazing how readily people opened their doors to a couple of foreign strangers. Our friend did most of the talking, however we encountered a surprising number of English speakers and got to practice our Chinese. One apartment turned out to be an office of some sort and no one was interested in talking to us. A short time later a man came out of the “office” in his underwear and hurried after us down the hall calling: “Hello? Hello?” We couldn’t guess what kind of “office” it might be, but the man desperately wanted one of our flyers.

We are so grateful for all of your support and encouragement and we will be thinking of you as we wend our way toward Christmas. We pray your holiday preparations are filled with family, fun and warmth.

back in class

2010-11-22T03:20:00.000-06:00

While we were very excited to be back in the classroom after several months of admin-type duties, November’s Class C has embraced our enthusiasm and seized every opportunity to take the feeling to another level.

Having adopted several c-related appellations – caring, capable, confident and cool – it quickly became clear that “crazy” was the most fitting. Their energy and enthusiasm has more than compensated for their lower confidence in speaking English.

At meal times, they are easily the loudest and most rambunctious class, belting out songs and chants and offering high fives and other encouragements to anyone within striking distance. Many more-confident English speakers from other classes have expressed a desire to join Class C, willing to overlook our extremely limited vocabulary.

About half of our 30 students are from Liaoning Province in the north and half from Guangxi Province in the far south, paving the way for many debates on the desirability of eating rice or noodles. As might be expected, the weather in Beijing – blessedly mild this month – is still a popular topic for our southern friends. They are mostly primary school teachers with a half dozen middle school teachers mixed in. We have 28 women and two men. Oh boy (less)!

Our designated party planner was able to get everyone organized for an inspired Talent Show performance despite having to rely primarily on her own language of grunts, groans and wild gesticulation to get her directions across. Our production included special Class C renditions of Country Roads (China Roads), the Chicken Dance and dancing the Macarena.

Another of our students spent an afternoon in tears because she thought she was being sent home after one of our colleagues encouragingly told the student that she spoke such great English she didn’t need to be at the program. No good deed goes unpunished.

As we head into our final week of the session, the intensity of the first part of the program is starting to take its toll, as everyone is fairly exhausted. Nonetheless, we have a full slate of projects planned, including student-led class activities, 10-minute speeches and teaching practicum.

Outside of class, we were blessed with the time, opportunity and energy to organize all of the unwanted clothing (bu yao) that has been left by departing volunteers over the past year. After a couple of hours of sorting and packaging, we ended up with four extra-large duffel bags of warm, useable clothing to donate to migrant workers and their families.

We ferried the duffels across town to our destination by taxi only to find that the office we needed was closed for the day. We put our limited Chinese to the test with the workers at the Japanese restaurant across the way and ended up leaving the bags in the restaurant storeroom to be picked up later. We have since learned that we hauled away an item someone still wants, so Pres can look forward to biking back to try and retrieve something. Did we mention good deeds earlier?

We are looking forward to some kind of Thanksgiving celebration at some point in the next several days. Despite the uncertainty of how we will celebrate, we are extremely grateful that we have an overwhelming number of things to be thankful for – family, friends, health, teaching opportunities and resources. We hope and pray all of you enjoy a blessed day with family and friends. We will be thinking of you!

all shades

2010-11-06T18:22:00.004-05:00

It has been an amazingly colorful fall here in Beijing. We have had the perfect temps both to paint the trees beautiful hues and to walk around and enjoy them. It’s a spectacular thing to see the yellows, oranges, reds and browns mixed in with the evergreens. And it’s even more special to savor this time just before the freeze settles in and everything becomes winter white (maybe).

It has been a challenging time of year to focus on Chinese studies that force us to spend more time indoors away from the warm sunshine. We had a spectacularly warm week – in the 60s and 70s – and so we have tried to incorporate descriptions of beautiful days and comfortable weather patterns into our Chinese vocabulary. At least we get to enjoy talking about the exemplary weather. : ) This time last year it had already snowed and the government-regulated heat had to be turned on early so that we didn’t all freeze. This year the heat came on Nov. 5 and it was in the 70s outside – we were baking, but not complaining!

The session ended on a joyful note as usual with Preston cheering on both the facilitator team and the students as they finished speeches and practicum while Krista was in Shenzhen fulfilling organizational obligations that keep us up to date with current foreign worker regulations. On the three-day trip, Krista also got to spend some quality relationship building time with Sarah, our Chinese friend and colleague.

During the few days between sessions we spent time with Chinese friends and paid a bit of attention to the normal end-of-the-month housekeeping duties. One fun jaunt in particular involved tracking down a package that had been waylaid in customs and was nowhere to be found for more than a month. We were finally able to set off to collect it after several Chinese colleagues helped us determine that 1) the package was in a certain customs post office; 2) we apparently owed duty taxes; 3) we never received a letter regarding claim details; 4) the shipping number had been changed; and 5) bus 656 would take us from our doorstep to the post office in about 1 hour. It was a fine day for a bus ride across Beijing and we discovered a really nice part of town.

Other fun stuff this past week included a dinner and movie night with our Chinese friends and co-workers Mary and Sarah, and luncheon with a former Chinese staff member, Ann, who is currently looking for a new job in Beijing. It was a fruitful and fulfilling time – much fun too! Now onto the November 2010 session – class C and more Chinese studies. ☺

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets/

study study day up

2010-10-23T21:16:00.001-05:00

With the October session humming along smoothly and our regimen of meetings, training and meal times with students firmly in hand, the topic of taking Chinese classes once again reared its thorny head.

We have long felt that some formal study could really help us with our Chinese, but issues of time, money and “which program where” have resulted in great discussions but little action. Upon learning of a very inexpensive program housed not too very far from our campus where we could sign up for classes in two-week blocks, we felt we had received a sign.

After reading a sketchy translation of the program’s Korean website (sorry, no English) and cross referencing what little we learned with the related blog entries of former and current students, we took the 25-minute bike hike uptown for a visit. Combining our extraordinary that’s-not-really-English listening skills and our limited Chinese, we discovered the true cost of the program and that we could take the first class for free.

Arriving at the appointed time to register, we were not too surprised to find that the process took much longer than expected or that we ended up walking into our first class 10 minutes late or that we were barely able to answer any introductory questions from the instructor. How long have we studied Chinese? Uh, we don’t know the words to explain that.

This session we have had a single block of “uninterrupted” time each day and that time corresponds to a class that is currently on Chapter 15 of the lesson book. Most of the textbook is written in Chinese characters, which we do not read. Chapter exercises and reviews fall under the portion of the book we can’t read. Fortunately, the new words and practice dialogues are in pinyin too. We are very thankful for our Chinese friends! (Of course, now Krista must fly to Shenzhen near Hong Kong on Oct. 28 for a program recruitment fair, so “uninterrupted” time has been redefined as interrupted. Sorry, no refunds or exchanges; yet she will get to spend three full days with Sarah, our Chinese friend on staff, in lieu of classes. God is good!)

We found we have enough vocabulary for the class, but our listening skills are very poor and our grammar is almost non-existent. We are not shy about speaking up and trying, which seems to both please and exasperate our instructor.

Our 90-minute class of about eight regulars is composed of students from Japan, Korea, South America and Europe and meets Monday through Friday. We are the only Americas. It is a great group of people who sometimes seem to know way more than we do and other times seem to know far less. Overall we are totally blessed to have the opportunity to learn, be forced to study on deadlines and see progression. We also are looking forward to trying a class that starts on Chapter 1!

As we are trying to improve our Chinese skills, we are adding a new dimension to our relationships with several of our longtime friends on the Chinese staff at work. We have received a lot of help from them and several have been eager to hang out as we help each other in bilingual settings.

We are looking forward another week of classes, although the daily biking, class time and study make for very hectic days. We have discovered a very pleasurable, tree-lined short-cut through Qinghua University and are sure that at the end of the week we will be looking for a way to jam in some more classes.

biking in Beijing

2010-10-09T08:14:00.001-05:00

In the spirit of all good breaks, we end our week-long work hiatus refreshed, exhausted and ready to greet the next wave of students.

Graced with mild weather, we spent a good deal of our free time enjoying the outdoors and mingling with the millions of Chinese who took to the streets and parks in celebration of the National Day Holiday. Everywhere we went we were met with crowds of people and streets crammed with vehicles.

We kicked off the week with a serious hike through the far reaches of nearby Yuan Ming Yuan Park and several hours biking to and around the city’s Western Hills area. As the hoped-for fall colors have not yet arrived here, we opted to hold off on the strenuous climbs to the tops of Fragrant Hills and North Mountain until colder temperatures bring a change to the leaves.

On a sadder note we also said goodbye to two long-time Chinese staff members, Joe and Naomi, who moved to Yunnan Province to get established in anticipation of their marriage sometime next year. Preston had spent a lot of time with Joe playing guitar and helping to train him to be the program’s first Chinese national to work as a facilitator. They both will be sorely missed.

Midweek we spent the day with a former student and her husband at their new home on the far eastside of the city. Having won a lottery for the opportunity to purchase a new home, the couple recently finished “fitting up” their new digs and moving out of the in-law’s house in an outlying village.

After a gigantic hot pot lunch with many of the couple’s younger relatives (brothers, sisters and their wives and significant others) we visited over bottomless cups of tea, handfuls of sunflower seeds and almonds. We got a lot of great tips on places to visit in Beijing from our student’s husband, who is learning to be a train engineer and is a life-long explorer of the city’s nooks and crannies.

Following one of the many tips, we set out the next day for Eight Sites Park, more than two hours away on bicycle. Riding past orchards, cemeteries and sprawling government compounds we were reminded how much there is to see on the outskirts of the urban area. We spent a couple of hours at the park squeezing our way through crowds and clouds of burning incense to visit the temples. We claimed a park bench and ate fried noodles and watched the people as we gathered the strength to head home.

Today (Saturday) it was meetings, planning and organizing as we prepare for the arrival of some 300 students on Monday. We will again be working in support of our new colleagues and taking on special projects as they arise. We continue to be blessed daily in our relationships, opportunities and joy in the work that lies ahead.

and so it goes

2010-09-24T19:28:00.000-05:00

After several consecutive days of cold and rain, we have been graced with an Indian summer that has turned attentions away from when the radiators will be turned on (not ‘til Nov. 15, folks) to getting everything washed and out on the line. While having one of the two small washers on the disabled list is not a great privation, the fact that we all incorrectly assume someone is tending to the matter may indicate an area that needs attention.

The same might be said for the out-of-order photocopy machine, dorm room locks that don’t have working keys and the question of who does have the telephone number for the man who brings the water. So go the intricacies of communal living. :p

As life with our new colleagues and support staff takes shape, we are all becoming reacquainted with those things we have taken for granted and the unassuming service that those who have been and gone rendered behind the scenes. Things are slowly coming together and it is exciting to see a group of disparate people bonding through a spirit of accommodation and respect and a desire to serve. It’s a God thing.

As there are relatively few students on campus this session (about 140) because of the beginning of the school term and the timing of the Mid-Autumn Festival/National Day holidays (Sept. 22 and Oct. 1 respectively), we are busy working in support of our new colleagues and special projects. Preston is training, answering questions and putting supplies and materials in order for the months ahead. Krista is up to her neck in research/writing for the textbook our program is producing, as well as organizing/producing an associated video project. Think of us as cheerleaders… short skirts and all.

Clear skies allowed us fantastic views of the harvest moon that appeared the night of the Fall Equinox (Mid-Autumn Festival) as we searched in vain for moon cakes in the alleys behind campus. While students were disappointed to be anywhere other than home for the occasion, they did appreciate the special parties held in their classrooms. Most students are very excited at the prospect of being in Beijing for National Day, the day they graduate from our English-only program.

Our less demanding schedule has allowed time for us to connect with former students and encourage them as they start their busy school year. In addition, Krista has found joy in daily visits to the fruit/vegetable lady down the street and the opportunity to cook and bake. Preston has served happily in washing a lot of dishes and buying a kilo of red beans that magically turned into raw peanuts somewhere between the market and the pot. We discovered a new and inexpensive falafel restaurant where we spent a long lunch chatting and sipping Middle Eastern tea with the Jordanian owner’s brother. We also sneaked in a mid-day visit to one of our favorite Mexican restaurants on the day they had giant burritos on special for 10 yuan (that’s a buck and half, folks).

In further multi-cultural news, we have joined a small group through our international fellowship. We were very excited to attend our first meeting at the on-campus apartment of a couple who are professors at one of the large universities. It is a diverse group hailing from New Zealand, Singapore, Korea, Ukraine and the U.S., and ranging in age from early 20s to our 70-year-old compatriot from Oakland, CA. We look forward to learning a lot in the coming months as we study the Book of our favorite Teacher.

We have also been enjoying getting to know the new friends who will be with us for the remainder of the year. Primarily, they are a younger group of recent college graduates from the south interested in serving for a year before heading into the job market, though the team’s other married couple is retired and in their 60s. They bring a variety of talents and interests and even more profoundly a half-dozen guitars, an oboe, a ukulele and a set of bagpipes. Stay tuned for news from the first hootenanny.

skyhigh qinghai

2010-09-10T20:17:00.000-05:00

After wrapping up our work duties, we set out Aug. 22 for the higher, wilder and cooler climes of northwest China, landing in the city of Xining, capital of Qinghai province about 1,300 miles northwest of Beijing. We went w/o technology… so our blog had to wait!

The cool temperatures, blue skies and the relative calm of the city of just over a million people, immediately struck us. It was beautiful, and cresting our first staircase we were literally breathless at the prospect of surviving on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, the “roof of the world.” Starting 7,400 feet above sea level (Beijing elev. 141 feet), it really was uphill for the remainder of our trip.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks we visited with a dozen students and their families, saw dozens of Buddhist temples and monasteries, sampled local foods and enjoyed panoramic vistas of terraced mountainsides and cloud shrouded peaks.

In Xining, students led us on expeditions that included the Ta'er Si Buddhist monastery where we tried to stay focused on the architecture and history, but found ourselves distracted by robed monks with sports shoes and cell phones and the somewhat disagreeable aroma of sculpted yak-butter that had passed its freshness date. We also climbed the city’s southern peak (nan shan) where we mingled with a parade of temple visitors in a smoky haze of burning incense on Ghost Day (zhong yuán jié) and concluded a long, hot trek with a rest beneath the trees beside a miniature model of the Shanghai riverfront.

We spent a morning enjoying the final day of an exhibit of Tibetan sacred art (thangka) with students who repeatedly urged us to take advantage of the close-out prices as the vendors were packing up. While our hosts scrutinized jewelry and handcrafts, we eyed the inexpensive camping gear and wondered if we could get it home and when we might use it. Pass, with continuing regret.

We visited parks and the city’s main square, where music that could be heard for miles was piped through walls of speakers each morning. We traversed the diverse city, mingling with several different people groups: Tibetans, pink-turbaned Tu, Hui (Muslim) in white caps and head scarves and Han peoples. We frequented a Tibetan Western-style café that served great coffee and snacks at unbelievably low prices and listened to ethnic music along a shady parkway.

Streets were nearly devoid of bicyclists, which our friends attributed to “laziness” or narrow streets. Motorbikes were plentiful and the garbage trucks trolled the streets playing familiar classical and American tunes calling residents to haul out their bags and buckets of refuse.

Periodically plagued by altitude sickness, general fatigue and the gurgley effect of strange food and water, we bought what little was available in English from the local bookstore and spent our down time reading Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald and O. Henry. Imagine our confusion.

We got our first real taste of the countryside visiting a student and his family in their small village nestled among terraced fields carved into the mountainsides outside Xining. The student’s wife and 4-year-old son welcomed us to their one-room, bathroom-less apartment on campus where we continued to pit our limited Mandarin against the provincial dialect, a challenge we faced throughout the journey. We ventured to the public latrine built on a ditch next to the playground. Think mountains of… and no running water. At the village restaurant we assured our host we loved all Chinese food then watched with dismay as the waitress delivered large platters of mutton, beef, pork and numerous local dishes. We spent an interesting hour on the village street waiting for enough passengers to fill a car for the 30-minute ride back to the bus.

We headed south to Gui de, a small mountain city about 3 hours by bus from Xining, along the Yellow River. Sitting in the very front seats of the bus, we had postcard views of herds of yak and flocks of sheep grazing on the grassy mountainsides and the small tents of nomadic herders.

We stayed a couple days with a former student and his family in their apartment, which was walking distance from the walled Old City, where we spent a rainy afternoon being toured by our student, who speaks very little English, and his 12-year-old son. A vendor’s 9-year-old daughter attached herself to Krista’s hand and joined us as we climbed through the mist to view temples and the surrounding mountains. Later, an extensive tour by car took us to the wide, flowing waters of the Yellow River and several other temples

We had a great time negotiating meaning with the family and eating delicious food at restaurants and prepared at home. We were nearly run down by a gang of young monks on motorbikes and, after touring numerous temples and mosques, came up against a padlocked gate at the entrance to the city’s Christian church. We learned the Chinese word for diarrhea (thanks to Krista) and discovered it was a frequent topic of conversations between our hosts and their “good friends.”

After several aborted attempts at getting to legendary Qinghai Lake (we’ve been hearing about it since we came to China) we opted against the standard tour and hopped a bus to a small town situated at the west end of the lake, about 200 km from Xining. For 5 hours the bus climbed up to nearly 12,000 feet as the rolling, terraced hills gave way to a huge sky and the sky-blue water of the lake. We alone disembarked at a small village wedged between the mountains and China’s largest lake. We took in the dusty strip of shops on either side of the road and the chaotic activity of scores of Tibetan herders in town on their motorbikes and quickly noticed that all signage was in characters, no pin yin and no English.

With a touch of anxiety we ambled up and down the road with little luck trying to find a place to stay as people vaguely waved us down the street. Thankfully (yay God!), a young man eventually offered to take us to the guesthouse, a newish strip of rooms at the foot of hills behind the police station.

We hiked to the lake, watched the shepherds herd their yaks and sheep through town and the surrounding countryside, watched clouds float over the mountains, visited some deserted Tibetan monuments and declined an offer to ride horses made by an old man who appeared in the middle of nowhere. Watching the shepherds and their sheep is a sobering reminder of what it really means to be a member of the flock. At the restaurant we couldn’t read the menu and the pictures were strictly for show so we ordered fried noodles and tomato and eggs for every meal after Preston managed to order a very expensive plate of yak meat (tough, but tasty) at the server’s recommendation.

Faith and perseverance paid off again in securing tickets back to Beijing, as we had to compete with students returning to university and the agencies that were reselling tickets at huge markup. We secured a very reasonable flight that required us to spend a night in Xian, where Krista for the last time staged her nearly nightly performance of throwing on the lights in the middle of the night and declaring that someone had to kill the mosquito that was biting and buzzing in her ear. Amen.

We arrived back in Beijing tired and weary and forever grateful to the wonderful hospitality of our friends and God’s protection and guidance throughout our journeys as well as vowing not to get on another bus for a very long time. Of course, Krista again made her regular trip to the clinic for several IV’s to kill the pests that had hitched a ride back in her stomach! However, it wasn’t long before the walls of our very small room began to shimmer and our minds drift and someone wondered aloud, “Where should we go next time?”

adventure starts here

2010-08-13T23:08:00.000-05:00

While most Chinese refer to July and August as summer holiday, we have become painfully aware that the Holiday means everyone is on the move. Having never tried to travel during the summer months, we quickly discovered that purchasing train tickets to visit former students is no small feat.

In addition to having to vie with more than a billion people anxious to get from here to there and back again, the difficulty of summer travel is further compounded by restrictions on how far in advance tickets may be purchased and the fact that travel agents are able to snatch up large blocks of tickets the moment they become available.

After numerous and unsuccessful visits to the neighborhood ticket window and a harrowing trip to the main train station, where thousands of anxious, hopeful travelers quickly turn nascent lines into incomprehensible scrums, we were nearly resigned to postponing our travel ambitions.

Turning to the internet, Spring’s superhuman diligence in hourly checks of travel sites unbelievably turned up airline tickets within our budget and of comparable cost to the train. This after countless times selecting “buy” and being informed there were no longer any tickets available at the advertised price.

We are scheduled to set out Sunday, August 22, for Qinghai province, where we are looking forward to reunions with dozens of students.

Through it all we gleaned valuable insights: The “Foreigners Ticket Window” is not always staffed by English speakers (apparently there are foreigners who speak other languages); and understanding some Chinese does not guarantee full certainty of what happened at the ticket window.

Back on campus, we have been blessed to work with another fantastic group of summer volunteers who are doing a top-notch job with the 550 students operating under three separate daily schedules. Their enthusiasm and perseverance has been an inspiration and provided many new ideas and insights into the program.

The students have also been great to work with and are doing an admirable job of pressing on despite the hot, humid weather and the fact that the group as a whole is weighted to the side of lower-confidence English speakers. It is not uncommon to stroll the campus in the relative cool of the evening and hear earnest salutations of “good morning!” Having insisted to the clerk at the ticket window that we want to take a train “last week,” we fully empathize.

The new volunteers who will stay for the year arrived mid-week and are busily training and trying to shake off their jet lag. We look forward to getting to know them and working together in the months ahead.

It has been a rewarding month as He has given us ample opportunities to practice patience and respond with kindness in all manner of challenging situations, answered prayer and done all the heavy lifting we could never accomplish on our own.

for all ages

2010-08-02T00:39:00.000-05:00

We have had a multi-generational month as we have shared crackers and juice boxes with primary school students, dined with an 80-year-old Chinese educator and worked with students and volunteers of all ages between.

The last weeks of July we were extremely busy juggling five days of an English camp for children and the shifting demands of helping the summer volunteers manage the 650 students training on our campus. We started early and ended late, enjoying the relative cool and calm at either end of the day as much as possible.

As volunteers at the English camp, put on by our international fellowship for the primary school age children of workers in the office building where services are held, we each assisted in two classes for th youngest students, ages 5-7. We spent the mornings leading songs, crafts, skits and games while teaching new words, encouraging the kids to use their English and practicing our Chinese as necessary. About 60 kids attended the camp.

After dispelling their initial reservations, the kids were sitting on our laps, participating in all the activities and answering questions in English. By the end of the week, many were chattering away and we were astonished to discover how much English some of the children could actually speak once they became more comfortable and confident. It was a great opportunity to serve and build relationships!

On the other end of the spectrum, we were also tapped several times to help out with visits and dinners for various officials who are interested in sending or helping recruit students to our program. While our function is strictly show ¬ smiling, polite Americans ¬ it is interesting to sit around and listen to a lot of discussions in Chinese and show off a few words of Chinese of our own.

Among our July visitors was the 80-year-old chairman of the Chinese Society of Education. Reportedly one of the most famous educators in the country, he has been involved in the government’s education efforts since the founding of modern China. We also helped give a campus tour to the deputy mayor of Yan’an City, Shaanxi province, who arrived with an entourage of aides in tow.

The summer volunteers have been fantastic and a joy to work with. Ranging in age from 11 to 77, there have been few dull moments as we are awed by their many talents and skills as well as doing our best to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to have their service be a great experience.

With summer half over, we are still optimistic that we will find time to visit with former students while they are on break. God will direct and we will follow!

summer perspective and inspiration

2010-07-18T06:20:00.001-05:00

It has been a rollicking couple of weeks as TIP is hosting 600-plus Chinese English teachers from all over the country as well as 20 new summer volunteer facilitators. Spirits and expectations are high all around even as sweltering temperatures are followed by torrential rains; and everyone is in a scramble to master a mash-up of schedules and work assignments. (Please pray for southern and western Chinese communities that are experiencing flooding and relocation due to dangerous reservoir levels. While we are not affected, some of our students have been.)

We have been doing our best to support and encourage the short-term facilitators and the leadership team while plugging holes and dousing fires as they spring up (from taking care of toilet paper needs to filling in during Music Clubs that found themselves without leaders). It has been a blessing to watch as our new friends shake off their hesitancy and uncertainty to take charge of classes and activities while infusing the session with fresh ideas and energy.

After a week of preparing for an English summer camp for middle school students in Shanxi province, the camp was postponed until August and now we’re not sure if we will go. TIC (this is China). We are happy to have had the chance to plan creatively together and plan a schedule that others can pick up and run with. Still on the table is a week of helping out at an English camp for the children (ages 6 to 10) of the Chinese people who work in the office building where our international fellowship meets. That’s where we’ll spend our mornings this coming week.

On the facilities front, we were saddened to watch as “playground improvements” on campus resulted in a half-dozen large trees being cut down. While our program does not use the area, everyone benefited from the only real shade in this place of concrete and asphalt.

Just outside the campus gate, we have discovered a “new” restaurant where the food is delicious and inexpensive. We have enjoyed sampling several new lamb, mushroom and tofu dishes, which have gone a long way toward ameliorating the culinary grind of the cafeteria.

We have also been having a fantastic time talking with our Chinese friends who manage and care for our dorm building. While it has always been a good opportunity for us to practice and learn Chinese, they are showing some interest for the first time in learning some English. Our “conversations” are incredibly mundane, circular, repetitive and confusing but always result in a lot of laughter as well as some learning.

Now that we have identified the mysterious smell that was slowly taking over our room – old, un-refrigerated eggs – we are truly ready for a new week and maybe some housekeeping too.

with love in China

2010-07-04T19:17:00.001-05:00

Despite the oppressive temperatures, think high-90s and blazing sun, we have been out and about enjoying being together again, again.

Preston touched down in Beijing just before midnight on July 2, where he found an excited but wilted Krista awaiting him in the sultry 80-plus degree terminal. She had spent a long day with former students visiting The World Park in Beijing, viewing more than 100 miniature world-famous buildings from 50 countries. It hadn’t taken long for deference to dictate that she needn’t share the fact that she’d actually been privileged to visit many of the actual places portrayed.

Even as we waited in line for a taxi home, students from the recently completed session were still sending her text messages asking what she was doing and wondering if Preston had arrived. It was one of those days.

Though it was after 2 a.m. by the time we made it back to campus, Preston could not help indulging in the mutton pizza Krista had so thoughtfully procured beforehand. The deliciously spicy mix of mutton, onions and peppers piled on chewy flat bread (no cheese or sauce) was too good to resist and helped mollify the realization that he may have been too generous in describing the size of our room to friends and family back in the states.

We slept in the next morning (and early afternoon) and then opted for the 30-minute walk to the regular grocery store to pick up a few supplies. Proving that he’d forgotten a lot of Chinese, Preston was easily able to reduce the friendly maintenance man to tears of mirth with his attempts at heart-felt salutations. It seemed dangerously hot as we made our way through the slow-motion crowds toward the supermarket, where we were disappointed to discover the store was “air conditioned” only in the loosest sense of the word.

We savored a cold drink (with ice!) from the Happy Lemon, our favorite Chinese drink stand, and could not resist the somewhat cooler temperature inside KFC, where we had ice cream sundaes. Sunday morning we went to church on our bikes, which Preston found alarmingly small and insubstantial compared to his dad’s exceptional two-wheeler, not to mention the somewhat more chaotic ebb and flow of traffic. We rounded out the day with a date at our favorite Cantonese restaurant and a visit to the air-conditioned paradise of a western coffee shop.

Monday morning finds us contemplating having to get up earlier than 6 a.m. if we are going to beat the heat on our daily walk through Yuan Ming Yuan Park. We plan to spend a good part of the day with our Chinese friend, Margaret, traipsing around Beijing getting our visas and other documents in order. We will spend the balance of the week preparing to lead a summer English camp for middle school students in Taiyuan, Shanxi province the last part of July

where in the world

2010-06-19T14:41:00.000-05:00

Does anybody really know what time it is? This is the recurring thought we ponder as we crest the mountain of our month apart.

Least we become too complacent in our separate realities – Krista at work in China and Preston at ease in the U.S. – changes in routines and schedules are keeping us on our toes as well as flat on our backs with exhaustion.

On the China front, Krista wrapped up a challenging seven-plus day stint of non-stop interaction with students. Leading an enthusiastic and serious-minded class of mostly older students primarily from Shanxi province with low confidence in their English has been a test of stamina as she has fielded an inordinate number of questions on vocabulary and pronunciation. Modifications in the program schedule have put her in the classroom without a break for an uncommonly long stretch, pitting special English against limited vocabulary.

Amid their struggles in an English-only environment, students also found themselves a long way from home during the celebration of the Dragon Boat Festival. The festival commemorates an ancient government minister and poet revered by the people whose battle against corruption resulted in his exile. After he drowned himself in a river, the fishermen raced out to in their boats to prevent fish from feeding on his body. While students did enjoy eating traditional zongzi (rice dumplings wrapped in corn leaves) they missed their customary family celebrations.

On the other side of the world, Preston is readjusting to life at the retired pace of his folk’s house after several days with his brother’s family in California. While visiting Santa Monica, Preston enjoyed hanging out with his brother and his wife and playing with their two young girls. In addition to the amorphous quality of “kid time” and another change in time zone, there was backyard fort construction, visits to his brother’s music studio, the girls’ schools and the beach. Knowing if Beijing is 13 or 15 hours ahead only really matters when someone is asleep!

Back in Wisconsin, Preston and his mother are toughing it out together as Dad is away at his college reunion. Despite (owing to?) the absence of common-sense leadership, they did manage to brave a severe thunderstorm for a yummy Friday night fish fry. Preston was only mildly taken aback when his 72-year-old mother offered to read the small print on the credit slip after he forgot his reading classes. Armed with credit card and automobile, they have determined the world is their buffet and are weighing their options carefully.

As we to count the days to our much-anticipate reunion in China at the end of month, we are extremely thankful for the blessings of family and friends who offer so much encouragement, support and fun as we make the most of the opportunities before us.

tale of two continents

2010-06-05T07:23:00.001-05:00

The first week of June finds us again traveling different roads, on different continents and in time zones 13 hours apart. No sooner had we wrapped up the May session and bid a sad but hopeful “see you later” to our class, than Preston was trying to get his bearings in Wisconsin and Krista was off to the coastal city of Qingdao on the Shandong peninsula.

Hello, goodbye is the order of the day as many of our colleagues for the past year have concluded their service work in China and returned to the U.S. It is a sad and exciting time as we contemplate their absence from our daily lives and eagerly await reports of their next season. Summer volunteers are starting to arrive, bringing with them the happy chaos of new faces and the return of old friends.

Preston is enjoying his English-only environment while visiting with family near Milwaukee and the opportunity to sample all the creature comforts he’d been dreaming of since his last visit to the States one year ago. Drinking water straight from the tap, tossing toilet paper straight into the bowl and having the kitchen cleaned daily (thanks Papa) currently rank as luxuries.

With the aide of his dad’s bike, Preston is also enjoying the cool weather, clean air and abundant greenery. While traffic congestion and the unpredictability of motorists are mild compared to the Beijing scene, vehicles in the U.S. are way bigger and drive way faster. Less threatening, however, than the prospect of returning from the country that actually celebrates National Donut Day (first Friday in June) twice the man he currently is.

Meanwhile, Krista and a friend are off to beaches on the Yellow Sea to escape the Beijing heat and take full advantage of having the program start date pushed back a couple of days in order to accommodate more students. The well-known resort area is only 5-6 hours by train from Beijing and woman she is traveling with will head back to the states at the end of the month.

While it has only been a month since our situations were reversed, Krista in the U.S and Preston in China, we are grateful for the opportunities for adventure and refreshment with family and friends and look forward to sharing our many experiences when we reunite in July.

cuckoo 4 summer

2010-05-22T22:01:00.000-05:00

The cuckoo birds have returned. Really. Last year at this time our rural Changping campus was suddenly filled with the all-day and night sounds of the insistent, verging on annoying, rise-and-fall calls of the cuckoos as they moved stealthily among the treetops, seldom seen. Now in the urban environment of metro Beijing, the sporadic, disembodied calls of the migratory visitors are wistful reminders of a China we used to know.

Even in the sanctuary of nearby Yuan Ming Yuan Park, the cuckoos seem few in number and their calls alien against the backdrop of traffic noise and enthusiastic tourists. While we haven’t laid eyes on any of the elusive creatures yet, we are excited by their presence, the occasion to reminisce and the opportunity to have the curious join us as we gawk at the treetops.

Biking home from the grocery store one evening this week, we decided to stop at a small, familiar shop close to campus to pick up a couple of weighty items we didn’t want to carry very far. When we arrived, we were astounded to see dozens of people milling about watching television at full volume on a large-screen TV and gathered around various food vendors encamped on the pavement in front of the store.

After the initial confusion and reassurance that we were in the right place, we recalled last summer that it took us several weeks to discover the small store because we always assumed it was a restaurant. In the evening, both sides of the street in front of campus are beginning to look more and more like a block party – obvious signs of summer fun.

Donned only in sundresses, shorts and sandals, we now find ourselves with more time and motivation to cook, bike and enjoy the outdoors. Our first trip this week? We headed off in search of nearby produce. Less than enthusiastic about crossing the pedestrian bridge and ambling several blocks to our usual store, we took a chance on the long-neglected alley just around the corner. There we “discovered” several produce stalls that you can see again, now that the doors are open and heavy padding no longer blocks the views as it hangs on the windows to retain the heat. We came home with all the vegetables and fruit we needed for a burrito a la Cali-Mex.

The return of the evasive cuckoos, public TV on warm festival streets and “discovering” useful places once hidden by winter’s cold, these are sunny reminders of summer in Beijing.

today is here

2010-05-08T10:32:00.001-05:00

The trick, as always, is finding contentment in the moment and remaining focused on the tasks and agenda at hand. As we are so often moving from one discombobulating circumstance toward the promise of another, it is all too easy to get caught up in what “should have” and what “might be.”

Even as we have close to months of service left in our current “year” in China, the list of potential issues surrounding the year ahead is growing by the day. Visas, insurance, finances, travel and working arrangements all add to the growing background noise of the future.

A colleague who came to the organization at the same time as we did returned with his wife to America this week to start a new job and prepare for the arrival of their first child. We will miss them. Many of our other colleagues are also preparing to return to the states in the next couple of months. The program administration will also see significant changes in the months ahead.

Even as Krista wraps up her month-plus time in the U.S. and returns to China, Preston is looking ahead to June when he will be off visiting his family and friends in Wisconsin and California. Another month of living on different continents promises to be challenging, to say the least.

While there is uncertainty to spare, there are also so many tangible things to be thankful for today.

In Beijing, it is a beautiful spring day as a new group of students arrive to repopulate the campus and kick-off a new session. As usual, the new arrivals are a bundle of anxiety and anticipation as they prepare for an English-only environment, meeting hundreds of new people and being away from their family and friends. It never ceases to amaze what a big smile and a few words of encouragement (spoken slowly!) can accomplish. After all, we face a similar challenge.

We are excited once again to be working together with a class of students with low confidence in their English abilities. Once Krista returns and navigates quarantine, change of time zone and re-acclimates herself to a diet of rice and noodles, we will enjoy being TOGETHER for a few days.

Krista has two days left in her visit to Crookston to enjoy speaking at church, visiting friends and former work colleagues, and attending the graduation ceremony the U of M. While everyone has gone out of their way to make her visit fun and encouraging, our good friend Kevin is due extra thanks for sharing his home, his Internet connection and his special brand of hospitality. This marks the third time he has opened his home to us.

With old friends and family on hand and hundreds of new friends to meet, we are truly in the midst of the abundance that God promises and we trust that He will handle the future as long as we do our part each day as it comes.

Shifting Gears

2010-04-23T20:05:00.005-05:00

In an abrupt about face, we seemingly climbed out of the back seat of a car packed with Chinese teachers careening around the Chinese outback and went our separate ways. In the space of a couple of days, we were transformed from conjoined travelers enjoying the food, sights and hospitality of former students in Yunnan Province (photos) to denizens of different continents.
We leisurely made out way home to Beijing late on a Friday and by Tuesday the 13th Krista was on a plane to California while Preston eased back into the daily work mode.

This session, Preston is mainly focused on project work that requires a lot of reading, writing and editing. We are writing a book, at the invitation of Peking University, on how to teach oral English the TIP way. It’s a big project with a looming deadline. :0 Preston still gets a fair share of student interaction in teaching Music Club, helping out in other people’s classes and attending daily mealtimes. His other focus is trying to stay abreast of time zones and which state Krista is in, sleeping or awake, or West Coast, East Coast or Midwest.

Krista had barely touched down in the Golden State before she was airborne again and off to the East Coast with her mother to attend the wedding of former colleagues Peter and Laura. The nuptials were a blessing and it is a great joy to see our good friends together as husband and wife (photos).

It was an exciting day for Krista as she was honored to participate in the ceremony, offer a toast at the reception, meet Peter and Laura’s families, catch-up with some former colleagues and squeeze in some pool time with Peter’s little sisters. Afterward, she promptly caught another cold. :(

Then it was back to California where Krista is making several presentations at our supporting churches in Yuba City and Monterey before jetting off to Minnesota to visit our church in Crookston and attend the graduation of student friends at the University of Minnesota.

In her spare time, Krista is trying to wrap-up the TIP book pieces she’s been charged with and visit as many supporters as possible in between stops. Meanwhile, Preston is trying to find comfort in sole dominion of the dorm room and casting about for ideas on how to spend the week-plus break ahead without his best friend. Wherever she is.

Yunnan and Us

2010-04-10T06:26:00.000-05:00

We were thrilled and blessed to reconnect with more than 20 former TIP students during a trip in early April to Yunnan in southwest China. It was an eye-opening experience to see some of their schools, the conditions of their living and working environments; and it was fun to have more time to get to know them better. We had not seen some of them for more than a year so it was especially rewarding to hear about their year after TIP.

It was an adventure from the beginning as students picked us up at bus stations and train stations, ferried us around villages and treated us like VIPs. We were blessed to meet our students’ English pupils during our trip and lead eight classes – total we had about 700 students! Classes ranged from 7th to 11th grade and they were all excited to try out their oral English with us. It was encouraging for us all.

We enjoyed time together in the various locales: singing karaoke-style at local KTV’s (a favorite Chinese pastime), eating spicy Yunnan dishes and sipping tea, marveling at the amazing caves, waterfalls and stone “forests” and visiting different schools. It was awe-inspiring to experience their lifestyle, if only for a few days. For example, we spent many, many hours getting to schools, sites and restaurants. Transportation is not convenient outside of a city proper, so we were stuck in street fairs, twice, for hours. One time we had to abandon our vehicle and walk to another vehicle waiting on the other side of the traffic jam of 1 car, 3 big trucks, the surrounding market vendors and hundreds of shoppers smashed into the narrow roadway.

Bathrooms consisted of squat toilets (mostly without doors) at homes, schools and around town. One of the village schools only had a public latrine and one restaurant “bathroom” required us to balance on 6-inch logs. Needless to say, many of our students come from very poor areas and having seen it first-hand, we have a much better appreciation for their countryside life skills.

Photos will be posted as soon as possible!

come snow, sand or rain

2010-03-28T02:35:00.000-05:00

The weather outside was frightful but the students were so delightful… okay, so it’s corny but true. This session we endured some of the most bizarre weather in our entire lives all within the confines of our campus walls. But the session was one of the most rewarding – as we laughed and struggled together with our class and formed strong friendships.

Cold still: There was ANOTHER snowstorm March 14, which made us a bit crazy as the heat was supposed to be shut off on March 15 and Krista was still on antibiotics. Fortunately, the government extended heating until the end of the month.

While it was very cold outside, our hearts’ were very warm as we were blessed with an amazingly generous class who continue to show so much concern and love for Krista’s health and wellbeing that we were overwhelmed. This was the first class that wanted to wash OUR lunch bowls almost everyday – and it was so touching to have them go out of their way to take care of us many times.

Mission to Mars: On March 20, we woke up to a yellow sky and fierce wind. It turned out to be one of the worst sandstorms in the last four years. Preston had already gone for his morning walk before checking the online news that cautioned against venturing out. Oh well. Sand replaced the snow, literally. Where the playground had piles of snow now stood piles of sand. It was a peculiar sight.

Our students rolled with all of the adventures, as they enjoyed the snow and weathered the sandstorm. This last week we were treated to wonderful weather (with only a spattering of evening rain) and got to enjoy playing outside – which led to Preston falling flat (front-side down) and spraining his wrist. This resulted in our class focusing all of their attention on making Preston better – and more nutritious provisions and wise advice. We are grateful that Preston is on his way to a full recovery and that our students didn’t mind having the otherly-abled facilitators.

So it was a session of much kindness along with healing, and we were given just the students that we needed to make it through relaxed and still refreshed. They led excellent lessons and gave heart-felt speeches. We were so proud and excited about their experiences. One teacher said it was the best, most interesting training that they had ever attended in their life. Another said she would help her family bury their “I can’ts” and focus on what they could do. Another said that our love and kindness has so influenced her attitude and view on life that her friends back home would know she was a changed person when she arrived home.

a barrelful of tomatoes

2010-03-13T06:02:00.000-06:00

After an extended break from teaching – all of February – we are excited to be back in the classroom and sharing the duties of working with a lively group of 32 students.

While the majority of the class is made up of students with lower confidence in their English speaking abilities, it has not dampened their enthusiasm for speaking and giving our listening skills a good workout. Our recent experience in Mandarin TIP has renewed our appreciation of the challenges they are facing.

This session there are more than 300 students on campus from all over China including Guizhou, Shaanxi, Sichuan and Gansu and Shandong provinces.

We are also excited that Krista is bouncing back from a bout of walking pneumonia that has had her sidelined off and on for the past month. After hitting the local Chinese hospital for IV transfusions of strong antibiotics eight straight days, her latest x-ray shows her lungs are much improved. Continued rest is prescribed (as well as more antibiotics in pill form this time), which may be a bit easier now that she is not investing up to four hours a day in hospital treatment and travel. (Chinese medicine for the most part is delivered via IV rather than pills.)

While we would have chosen different circumstances, the experience did provide Krista an excellent opportunity to hangout with some of our Chinese staff – who were gracious escorts when understanding Chinese was a must – as well as practice her Chinese speaking and listening skills while making a couple of new Chinese friends (who now have her phone number, and only speak Chinese!!).

We have received many messages from former students encouraging Krista to rest. One student also paid a personal visit bringing treats and prayer support. Our current students have strong opinions about how she should work to regain and maintain her health and have plied us with melons, apples, bananas, tomatoes
and suggestions for what she should and should not drink. We are still not sure where the students – who must remain on campus – got their hands on a flat of cherry tomatoes or how we will ever eat so many. But we are working at it and it is wonderful to eat as much fruit as we want whenever we want.

The week ended on a high note as the weather finally showed a hint of spring, allowing us to scrub the winter grime off our bikes and pedal to the local coffee shop. It may not be taxing on the lungs, but Beijing traffic can take a toll on the heart.

weddings and more

2010-03-03T03:31:00.002-06:00

We wrapped up our Chinese TIP with successful 10-minute speeches in our own kind of “flawless” Chinese. Can you believe it? Then we took off right after closing ceremony for a wedding near the coast.

Chinese TIP: During the last six days of the program our facilitators spoke Chinese-only and we had a great time communicating with them through guessing, rephrasing and generally just spitting words out. It was a riot sometimes.

We spoke Chinese-only for an entire day in our room too and did pretty well with the conversations that took place – granted there was much more quiet time than usual. ☺
Our Chinese is actually fun to use now and while often it gets us into very long, incomprehensible conversations, we usual come out on the other end with a feeling of accomplishment.

Jessie’s wedding: We were honored to attend the countryside wedding of our Chinese friend and colleague, whose hometown is just outside of the warmer coastal city of Hangzhou, a national tourist destination. Five of our TIP teammates also joined us.

Jessie’s cousin picked us up at the airport and ferried us to a nearby hotel where we were put up for three nights. We spent an entire day at her childhood home hanging out with her relatives on Wednesday, Feb. 24, enjoying fireworks, taking photos, speaking Chinese and special English and getting tours of the area while dining on seafood and snacks in between. Her parents hired a chef and catering staff for the event and there were 12 tables full of relatives who were accommodated at places spread throughout houses and garages in the neighborhood.

The next morning we arrived at her home for the official wedding ceremony. There was an altar, offerings, incense, bowing, an exchange of rings and then more fireworks. After we joined a walking parade, with even more fireworks, as the groom, Kinson, carried his bride-to-be down the block to an awaiting car.

We were all chauffeured in black luxury vehicles to his parental homestead where we met his relatives and again feasted on seafood (more than most of our group could graciously handle). We snacked all-day long, enjoyed more photo taking and visiting with cousins and former TIP students. As is custom, Jessie’s father joined the activities and celebrated with the new in-laws. However, her mother would be welcomed the next day.

Jessie changed clothes three times on Thursday – from bridal gown, to evening gown and finally the traditional Chinese cheongsam. The two had bridal rooms in both homes and have their own rented apartment in Hangzhou, about an hour drive.

It was a joyous time to celebrate with our friend, who we’ve worked with for nearly two years, and we were blessed to have been invited because… “You are a very good example for me and Kinson.”

Photos online: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets

return of Spring Festival

2010-02-20T02:59:00.001-06:00

We welcomed Spring Festival in with another million firework bangs this year and again found ourselves sicker than dogs.

Krista again spent Chinese New Year’s Eve in bed all day with a major headache and fever – praying it away. Preston, who was recovering from his weeklong bout of sickness, enjoyed walks around the campus as he breathed in firework fumes and experienced the first warm day in a long time – a prelude to spring? February 13 was our first day without our day-long Chinese classes, so it’s no wonder we were exhausted and ready for a break.

Despite being under the weather, we got up Sunday morning to head out with our student’s family to enjoy New Year’s Day festivities Chinese style. Nell, her husband and 14-year-old son, David, picked us up in their car at 9 a.m. and ferried us over to the largest Spring Festival Temple Fair in the city.

Unfortunately, the weather was windy and frigid. But we enjoyed the bilingual conversation, the myriad of goodies and festival wares out for inspection and the people watching. For warmth we found an inside display of photos on National Day activities as well as a flower show and Chinese game center. Preston learned a traditional Chinese game and Krista found a seat and soaked up the warmth.

The day’s plans called for a daylong outing, yet Krista’s waning fortitude called for an afternoon rest before the jiao zi (dumpling) party for dinner. Nell lives in a two-bedroom flat in the same complex as her parents and sister. She put us up in the master bedroom (way better than our own digs) and settled us in.

For New Year’s Day dinner, we made jiao zi with the entire family, and being our third attempt, we finally have got the hang of it. It was so much fun enjoying the holiday together, especially with our Chinese friends, as we had previously missed our traditional American holidays.

Nell and her family were a perfect fit for our stamina and demeanor. We enjoyed looking at her son’s photos of his recent trip to Yunnan and the video of his participation in the National Day festivities (he was one of the flowers in Tiananmen Square – requiring three months of practice and 10 hours of work on the day of). Preston enjoyed helping Tiffany, her niece, learn a new song on the guitar and we both had fun teaching everyone the Chicken Dance and YMCA.

The day was rounded off by our very own personal fireworks show – which required a lot of running and laughing and insisting that we didn’t want to light any ourselves.

Day two saw us out for a one-hour walk around the neighborhood, hot pot for lunch and an afternoon at Chaoyang Park International Carnival. In the evening, we enjoyed learning how to make noodles (mian tiao) and watching the National Day video in English.

Now this side of the main Spring Festival celebration, the fireworks continue on and we are enjoying a few days of the Chinese-only environment at TIP. PTL our Chinese is pretty good. Krista has spent another three days in bed nursing a sore throat and nagging cough. Our Chinese speech is due on Monday and we are ready. We head to Hangzhou (near Shanghai) this week for a wedding celebration and bit of rest before the next session gets underway on March 7.

lots of photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets/

more Chinese, please

2010-02-07T01:05:00.001-06:00

Tian tian kuai le! (happy everyday). So our mission this month? Practice Chinese for 20 days!!!

Since our "students" are enjoying their Chinese New Year holidays, we had to find other things to occupy our days. Our leaders created a Chinese version of TIP which means 12 hours of Chinese study daily (including 1 hour for rest) and then writing in pinyin in a journal each night and reviewing at least 25 new words. Weekends are 8 hours a day. We give a 10-minute speech on the last day. :0)

We are building up to the "total immersion part" (right now we are in a bilingual environment). After 10 days or so, our trainers will stop speaking English and then we will have 3 or 4 days of Chinese only. This phasing in of "Chinese only" is required as we don't speak much Chinese and we understand even less. So after 1 day for example, we wrote down more than 150 new words.

Our day includes reviewing a Bible verse and TIP propaganda (encouraging "you can do it" phrases) mixed in with a lot of prayer. We have 2 hours of class and 1 hour of diction. Mostly, our Chinese trainers are baffled by our diction, so it seems like the entire day is filled with diction practice (we are tone deaf). Fortunately, our trainers are young, energetic and patient.

For lunch, we are encouraged to eat with the team and practice our dialogues of the day and then we have a rest until 2 p.m. when we have game time! Sometimes we play UNO and sometimes we identify things in a room with the few adjectives we know and have our friends try to guess what we have described. What's red, short and small? Who really knows right?

Then we have listening class, song class, club (special topics), dinner and language lab (more diction and repetition). Thankfully, we are in a great place to take advantage of the opportunity because our vocabulary is pretty good as we have been studying over the past year on our own.

So we are really excited to get to speak a ton of Chinese and use the words that we know often (think, "Hi, my name is... how are you? where do you come from? what's your job? what are you doing?"). The hard part is we can't write or read and have little hope of doing so in the next decade - but that's why we pray. :)

After three days, we are excited about all the potential (but we hope that Monday morning can wait for a few more days - three-day weekends, please). Our goal is to participate as much as possible, enjoy our Spring Festival in China (we'll be staying with a student for a few days!!) and follow God's leading for the month ahead.

good busy

2010-01-23T07:46:00.001-06:00

The January session is flying by so fast. Two weeks have already gone and speeches are this week!

This session we drew a class of very confident speakers. Most of them are from Beijing and Liaoning – so they are a more sophisticated, demanding lot. Krista is leading the class and Preston is doing all the background work as well as managing our household affairs. Still it seems that our days are very full.

With a class of 38 students, who never stop talking or asking lengthy questions, it’s very comforting to have two facilitators on hand, especially for meal times and in creating and prepping for team activities.

It is back to the usual female-to-male ratio, in that there are only five men in our class. Two of the students are very young (one in university and the other in senior school) and the rest are teachers. The range of ages is good – there is a balance between younger, single teachers as well older married people. They have become a crazy, energetic family under Spring’s (aka Krista) tutelage and all of them are interested in having their husbands and boyfriends learn from Pres about being a kind, loving and gracious husband. :)

We are blessed in our class size as some of our teammates have up to 46 students, who supposedly were the more confident speakers. Yet, others have commented on the language skills of our Class F, and we are thankful (PTL) for the work that God is doing as our students are excited to participate and be active everyday.

So we continue to be healthy, despite eating daily at the cafeteria, and we are grateful! We are also excited that we were blessed to have Sundays off this month, giving us time to get more connected with the Beijing International Christian Fellowship (BICF) through their “get to know us” classes. Along with our monthly reading time with children at the local library, we are also joining the BICF set-up team and being trained to serve in other ways as well. God is good.
We are grateful that God continues to provide us with tons of opportunities to shine His light and to support our teammates in their times of need.

What’s next? This week five colleagues head to Shanxi to lead a 10-day children’s camp. In February, we will attend a 20-day Chinese TIP (pray that we learn a lot and can persevere) and also enjoy a few days of break for the Chinese New Year celebration. Soon the explosions that define Spring Festival will begin!

a new year begins

2010-01-16T00:19:00.002-06:00

The new session begins with an audible groan as everyone shifts from idle to go.

Hundreds of students appear and wander in loud, disoriented gangs around the once-deserted campus with eyes filled with excitement and trepidation as they acclimate themselves to their new English-only home away from family and friends. We stifle our impulse to practice hard-earned Chinese.

The lightness with which we sprung from bed before dawn during the break is replaced with concrete. We repeatedly smack the snooze button and begin the day with an eye on the naptime that probably will not arrive.

We are co-teaching a class of 38 students, most of whom are teachers from an affluent school district in Beijing. Their English is challenging us to discard our original plans and rethink our approach, activities and lessons.

The remains of last session that we planned to deal with during the break have not disappeared. Changes in our schedule that seemed so propitious are now confusing and giving birth to new challenges.

Our good friends and colleagues, Peter and Laura, are leaving this week to begin their new lives together in the U.S. and put the finishing touches on their April wedding plans. We are so sad and excited to see them go as the four of us joined the program at the same time. It is impossible to imagine being here without them and impossible to overstate the blessing they have been to our experience.

We continue to be extremely thankful for Yuan Ming Yuan Park, where we walk daily. It is a peaceful expanse of snow, wind, cold and very few people. We were able to buy an annual entrance pass at the beginning of the month (not as easy as it may sound) so we are good to go for the whole year!

We are happy and grateful that our room is warm; that we have so many new friends to get to know and that we are not sick (mostly). The new year is off to a great start and we still have Chinese New Year to look forward to! Life is good.

Class G photos from Preston's December class are now posted online http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets

back in Beijing

2010-01-05T21:40:00.001-06:00

We left the Beijing Airport at the close of 2009 and our taxi dropped us off at our dorm on the other side of town in the first minutes of 2010. It was great to start the new year together after a hiatus of better than 30 days.

We spent the first day of the new year attempting to find room for the treasures Krista brought back with her from America, eating the delicious food and snacks she’d lugged halfway around the world and reacclimating ourselves to married life in the bachelor-size pad. We laughed a lot as the piles of “things we’ll find a place for later” quickly covered the floor, the bed and every available flat space in the room. Many of last year’s essentials unceremoniously found themselves among the community boxes of “bu yao” (don’t want) to make room for more.

While Spring (aka Krista) had come to Beijing, the weather itself took a decidedly unspring-like turn as we woke Sunday morning to a full-fledged snowstorm. By the time snow stopped falling late in the evening, several inched had accumulated. We enjoyed taking the bus to church as Beijingers wrestled with the excitement of fresh snow, the annoyance of everything being cold and wet and the general slow-motion feeling of being underwater.

The lobby at the building where we attend international services was still dark when we arrived, and we found that we were among the few who’d been able to make it on time.

By Monday, temperatures had settled in the single digits and a stiff wind had come up. We decided on Sizzler in honor of Preston’s birthday. There were few buses and few people as we set out just after noon. We later learned that most schools had been closed and that buses were under staffed and many taxi drivers were refusing to navigate the still-snowy conditions.

Walking several blocks down the usually busy thoroughfare in front of campus, we marveled at the amount of snow still on the road and the number of cars that seemed to spontaneously become stranded. We enjoyed a fabulous meal followed by a couple of hours at the coffee shop reading, texting students and people watching.

The subway was gloriously empty on the way home, meaning we got seats almost the whole way. Waiting at the bus stop to complete the last leg of our journey, we realized we’d actually become part of the transportation nightmare we had heard about earlier. Each of the unusually few buses that came was crammed to overflowing with desperate commuters. We laughed as people were physically pushed onto buses so the door could close, barely, with them inside. We walked several blocks in the biting wind and finally managed to get on a bus to our small yet blessedly warm, dry and well-stocked room.

Christmas cheer

2009-12-23T12:36:00.001-06:00

It’s already Christmas Eve morning in Beijing and TIP continues in its traditional form here in week three. Teaching practicums have gone well for this Class G and students will give their long-awaited speeches Thursday so they can focus on Friday’s Christmas celebrations.

Students are excited about Christmas with us and we are happy to have the opportunity to carry on activities so that general homesickness does not overtake our thoughts. (We will hold a non-working team Christmas on December 27 after the session).

Christmas is not a holiday in China and family togetherness and gifting festivities center around their Spring Festival in February instead. So our students are enthusiastic about finding out more about our holiday events.

So tonight we will carol in the dorms and sing our favorite hymns and praise songs! Then on Friday students will join us for caroling around the campus, as they learn Christmas songs along the way. A skit by the facilitators will tell the Christmas story and then students will have the opportunity to try their hand at creating a role-play and acting out “What is Christmas?” in their own English version.

Thankfully Preston’s co-trainer Doug is recovering well and is back on the job helping make this week a more restful one. Preston is fighting a bug, but as it has been a smooth week, he is looking forward to hanging out with his class for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. And he is especially happy that Krista will return in less than a week.

As for Krista’s escapades in America… she had been fortunate to talk with, see and celebrate with many, many friends and family members. Her totally cool and gracious parents have taken care of her the entire time – which makes us especially blessed! And she celebrated Christmas on Monday with the Lemos clan, the first time everyone, sans Preston, has been together since 2005. Now she is ready to go home.

We wish you a very Merry Christmas! And we are more thankful each day for how Christ has changed our lives.

Photos of Preston’s class and Christmas with the Lemos family are online:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets

colder still

2009-12-15T12:38:00.002-06:00

It’s getting colder in Beijing the deeper we go into the winter season. Windchill is taking us into the negative numbers this week and because our transportation options leave us out in the elements, it always seems colder still. For that reason, our quarters, no matter how small, are a comforting option.

The students in Preston’s class G this session mostly come from Yunnan province where it is still in the high 50s and low 60s. So it is taking time for them to acclimate to Beijing weather. Fortunately we have extra clothes on hand in case they didn’t bring along quite enough (which is often the case).

We have found that the people from Yunnan, home to Spring City, are vibrant, outspoken and outgoing. They always enjoy a good time and a good laugh too. It is the first time our class has been dominated by this province and it is making for a fun-filled time and the session is flying by.

The class is also blessed with a couple of students who are confident English speakers who have a lot of vocabulary. They volunteered to be the leaders, the class monitor and assistant monitor, and are helping the other students along – those who need more encouragement and repetition.

Unfortunately winter also has brought colds, flues and general ills along with the colder weather. Preston’s training partner Doug has been sick for several days already and therefore out of commission for a while. Others on the team are struggling to keep moving forward and get enough rest. We are praying that the bouts are short lived and we are thankful to have a larger team this year, so we have plenty of substitutes.

This week Preston is also leading Music Club, where students dance, sing and talk about dancing and singing. During warmer weather, we can go outside and create a raucous. During winter, however, we have to make due inside. This session Preston was assigned to his classroom, the smallest in the building, and had to be creative in order to make room for dancing and singing – so they moved all the desks out and voilà there was room for much merriment indoors!

Moving along

2009-12-10T14:38:00.002-06:00

December is moving along swimmingly… interviews were interesting and more than 300 students, fewer than expected, are now on our cold campus for the duration. They placed in, speaking wise, a bit higher than last session, so it could be a wild ride even with a lesser-confident class. Preston is co-training with Doug this session, a 67-year-old teammate who has the energy of a 20-year-old and likes to sing and act. Class is at 9:30 a.m. this term.

It’s a unique class as more than half is composed of men (15 of 29!!!) – a first for us. Traditionally, we have 3 or 4 men at the most. So it’s a majority male class with two male facilitators; now the decision, “What to do for the Talent Show?”

It’s been a fun and busy first week at TIP thus far with Preston following the normal routine as well as squeezing in a few daily walks around Yuan Ming Yuan alone or with teammates and connecting with Krista via phone each night (her day). The TIP group is also finalizing plans for what lessons to do on Christmas Day, since the session runs through the 26th.

God has been using our time apart in very unique and rewarding ways. We are grateful for His goodness and the opportunities He gives us along the way.

Krista continues to watch her days overflow with times of service, sharing and conversation. A weekend trip to Santa Rosa was spent catching up with her best friend Jana. It was lunching, enjoying a movie or two and sharing coffee; it’s been years since there’s been the time to just sit and listen to each other face to face for that long.

Then there was housecleaning and decorating for Christmas – the first time in many, many years as well. Krista talked her folks into an early tree purchase and enjoyed the family event of making her childhood home ready for the celebration season. She has also been blessed with the time to join her mom on a weekly women’s Bible study on David and grace. So very cool.

We end the week with Krista at her Aunt Joyce’s house in Durham for a few days where she also gets to check in with her brother and his six kids (No. 6, a baby girl Hadley was born on Dec. 5). On Saturday there’s the Singing Christmas Tree performance with the seniors from church (and she gets to tag along). Preston is ending day three of English only and gearing up for a Sunday-morning shift to encourage the students to be “their own best teacher” before tackling week two.

dichotomy

2009-12-03T21:08:00.005-06:00

China. America. The contrast is even more evident as we spend our first week on opposite sides of the globe.

We are on break at TIP and Preston and colleagues are soaking up the quiet time this week before the session starts on Dec. 7. With the Christmas season in full force, Krista is spending a lot of time with her retired parents and enjoying going to women’s Bible studies, luncheons and family get-togethers (okay – there is a lot of shopping and coffees in there too). Our lives look very different for the time being.

Museum or mall? Preston wakes up and does the laundry and dishes before talking himself into a trip to the museum. Traveling requires bike or bus and subway and temps still hover in the low 30s and upper 20s all day – so it’s not a convenient trip. Krista on the other hand gets in a car and heads to the mall (indoor, outdoor, strip or other). There is no shortage of places or opportunities to buy and spend. Preston is not so impressed with the exhibit at the museum but he does find a book at the international bookstore. Krista buys three pairs of jeans, a sweater, a shirt, some slippers, a belt and provisions (that can’t be all).

Books or TV? Preston contemplates another trip out of the house or the opportunity to sit back and relax in the room and devour his new book. After a walk around Yuan Ming Yuan park, he decides to tackle the book and then head out later in the day. Krista uses the DVR feature on the TV to watch crime shows, holiday movies and a not-so-holiday movie. In order to avoid watching too much TV, she makes luncheon dates with her brothers and heads out to visit with her niece and four nephews.

Beijing or California weather? Beijing saw its first snowfall on Nov. 1. Temps dropped so low in the north that the government turned on the public heat 15 days early. All the leaves fell off the trees and the anticipated fall color season was cut short. On Nov. 24 in San Francisco, the fall colors were still spectacular. Actually the drive up to Live Oak presented the most beautiful scenery Krista has seen in her life. Sweaters were optional and sunglasses required. In fact, she hasn’t worn a jacket the entire week. :)

bittersweet November

2009-11-25T13:01:00.007-06:00

The session has flown by in a whirl of getting to know a new class, recording English dialogues, squeezing in volunteer opportunities here and there and finalizing plans for Krista to spend the holidays in the states.

Class G has been a true blessing of fun, energetic students from Yunnan, Qinghai, Shanxi and Beijing. As Krista’s plane ticket to California was November 24, she had to leave just before the session ended. So we were able to team up to teach a class together for the first time. We taught 27 lesser-confident students who had a lot of enthusiasm – even if they were terrified, or even unable, to speak for the first few days. ☺

Krista led the class for the most part and Preston took the opportunity to practice his Chinese, ride his bike and relax a bit before he took the reigns this third week. It was the first lesser-confident class that Krista had led, yet, Class G became known as "the" confident, excited ones – even if they weren’t able to volunteer to answer questions during large group time. We spent a lot of time practicing answers to “How are you?” – responses other than, “I’m fine, thank you.” It was rewarding to hear, “I’m excited,” “I’m happy today” or “I miss my family” – even within the first few days.

We had unique opportunities outside of our normal training schedule to connect with friends and help record English dialogues for a company. It was monotonous work (and long hours), but interesting none-the-less. Krista’s experience in TV and radio in the states made her a sought after candidate even when she only intended to “help out a friend” by going the first time. She’s since been able to pass along the business relationship to another teammate. PTL

We also enjoyed having lunch with friends at church, checking out books from the library, practicing English with neighborhood children and celebrating Laura and Peter’s engagement at a fabulous Thai restaurant.

Then we said “see you soon” to each other amidst a torrent of Krista’s tears, as she departed for California to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with her family. Tears are contagious and Class G – good, grateful and great – was quite emotionally depressed Tuesday morning as they raised their voices in unison “we miss you and love you forever” and waved goodbye. Yet they are in good hands with Pres who is encouraging them to complete their teaching practicums for the week and deliver their speech on Friday.

So for the next month, Preston is in China and Krista is in America. We’ll let you know how it goes. Happy Thanksgiving!

New photos and video are now online: 1) our trip to Gansu; 2) fall and snow in Beijing; and 3) fun with Class G

http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets/

the right elements

2009-11-10T21:11:00.000-06:00

It snowed the day before we set out for Gansu Province and by the time we woke the guard at 4:15 a.m. to unlock the gate and let us off campus, the temperature was in the low 20s. The icy snow crunched under foot as we walked the deserted streets beneath a nearly full moon on the mile-plus trek to catch the first subway in route to the airport. Already tired and cold, we wondered why we chose the early fight and if we’d packed the right clothes.

We landed in Lanzhou about noon and claimed the last two seats on the bus just as it was leaving for the city, about an hour away. We spent a beautiful fall day with three former students who had miraculously managed to free-up their weekday afternoon teaching schedules to show us the sights along the Yellow River and ply us with local cuisine. Pealing off layers, we wondered why we’d packed so many clothes.

We caught the overnight sleeper going north about 10 p.m. and immediately passed out. We arrived in Jiuquan about 6 a.m. and were greeted at the station by a student with a driver, who managed to get us checked in to a hotel despite the unheard of hour. We toured an historic fort in the flat, desolate countryside and visited the middle school where our friend teaches. We met his colleagues in the English department and we dined with school administrators that evening.

The following day we rode in the “cattle car” on the 5-hour train trip north through the brown desert to Dunhuang. We had a great time sharing all of our Chinese with passengers and crew, who shared all their English. Westerners are apparently not too common in Gansu and we were treated with a mixture of awe, fear and curiosity everywhere we went. We spent the remainder of the day biking the back roads at the base of the massive sand dunes that mark the beginning of the Gobi Desert. There were camels everywhere. The next morning we toured the caves of an ancient Buddhist monastery and library. We saw many, many interesting depictions of Buddha and agreed that the tour might have been more interesting if we’d chosen an English-speaking tour guide.

The overnight sleeper returned us to Lanzhou, where we kicked around the city before hopping a plane about 7 p.m. We hustled across town and were relieved that the guards were pleasant even though they’d already locked the gate and had to let us in. We rested and enjoyed mild, fall weather as we prepared for the arrival of new students.

Tuesday morning we awoke to a fresh blanket of 3-4 inches of snow. High spirits and looks of misery were everywhere we went, as workers attacked the sidewalks and walkways with brooms and shovels fashioned out of the backs of wooden classroom chairs fastened to the handles. Outside the dorm, the building manager built a snowman that became a snow family later in the day. Outside campus, the normal zip of cars and bicycles had slowed to a crawl through the slush. A shovel-wide path scrapped down the sidewalk contorted pedestrians into the unnatural arrangement of walking in a long, snaking, single-file line. Yuan Ming Yuan Park was white, silent and ethereal. Despite the best efforts and exasperation of all our Chinese friends, Preston still cannot say “snow” in Chinese perfectly.

Refreshed by an exciting break with spectacular weather and rewarding visits with many students from former sessions, we are ready to meet our new friends in the November session.

Photos will be posted soon!

Swimming upstream

2009-10-26T19:29:00.001-05:00

Riding bikes in Beijing is not for the faint of heart or those who are concerned about following the rules. It’s pretty much fend for yourself, pay attention to what’s in front of you and hold on tight.

For example a routine early morning bike ride to the Internet café, sans helmets, might look something like this.

Leaving the gate, we turn left into oncoming bike traffic onto the hemmed-in bike lane that has parked cars on one side and a cement ridge on the other. If we are lucky, the traffic light has allowed us some breathing room, we have time to brace ourselves before the first pack of hundreds of bikes, electric bikes, scooters, rickshaws, motorcycles, and yes, even the occasional car, hits us.

You feel a lot like the mackerel at the aquarium that for some reason won’t swim in the same direction as the school – except we think it would hurt more if we ran into one of our biker friends. Basically, we have to stick to one side of the mass of bikes or the other, hold on tight to the handlebars (as you get nudged and pushed you don’t want to go down in the mess); stop when you have to and push yourself along the cement ridge; peddle like a madman when there is a break in the traffic and pray that you get to the traffic light before it turns. Usually though, we make our way through at least two of these waves before we can even think about getting to the other side of the road.

Cars in China can turn right on red basically anytime without stopping, so this makes the intersections very interesting. Even if the traffic light is in your favor, it is usually guaranteed that a line of cars, bikes or motorcycles turning right will be honking their horns incessantly and trying to run you over. Often the line is never-ending, so we have to snake between cars or ride along side diagonally until we can make a quick switch through the line. It takes some stealth and confidence because hesitation could be painful.

When crossing an intersection, it’s best to follow a local because they seem to have developed the survival instincts we are only just learning. Even when we get to the other side and ride in the bike lane with traffic, we have more perils to be aware of – the dreaded bus stops.

P.S. - we have finally posted photos of our room online (enjoy!): http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets/72157622512013709/

this week in China

2009-10-19T20:34:00.000-05:00

Last Monday was Arrival Day when more than 400 students descended on campus for their initial foray into TIP. We have more than 30 facilitators here now so we can hold two sessions at the same time, similar to what we do during summer. Peking University agreed to give us some more working rooms on campus (PTL), so for now, we all get to stay in Beijing. Yay! While we don’t all get to work together, we are on track to train nearly 5000 teachers this year!

Preston is facilitating Class F – a group of excited students who come from Yunnan, Qinghai and Shaanxi. Krista’s doing volunteer projects this session for TIP and church while managing household projects, e.g. cooking, cleaning and communicating.

The usual entrance interviews (Preston talk to 27 people himself ☺) and TIP orientation led to a successful first week. Plus, we are happy to say that some changes in the schedule mean we get off everyday right after dinner, at least in the short term. So stop feeling sorry for us, we no longer have meetings at 8:30 p.m.

Thursday and Friday were run of the mill days, except for the extensive cleaning job that we pulled off in between sessions. One of the areas of our room still needed a ceiling and wall scrub down. Now that the thick layer of dirt is gone, Krista is a little less concerned about what we are breathing.

We are happy to say that our students are enthusiastic and love to speak English – no matter their level. It has been fun getting to know them. And we are finding time to practice our Chinese, continue our morning walks in the park and read a fair amount. Life is a bit less hectic – thanks to the many prayers!

On Saturday, Krista enjoyed the morning visiting a hospice on the other side of town and talking at seniors there. Okay, we say “talking at,” since her Chinese understanding is minimal and their English was nonexistent. So it was a fun mix of laughing, smiling, translating and singing. The seniors were just happy to have visitors and hold hands. Afterward she had lunch with the volunteer team – and had fun connecting with other expats who call Beijing home.

Sunday after church, we had a relaxing lunch and visit with friends Laura and Peter at Annie’s, an Italian restaurant. It was gooda!

Now on to Act II.

climb that mountain

2009-10-13T01:06:00.001-05:00

There are some things that translate very easily to China. Lax planning, group enthusiasm and believing that certain discomfort may not be that bad because the experience will be cool. So said the seven hikers who set off late one afternoon for the highest point of the Great Wall at Mutianyu, about 60 km north of Beijing in the mountainous Huairou District.

I joined the adventure while Krista eyed the slim game plan and opted out, asking only that a photo be taken wherever her beloved fell.

The path was steep and hot under a cloudless sky and the watchtower that marked our destination didn’t seem to budge as we climbed hundreds of feet. As the sun dipped behind the panorama of dark mountains, we conceded that the path was too dangerous to descend and floated the hope that once at the top an easier way down would be revealed.

Short of water and food, we cheered as the nearly full moon rose from behind the black face of the mountain. Scrambling over boulders and climbing through rocky crevasses, we insisted that the top was just around the bend, over the next outcropping of rock and would be reached shortly.

After more than three hours, ecstasy reigned as we hauled ourselves out of the gloomy woods and up onto the moonlight-bathed remains of the Great Wall. We crunched through rubble and weeds as we followed the wall to the nearest watchtower. We could see the outline of the wall snake along the mountaintop for miles in either direction. We were alone with the beauty but the “easy” path down remained a wishful thought.

Inside the watchtower, we huddled around the smoky fire and tried in vain to sleep, without blankets, on mats of dried weeds piled on the frigid stone floor. We were cold and the night seemed never-ending as we waited for daylight. We shared our survival snacks, nursed our bottles of water and contemplated how good we usually had it.

With joy and relief, we watched the sky brighten as the sun emerged from behind a nearby mountain. We climbed to the top of the watchtower and surveyed the wall, the mountains and the towns and villages that lay in the valley far below. We assured each other that the suffering of the night had been well worth it. Some vowed a return trip with proper gear and rations.

Filthy, sleepless, hungry, thirsty and dazed we limped along the top of the wall until we found a path that seemed more manageable. We started down on rubbery legs, reveling in the first few minutes before the seemingly benign trail again turned cruelly steep and we found ourselves scrambling and scaling down the mountainside in order to recoup for a few hours in the hostel we had paid for the night before and catch the many buses back to our campus home.

check out photos of the adventure:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets/72157622573590644/

who’ll stop the rain

2009-10-05T21:02:00.000-05:00

True to the government's word, the weather on National Day (Oct. 1) was as glorious as the celebration of the 60th Anniversary of the PRC. While enjoying our time between sessions, we were able to truly appreciate the day of mild temperatures and clear sunny skies and no rain, just as it was engineered.

During the build-up to the massive observance, we’d again been fascinated by rumors and news reports about the government controlling the weather. We’d read about satellites, lasers, liquid nitrogen and hundreds of meteorologists being involved in the effort to quash the historic 20-30 percent chance of rain. As the days leading up to the celebration saw some drizzly skies and a violent deluge complete with thunder and lightning, we were a bit skeptical. However, an early morning smidge of drizzle apparently cleaned the slate for a beautiful autumn day.

We were relieved to discover that the big celebration at Tiananmen Square was a made-for-TV event and not open to the general public. We didn’t join the crowds of Chinese milling around every available television set and we didn’t feel guilty about not braving the hordes downtown. We opted out of joining our colleagues for fireworks, claiming two weeks of explosions last Spring Festival, 10 years in Monterey and the glorious view from the Knick during whatever ‘Fest was happening was fireworks enough for us.

Despite grave fears about congestion in the area around Yuan Ming Yuan, we were delighted to have the place to ourselves, relatively speaking. We spent the morning roaming the back streets around campus and investigating the smaller shops that take a little more effort to patronize. Braving a small, uninviting doorway, we found the produce market of our dreams. The market is small but offers fresh fruits, vegetables, various types of tofu and eggs. One of the vendors speaks fairly good English and seems likely to become an important local.

Earlier in the week we took what felt like our first step toward becoming real Beijingers and headed down the street to the National Library. We managed to get library cards that give us access to reading rooms and the sizable collection of foreign (English) books, periodicals and magazines! We can’t remove materials from the building and haven’t quite figured out how to request anything other than the magazines (many, many!) that are out. There is a coffee shop and we think we can watch movies and use the Internet as well. Someday it may all become clear …

The visit to the library is associated with the biggest Beijing event in our lives: the opening of Subway Line 4, which is very close and connects us to major parts of the city and other subway lines. The nearest station is still a short bus ride or 30-minute walk, but we are grateful for the added convenience and have already used it often in the one week it has been open.

As our break continues this week, we are trying to enjoy outside activities and make the most of the best weather of the year and savor the many blessings God continues to send our way.

one wedding, one palace

2009-09-29T03:37:00.001-05:00

National Day is fast approaching and we are looking forward to an extended time of enjoying the beautiful autumn weather while experiencing Beijing, China, as it celebrates the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC.

We started our celebration early by attending the wedding of our friend’s cousin in Qinhuangdao. We were introduced at both the ceremony and reception – an interesting moment for us both. The event was beautiful and we were treated like family.

On Monday, we took the opportunity to visit the Summer Palace. We’ve avoided going there until this fall hoping we could enjoy the sites under warm, clear skies. And PTL, we did! We spent eight hours roaming the grounds and imagining how royalty must have felt having the place all to their selves. It’s been open to the public since 1924, but we still found there were many hidden places for solitude and reflection.

Photos are posted on our online alubm: http:www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06

fun with English, English

2009-09-20T20:58:00.000-05:00

E – Even when biking down the busy street, fellow riders, strangers, will pedal abreast and try to engage us in conversations: “Excuse me? Where are you going?”

N – Never a quiet moment alone when you find an empty patch of grass, pull out your book and have someone join you for a one-sided conversation in Chinese chasing around a single understanding: “My English is not very good.”

G – Gleefully they push their young children toward us encouraging them to say “hello.” The child nervously avoids all eye contact.

L – Listening to the English conversations of others is most unavoidable. If you can understand it, your ears inevitably seek it out.

I – I believe there are Chinese words to express what I want to say, however, my English is too good to waste, even if no one understands what I am saying.

S – Sympathetic campus workers in our dorm eagerly suggest an English-Chinese learning exchange, which so far has resulted in learning people’s names and the words for washing machine, hot pot and soap dish. ☺

H – “How many children do you have?”

great finds, strange facts

2009-09-13T21:42:00.000-05:00

La Bamba – A “real” Mexican restaurant that is very near our new campus and serves $1.25 (10 yuan) burritos and soft drinks for 5 yuan during Friday night happy hour. They serve REAL cheese and salsa! We found it earlier during a desperate search for Western food. The entire team now heads there every Friday. Viva China!

Bike rides to church – It only takes 30 minutes to get to the international fellowship here. Small groups, Bible studies and opportunities galore.

Cafeteria variety – With the official start of the university’s fall semester, the cafeteria opened up new serving windows for BBQ (see fat is meat) and noodles. Facilitators are excited. Students still insist the food is so-so and think it’s funny that we always say, “I like the food.” Attitude is everything. Or the brainwashing is working.

Like-minded adults – Living with a large team of mature adults this year is a breath of fresh air. When one of the newbies asked, “Why do we need to make rules to make sure we clean up after ourselves? We are all adults, aren’t we?” We were ecstatic!

Here recalls there – Our morning constitutionals in Yuan Ming Yuan Park continue to be a great source of peace ad comfort. However, the idyllic ambiance has been marred the last few days as workers are dousing the area with foul-smelling chemicals. The situation in Live Oak seems spot-on compared to Chinese overspray.

Periodical reinforcements – Just as we were turning the last pages of our latest novels and wondering what we would read next, voilà, a care package from Crookston loaded with current magazines. We are happily catching up on what July and August looked like to the rest of the world. Many thanks …

Afternoon alone time (do not disturb) – Now that we aren’t exhausted and forced to nap from 1 to 2 p.m. every day just to survive, afternoon “naps” have become some of the more fun together times.

Change is fun – This session Krista is going by the name of “Spring,” which is her Chinese name. So the nearly 200 students can remember and pronounce her name now. This is a good thing – really.

Photo album: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/

fresh air

2009-09-04T23:53:00.002-05:00

Blue sky, sparkling seas and beaches of yellow stone and sand! It was a wonderful, exhilarating experience to escape the clanging grayness of Beijing and enjoy the peace of the sea in the coastal city of Dalian.

We traversed the peninsula just to sit for hours at various beaches without actually getting into the water. We were happy to simply gaze out at the limped sea, wonder at its immensity, marvel at the peculiarity of bathers and costumes and revel in how it made us feel closer to home. Preston considered it an unusual blessing that there were no big waves compelling him to disregard doctor’s emphatic orders not to swim because of his infection.

The beauty of God’s creation is immeasurable and the disguises of His blessings unmatched.

Why travel 12 hours by train for peace and beauty? Right now, we live in a pigsty. The chaos and dirt that we have been living in has become so normal that we take it for granted that, “this is China.” So we went in search of the China we had lost in the past 8 weeks and were overjoyed to find it and ourselves where the Bohai meets Yellow Sea.

We have found other aspects of China that we share with the students who come to our program: Our students like things clean; they don’t like public bathrooms or showers; they appreciate structure and organization; they don’t like to work 12 hours a day. But just like in America, teaching is like working on a ranch – the work is never done.

Like our fellow teachers, we take breaks when we can to find refreshment, solitude and renewal. We enjoyed a clean, friendly hotel on a university campus, speaking Special English to our train mates, eating at the local mall cafeteria and taking buses and taxis to the various haunts detailed in our priceless travel book.

Again, God gave us a glimpse of heaven on earth. We eventually did get in the crystal clear water and we slept and read for hours. Fortunately, wherever we go, our God carries us. ☺ We'll post photos in the not too distant future!

Eat the fat

2009-08-29T00:10:00.000-05:00

I detest eating meat fat. I was trained by my parents to avoid it at all costs. And even though it was delicious, and retained more flavor than the meat itself, I learned to avoid it at ALL costs.

My fears of “eating the fat” have been affirmed throughout my entire life; magazines, TV commercials, conversations with friends, clothing sizes, medical facts all point to the certainty that eating “fat” will KILL you. As an extremist at heart, I follow this maxim. I don’t eat fat. I gave up bacon long ago.

But in China, FAT is considered meat. It’s an interesting concept and even a reasonable one since raising meat “products” is terribly expensive and consumes a gargantuan amount of resources.

When we have been taken out to BBQ (shao kao) here in China, all we really get is FAT. We get loads and loads of fat from different types of animals cooked to order. All of it tastes REALLY good and of course as gracious guests, we freely indulge, praying that we won’t become addicted or DIE of cardiac arrest immediately (okay maybe I only think that way). Fortunately, we mostly eat it in poorly lighted areas so we never really get to see what we are consuming.

For the most part, shao kao in China hasn’t agreed with me even though I have no choice but to “go for it” when presented with charred chunks of meat for lunch or dinner. But Preston hasn’t had a problem consuming it thus far.

In China, it’s a special treat to go out to shao kao – to indulge in eating the FAT. It takes a bit of mental gymnastics to get over our youthful fears – and maybe we never will. Culturally, we weren’t trained to enjoy eating the fat, but we are determined to go with the flow and be more cross-cultural, even if it does KILL us.

just a shower

2009-08-26T00:47:00.000-05:00

When I was a teenager living on well water, I used to take showers for HOURS, literally. I wasted so much water that California’s drought could probably be blamed entirely on my personal habits from 1985-1989.

Hot baths and showers are also my comfort during times of illness and stress. There was nothing that can’t be made to feel better after a nice hot soak. Again, the amount of water usage is incalculable.

Then as a married, financially obligated adult in my 20s, we moved to a city that regulated water usage. As a result, we started figuring out ways to SAVE every drop possible. We caught faucet drips and used them to water plants and wash dishes. We tried to collect rainwater – but never became very good at that particular “green” habit.

In drought-conscious Monterey, we became even more fanatical about water and energy usage. We timed our showers (5 minutes each). We heated water in the microwave to wash our face so we didn’t have to let the water run while waiting for it to get hot. We didn’t flush our toilet – at least I almost NEVER did. It became such a habit that Preston started using the toilet at the local Kinko’s and KFC in order to avoid the inevitable, unflushed No. 2 that he found.

Now we live in China – and we haven’t had access to a private shower or toilet for two months. Last year, we had our own bathroom, but the shower was so small, it wasn’t a particularly enjoyable experience. However, if you were sick, you had access to steam and hot water. If you were cold you could warm up. If you were hot, you could cool down – any time day or night.

This summer, however, none of that is possible. We share four showers with more than 40 people. So you have to time it just right to get in your 2 minutes for cleanliness. The hot water tanks are small too – so we practice turning the water off between lathering and shampooing. We’ve become so accustomed to showering only for necessity that we ALMOST wash our clothes more often than we wash ourselves under running water.

So, we’re making up for our years of wasting water. Maybe by the time we’re gone from this earth, we’ll be even again. We’re grateful for having been able to enjoy showers in our youth. We’re also grateful for all of the leisure time we have now gained due to our new circumstances – for instance, I just wrote this post when in a previous life, I would have been taking a shower.

devoted to it

2009-08-15T23:18:00.003-05:00

Eight days later… and we’ve made it through another episode of TIP week one!

We have 315 students this session and about 20 facilitators. So that means everyone is much busier than last session – fortunately, everyone is also more DEVOTED!

This session Preston is the program manager and Krista is his “helper.” Which essentially means that she is bossing him around a lot (fortunately, Preston is a gracious husband and is sucking it up well).

We have appointed an assistant manager, too – a summer alumni, Christine, who is taking on assignments and responsibilities beautifully so that we are not running around like crazy chickens with our heads cut off all of the time.

It was a hot week – shirt-soaking, falling on the ground hot. But the students are bearing up well and seem to be enjoying their TIP experience despite the circumstances. Pray that they continue to be healthy and strong as we move into week two.

A wonderful reward came in a visit from a former student who was visiting Beijing this week. He took the day off from his touring to meet us at Yuan Ming Yuan Park and take us to lunch. What a special opportunity!

Paul is from Gansu, a 24-hour train ride from Beijing. When he came to TIP in March he didn’t have the confidence to speak English and he didn’t understand all that was going on in class – but within a week, he was excited and doing his best to “catch up” with others and learn as much as he could. He was a great student and the best reward for us is that his English is even better now! He spent the last four months being his own best teacher and practicing his English and helping his students love English. He is now a fluent speaker and looks younger and happier than ever. We were so excited to see our friend and see that his life is a little bit better because of the service work we are doing here! Yeah God!

To wrap up the week, we arranged for the weekend off to celebrate Krista’s b-day and sleep and relax so that we can meet the challenges that lie ahead. Thank you for your continued prayers for health and perseverance – we still need them!

Photos:
K b-day http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets/72157622042246848/

Visitor from Gansu http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets/72157621925938187/

Visit to Qinhuangdao http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets/72157622050586752/

catch me!

2009-08-07T19:13:00.001-05:00

So when we last left you, we were in dire straights health-wise and exhausted from the July session that ended with Krista at a hotel and Preston running the show.

Act I: (PnK arrive back from the hotel the night of July 27 after having secured tickets to Qinhuangdao for four days of anticipated bliss.) Office, handouts, housing, training, August session are all in pandemonium. So we stepped into the fray once again and brought some quick order to the mayhem. We bonded with the new August team of energetic, insightful facilitators who are very encouraging and supportive. In order to preserve sanity, Krista started celebrating her birthday month in July this year, much to Preston’s chagrin.

Act II: (PnK leave for Qinhuangdao on Aug 1.) Snow and Dou Dou secured us a beautiful apartment by the beach again, treating us to non-stop lunch and dinner for the four-day stay. We slept until noon, swam in the sea, took drives along the coast at night and enjoyed just hanging out with our good friends. It was especially restful and relaxing (yeah God!) – even if Krista didn’t keep all her food down AGAIN!

Act III: (PnK secure two of the last four tickets back to Beijing on Aug. 4) As is customary in China, we boarded the train only to discover that our seats were not together. Numerically they were, but they were not NEXT to each other. Miraculously, the woman sitting next to Krista arrived on the train at the EXACT same time we did, and she graciously offered to exchange tickets with us! We arrived back on campus as late as possible (the gate closes at 11 p.m. remember?) and found our best friends Laura and Peter back on campus. HINI precautions aside – we hugged them for a LONG time. PTL.

Act IV: (PnK wake up the new session Aug. 5). Typical session preparations kept us busy for the rest of the week. PLUS, they started painting in our home building and many people became overwhelmed by the fumes – think burning eyes, sore throat, nausea and dizziness. And they started jack hammering on the building attached to ours on Aug. 6, which marked 30-days straight of construction noise from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. seven days a week. So everyone moved OUT and into empty student dorms (they are really nice, clean and quiet). We are still mentally a bit on edge – so pray for sanity.

Act V: (PnK attend praise and worship Aug. 7.) Entrance interviews start Aug. 8, so we only have running ahead of us. Yet God gave us much grace to start off on the right note. We spent time with our August team singing together, reading about love and affirming each other. It was a spectacular time to fellowship and be one in body and spirit.

It is a true blessing to know you will be caught every time you fall!

sweet sacrifice

2009-07-28T02:37:00.000-05:00

The week started off ominously enough when after working more than 15 hours on Monday, Krista went to bed saying, “There’s no way I can make it until next Monday without at least one day off.”

Students were dropping like flies needing medical assistance left and right. Facilitators for the most part were exhausted from the intense session combined with late-night carousing and needed more prodding and direction than usual. To top it off, more than 40 students couldn’t secure tickets home on their ideal travel date because of a series of unfortunate circumstances. As a result one day, we spent almost an hour signing campus leave forms so they could abandon the program for a short stint off campus to figure out their own transportation. There’s nothing like dealing with extremely angry mothers and fathers who are sure they will never get home. We were happy to send them off for the day in pursuit of their own happiness – regardless of how little support we received from our superiors for our initiative.

Sure enough, ask and you will receive. So Krista came down with what we thought was “normal” food poisoning Wednesday night and was out of commission on Thursday hoping to be fully recovered for the end of the session logistics, which went into full force that Friday. As expected, Preston stepped into high-gear and managed beautifully and took care of leading, directing and garnering needed support, while Krista just laid around a lot conserving energy (and praying for death to come more quickly).

But apparently one day of sickness and “rest” from the program was not enough. Krista ended up at the outpatient clinic suffering from dysentery and severe dehydration. We moved her out of the dorms and into a hotel Saturday morning and basically she missed the last four days of the session. With medicine, rest and a couple IV lines, she is now well on the way to recovery, PTL.
By God’s grace, Preston finished extremely well and set all plans in motion to bid the 350 students adieu. Then he jumped ship on the closing ceremony to hang out at the “sanity” health hotel for a night as well. God is good.

Needless to say, Krista didn’t make it to Monday without a day off. But we found much contentment in how God orchestrated the “rest.” There’s nothing like fever-induced hallucinations to make you avoid thinking about work. And it gave us much to pray for and reflect on while seizing the opportunity to rejoice in serving through sacrifice – no matter the form that it takes.

stormy day

2009-07-18T19:57:00.002-05:00

The rain was still coming down pretty good at 7:30 a.m. as we headed out to the Chinese hospital to have the physical exams necessary to complete our resident visas. Water sloshed over our ankles and rain swept under our umbrellas as we stood beside the busy street outside campus helplessly watching the always numerous taxis pass by already engaged by weather-wary commuters.

Under the conditions, standing in the road was not the our first choice, but we did not know which bus to take and visa deadlines and work responsibilities made our trip necessary storm or no storm. Grateful that we had opted to leave “way too early,” we eventually found a taxi and arrived at the hospital on time.

Thankfully, the exam was relatively painless and required no deep probing. In less than an hour we were back out in the rain and only a few hundred RMB poorer for our time. We managed to find a bus that passes right by our campus, which will make it easier next week when we return to pickup our test results.

The rain continued all day and was easily the longest, wettest storm we have ever experienced in Beijing. Damp clothes, wet feet and cooler temperatures had us wondering several times during the day if “maybe” we didn’t need a sweatshirt. It was only a thought.

The power on campus went out late in the afternoon. At first we blamed the workers who are still pounding and sawing 12 hours a day but soon realized it was a larger problem from the storm. We reshuffled classrooms and let our imaginations replace Cds and video while assuring the 350 students that class was not cancelled. By dinnertime things were back to normal.

While the program continues to require more hours than there are in a day, we have dusted off our bikes and taken several rides around our area. Bike riding in the Haidian District is an exciting adventure offering the same level of control as being shot out of a cannon. With steely nerves and a nose for following the locals, we have found that we are only minutes away from a shopping mall with a fantastic supermarket and deli.

We are content, fulfilled and in continuous prayer and extremely grateful that sometimes God’s answer is to play in the rain or jump on our bikes and head to the mall! Thank you for lifting us up daily!

Photos online: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40596876@N06/sets/72157621548884421/

better space, baby

2009-07-12T04:53:00.001-05:00

The first week on our new campus has been nothing if not eventful. In the space of a 10-minute taxi ride, we segued from the tranquility of quarantine to a raging party of moving boxes, 350 new students, 40 summer volunteers and an unfamiliar place.

The main building housing our office and living space is being renovated around us. The schedule is spontaneous and things have to be moved from room to room, downstairs to upstairs and back again.

We are eating fresh peaches everyday which almost makes up for the fact that they are jack-hammering the cement floor below our room (7 a.m. to 5 p.m.), everything we own is lost in a moving box and we are sleeping on opposite sides of the room on bunks made of wooden slats without mattresses. Incredibly, it all seems reasonable and normal.

The first few days of the program have been tremendously long as we have been trying to put everything in order, orientate the students and help the summer team get situated and stay on track. Everyone is working extremely hard to provide the students with a great experience under conditions that can we are generously calling challenging.

Despite the pace and confusion, we are truly happy to be back in China (in the right time zone), eating Chinese food and working with the Chinese people. We are also excited about the opportunity to help the summer volunteers have a positive and rewarding experience in an environment that is probably more difficult and crazy than they had imagined.

While the positive aspects of our new home are numerous, we have already identified several notable improvements. There are two convenience stores/fruit stands right on campus and they are actually open regular store hours. The cafeteria offers a larger selection of food and the overall quality and taste is better than before. Most importantly, we are less than a five-minute walk to the front gate and the outside world filled with stores, restaurants, public transportation and millions of opportunities to practice our Chinese!

Photos online: http://picasaweb.google.com/peace6371/

a new twist

2009-07-04T20:50:00.004-05:00

We arrived back in Beijing after an unbelievably easy flight. Our luggage arrived with us only slightly worse for the wear – some wandering powered cheese sauce, a few drops of saline solution and a leaky soap bottle.

Armed with a text-message in Chinese we were able to direct the taxi driver to the hotel we’ll be calling home for the duration of our seven-day quarantine/home-stay and enjoyed the air conditioning as we crept through downtown traffic and the 97-degree temperature.

Our hotel room is very nice with a real shower, western toilet, AC (semi-functional), a TV (2 English channels) but no window. We are on the same floor as two other summer people, an alumni and a first-timer, who are also on quarantine/home-stay. As we are barred from our new campus and teammates, we are practicing flexibility and patience as information trickles in about what is going on with the program.

Our quarantine/home-stay is a low-key affair requiring us to simply avoid physical contact with others and crowded places – no buses or subway. There is a market and many small restaurants near our hotel, which is located about a mile from our new campus. Mostly we are trying to rest and do all the organizational work that we avoided during our time in the US and do what we can to prepare for the first summer session that begins on the day we are done with home-stay. It promises to be interesting.

Overall, we are very excited to be back in China and anxious to recapture all the Chinese we have forgotten. We are even excited about eating Chinese food again and returning to our familiar survival routines. We feel that we are in exactly the place that we are supposed to be in.

We can’t say enough about the great time we had visiting with friends and family while we were in the States. We feel so blessed by the outpouring of support and encouragement from everyone we visited and our church families. We raised 90 percent of the funds necessary for the coming year and have an awesome amount of prayer support. Many, many thanks to everyone for all of the support and all of the good times.

We are still seeking a new home for our blog, which we can’t access from China (thanks to Barbara for helping out), so stay tuned for upcoming developments in future posts. We are praying that our home-stay passes quickly and that we are ready for action when the time comes.

Photos online: http://picasaweb.google.com/peace6371/

holiday in the u.s. of a.

2009-06-01T08:30:00.002-05:00

We have arrived safely in Greenfield, WI, and are busy negotiating a new time zone and the availability of a lot of familiar food we want to eat. Papa and Mama are fantastic hosts willing and able to accommodate our eating and sleeping irregularities.

After a smooth, painless journey from Beijing, about 24 hours doorstep to doorstep (Yeah God!), we were greeted in Wisconsin by cool spring temperatures, clean air and lots of green. Wow, it’s great to be home!

We will be here for about a week before making our way back to California via a quick visit to our church family in Crookston, MN. We are looking forward to a healthy dose of R&R before heading back to Beijing in July for another year of service.

As we will be traveling and visiting with friends and family, we will be on hiatus from blogging, posting sporadically only as time and circumstance allow. Look for regular posts to resume in July, God willing. Thanks for reading and have a great summer!

We continue to be blessed to have many friends, family members and church fellowship groups praying for us and helping us raise the necessary money to continue answering God’s call to service in China. We are so thankful for you all. Your prayers and support are greatly appreciated and if you are interested in joining our team, here are the details. J

Combined Expenses for PnK Teaching in China 2009-2010 are:

Support Services $5,000
Travel to/from homes $2,100
Health insurance $1,000
Preventative care $1,000
Visas $300
Total Fundraising Goal: $9,400
by July 30, 2009

Mailing:
Please make checks payable to “TeachOverseas.”
Write account number 208072 on the memo line.
Send to Barbara Lemos, business facilitator:
PO Box 214, Live Oak, CA 95953.

Automatic deductions: Call 1-800-895-7955 and refer to account number.

Online donations: http://teachoverseas.org/contribute.php; select support a teacher or staff member in the drop down and reference Preston & Krista Gobel.

village walk

2009-05-23T23:00:00.002-05:00

The walk around our campus begins with a 5-minute rush to get to the gate – so we can say hi to our regular walk “friends,” talk about the day ahead and experience the real China.

With the sounds of cuckoo bird songs ringing in our ears, we leave the main gate entrance and head down a main thoroughfare. At 6 in the morning, it’s bustling with workers getting started with their day. We pass “buildings” constructed and rows of trees planted only within the last two months.

Today is a clear day, as it rained the day before. The hills beckon us to explore their mystery. But at street level, signs of construction are everywhere and the roads are littered with bricks, rocks and cement-making materials. Spring roses brighten the otherwise gray environs and a quick stop in our favorite village store brings much color into our day.

Our favorite store clerk encourages us – as she understands our Chinese – and we head back out to finish the second half of the 30-minute journey. Street sweepers are clearing off yesterday’s dirt and leaves and families investigate the brick and mortar structures that will soon be their home or business.

The local bus 53 (aka 3) begins it daily route empty – driving opposite its traditional direction in order to pick villagers up for the first adventure into Changping.

We bid a fond zao shang hao (good morning) to our old friend who we pass twice everyday and he agrees to a quick photo!

Life along the walk has its busy routine – the people, places, mangy dogs, the dirt, the wind and the orchards. Yet it’s also new each day as we continue down the path God has directed and rely on His strength and love. Next stop Milwaukee, Wis.

Photo walk online: http://picasaweb.google.com/peace6371

blessings overflow

2009-05-17T23:05:00.003-05:00

This week marked the start of the May session, our last of the year. It’s a “normal” session with interviews on Saturday and five days of classes sandwiched between traditional weekends. Regardless, after eight days of straight work, we were ready for our weekend break.

God has blessed us with an enthusiastic group of nearly 200 students from Qinghai, Beijing and Gansu. They animatedly talk in English ALL of the time and respectfully stay seated during lunch and dinner times… without coercion.

We have also been blessed by the surprise arrival of 10 short-term facilitators who joined us for work on Monday. From Oregon and Holland, they found themselves in China without anything to do, when their other service organization canceled their program. A total God thing. So we were happy to welcome them to TIP, as they took over afternoon games and activities, clubs and in general, gave us all a bit of a breather!

This session Preston is leading Class D, again with 30 students. Krista is supporting the new program manager, getting training ready for summer and trying to finalize plans for out stateside visit. All in all, it’s probably the smoothest session ever – thanks for praying us through!

Blessings continued into the weekend, as we spent a day preparing presentations about TIP for supporters back home and then spent an afternoon alone in town shopping, eating and riding bikes.

Then on Sunday, we took the group taxi in for the international service in Haidian and spent the rest of the day on a double date with Peter and Laura, who have become our close friends. They treated us to coffee at Starbucks, a marvelous luncheon of Indian food and window-shopping and people watching in the trendy Nanluogu Hutong. Tired after eating more than our fill, we walked it off around Qianhai Lake, enjoyed the beautiful sunny day, sipped soft drinks at a café on the lake and meandered our way home to the bus station, where we boarded and promptly fell asleep! We rounded out the evening with sushi at a favorite local hangout and the purchase of tiny honeydew-like melons for dessert. It was a restful day of friendly conversation and much love and laughter – time away from the grind of our daily living/working life.

As we get ready to bit our short-term help goodbye on Monday night, we are ramping up for a busier week. But as always, we are reminded to look for the blessings that God gives us in each day – like our mothers!

We can’t post photos online from here right now, so visit our album online at http://picasaweb.google.com/peace6371

2009-05-08T23:08:00.008-05:00

The promise of spring has been fulfilled as the blossoms, buds and shoots have become a canopy of flowering trees, flowerbeds and thick, green foliage. Just outside the campus gate, the beekeeper and his family have set up a tent camp among dozens of hives servicing the nearby orchards and row crops.

It was an amazing change of scenery that welcomed us on our return from a weeklong adventure visiting former students in the coastal city of Qinhuangdao, Hebei province. While the Beijing area experienced its first stifling temperatures, we were happily enjoying the cool breezes and clean air along the Bo Hai, a large inlet of the Yellow Sea.

Former students arranged for us to stay in a rental apartment in the same building where they live and mapped out a slate of activities and sights for us to pick and choose from.

One student’s husband, a guitar instructor and fabulous cook, nightly prepared us scrumptious dinners of fresh, local crabs, shrimp and fish while each morning we were taken to favorite childhood breakfast spots and markets.

Another day, a student and her entire family, including a seven-year-old son, took us to an organic farm/amusement park (think Casa de Fruta) for several hours of fun and fruit picking as well as a delicious traditional Chinese countryside lunch. The men entertained everyone as they navigated the rope swings across the moat. No one was seriously injured.

We spent the better part of each day touring the area on our own while our hosts worked or entertained family visiting for the Chinese labor day holiday. The holiday added extra dimensions to our tour as we were joined by a bazillion vacationing Chinese everywhere we went including the Old Dragon Head, where the Great Wall meets the sea; the historic walled city; an Olympic park and a popular bird watching spot along the coastal flyway.

We were also part of a family holiday shao kao (Chinese BBQ) where we met and talked with many relatives while cooking loads of marinated meat and seafood on tiny, little grills. Several cousins spoke very good English and we practiced our limited Chinese. All in all we walked away from the evening extremely full (again!) and with invitations to visit their homes as well as attend a wedding in September.

We topped off our stay with a visit to our student’s parent’s apartment where we all chipped in to make and eat dumplings to fortify us for our two-hour train ride back to Beijing. We departed with hugs and promises to visit again and a mutual feeling that we would always be family.

seaside retreat

2009-05-06T02:05:00.004-05:00

We spent a few days visiting friends in the coastal northeastern city of Qinhuangdao. They set us up in an apartment in their building, took us to beaches and organic farms and treated us to nightly homemade dinners. We enjoyed learning about family life in China and getting to know several of our former students on a more personal level. So this week’s blog is a bit late and bleak, as we just made it back. But you can check out the photos and we’ll post again this weekend as we also welcome our new students to campus!

budget lifestyle

2009-04-26T06:25:00.004-05:00

Living on a minimal budget makes you appreciate conveniences you once took for granted. It’s amazing to think that we live on about the same amount Krista’s grandmother received monthly from Social Security for the last 20 years of her life.

Fortunately for us, we don’t have to pay for housing – rent, water, electricity, trash – and the Chinese standard of living is much different than the one we experienced in America. Still we make concessions in order to get along.

Ergonomic workstations – While we don’t have modern chairs, desks and the like, we have come up with some creative ways to save our backs and wrists from too much lasting damage. Krista balances her laptop on top of a cardboard box we received in the mail and a shoebox we found in the “don’t want” room. We haven’t figured out how to get around the neck strain yet.

Food variety – In order to get into town to “eat out,” we must either take the bus (about an hour roundtrip) or grab a taxi, which doubles the cost of the meal. So instead we stock up on groceries, at a cost of about $30 per month and we eat one-food-type meals. We have become accustomed to only eating noodles or putting some vegetables on a bed of rice. Of course, our mainstay is the campus cafeteria and our comfort food there is breakfast cakes.

Communal living – We share a kitchen of sorts with about 20 other people. We have learned to use hot plates, the rice cooker, toaster ovens and steam pots. We clean up our dishes – wash, dry and stored – as soon as we are finished. We have also had to adjust our standard of “clean” in order to make our kitchen experience bearable.

Wash and go – All of us also share one washing machine. It’s a miracle the machine is still going after the number of loads it goes through each month. In order to keep ourselves in clothes, we usually wear the same thing four times before washing. OK so Preston may wear it 10 times or more. However, underwear and socks are on a “must clean more often list” so we often put a load in at 5:30 a.m. before anyone else is awake. We also spend plenty of time washing by hand – since the washing machine is known for tearing holes in our clothes.

Downright strange – While Americans breed animals to bear more meat and accommodate our insatiable appetite for protein, the Chinese have instead refined the art of eating every available animal part. So for instance, chicken feet, pig’s ear and snout and animal fat and bones are all delicacies. They are also known to enhance health and show up in our kitchen from time to time. Eating chicken’s feet can help your joints; eating pig’s ear can help your ears. While we have not accepted this medicinal way of thinking quite yet, it is a fun idea to contemplate.

Studio living – The bed also serves as a couch, lounge chair and picnic table. The desk is our workstation, conversation area and dining room table. We use the bathroom sink to wash dishes and clothes. Bathroom towels hang daily on open cabinet doors. And the clothesline running across the room often creates an obstacle course that makes the room a bit claustrophobic, but it does give us dry clothes by morning!

life and spice

2009-04-19T01:22:00.005-05:00

We spent many hours this week dreaming, planning and struggling as we worked to put in order the details of our trip home in June. It has been exciting to contemplate all the things we might do and the people we might see on our return. Though we have sadly discovered our expectations are wildly optimistic, once we factored in the constraints of time, money and distance as well as the “must-do list” of doctors, dentists and arrangements necessary to return and spend another year in China.

We have also been busy putting together the plans and materials for the new volunteers who will staff the summer sessions while trying to figure out how we will manage the here and now as many of our colleagues return home to visit and move on to new opportunities. We plan to the counterpoint of equipment failures in our auditorium, kitchen tiles falling from the walls and rumors of “moves to another campus” on the horizon. We practice our mantra: “This is China.”

And then there is our friend and colleague, Mary, on the Chinese staff. Mary has celebrated spring and the first real rains with the harvest of weeds and leaves around campus. She borrows Preston’s bike so she can stand on the seat and pick the leaves from trees. She prepares these greens in the kitchen while holding forth on their potent nutritional value and explaining that the trees tell her which leaves are good to eat. We sample gingerly with good reason and wonder if Mary’s undertaking is a result of her personality or her personality a result of her undertaking.

We continue to find strength in all of your calls and e-mails of support, encouragement and kindness. We feel especially blessed as Preston’s parents have recently been able to get Skype to work for them. It’s great to visit with Mama & Papa in the comfort of our own room.

need more o’ dat

2009-04-12T19:30:00.006-05:00

Surrender makes resilience unnecessary. No matter what we have planned, the unexpected always seems to happen. So we have surrendered this session to the will of God.

Monday – Arrival Day saw our assistant program manager wake to a bout of food poisoning at 4 a.m. It rendered her unable to function for the day, so an already exhausted Krista, who looked forward to a restful session, took on the task of managing entrance interviews for the more than 200 students on campus. Preston chipped in to take over Krista’s other assigned duties – abandoned for the more important management needs.

Tuesday – Orientation Day Krista again stepped in for four hours of Chinese orientation and welcoming, as others were sick or otherwise occupied. By the afternoon, the electrical power had mysteriously been diverted from the Computer Lab, so plans for hands-on introduction to the software in Chinese were completely abandoned. ☺

Wednesday – Breakfast Greeting began at 6:50 a.m. and Krista planned to take a nap before she had to summon enough energy for club that night, which would last until 8 p.m. Alas, another class facilitator had to go to the hospital with an ear ache, so Krista subbed for Class F on the first day of English only. As this is the first session experimenting with 30 students per class, it was an opportunity to see how it actually would work. Preston was assigned as the helper for Music Club, which now boasts more than 40 students per class. But at dinner found that his co-facilitator needed more support than otherwise imagined and Preston stepped up to the plate to lead the evening session once again.

Thursday – Krista subbed again in Class F and ran completely out of steam. Fortunately, it was a meeting-less night and she didn’t have to sub the next morning, so sleep was a blessing to enjoy. She had to shirk dorm visits for the night in order to try to find some restoration.

Good Friday – Everyone chipped in to do pronunciation inventories for the students, by listening to them read story after story and checking their diction. A shortened story, specifically prepared for this session, made the task manageable and we finally saw some light ahead.

Saturday – We had a “regular” weekday schedule and Preston tackled teaching about speech assignments, the scavenger hunt and other weekend activities with his class. Day four of our clubs rounded out the already long week, but the students seemed to enjoy them all the more and the large classes went smoothly.

Easter Sunday – Preston woke up bright and early at 4 a.m. as he had many tasks to complete. He had switched Sunday duties with another facilitator who wanted to attend church in Beijing. So he helped students complete their morning work assignments and arrived home again at 11 a.m. Krista spent most of the day sleeping. The Talent Show completed our week and we all got to sing “Lord We Lift Your Name on High” and celebrate Easter together with heart-felt enthusiasm for God’s good care this week!

We wish you the blessings of Easter and praise the Lord for sending His son.

a week in review

2009-04-04T22:21:00.005-05:00

Besides the moments marveling at the beautiful weather, taking photos of the gorgeous flowers and conversing with our new “favorite” friends at the convenience store, this is what our week looked like.

Monday was our one real “day off.” So we cleaned our room. So dirty! Then Krista spent one hour talking to her folks and one hour talking to her best friend Jana in Santa Rosa. Preston rode his bike into Changping and went grocery shopping. The rest of the day was all about food, movies and rest.

Tuesday we took a trip to see our high-school age students from the February session. Five of us had lunch at our favorite cafeteria and spent a couple of hours catching up with them and encouraging them. Four of the students will compete in an English speech contest later this month.

Wednesday and Thursday women xue zhong wen (we studied Chinese). Jessie, our Chinese TIP director, had coordinated lesson after lesson of a Chinese language program and we got to be the guinea pigs for free! So four of our team members used our break time to get more acquainted with the language of our new home country. It was fun and very rewarding. All of our Chinese co-workers did a great job and we graduated with flying colors. Preston was the class monitor and Krista was the “star” student. As a result, we both gave a speech at the closing ceremony. We’ve been using more and more Chinese every day.

Friday and Saturday were session preparation days. We had our April session staff meeting, set up the large group meeting room, got lesson plans ready and counted and cut handouts. We’ll have more than 200 students on campus as of Monday!

Sunday is our day of rest… so excited!

all about food

2009-03-30T00:03:00.005-05:00

The ultimate measure of our days in China is food. There is no problem that cannot be made worse, no joy that cannot be multiplied or any rut that cannot be extended simply by what we are able, willing or forced to eat. Food is a never-ending source of speculation, anticipation and dread.

It begins with the first meal shared with a new group of students, who inevitably have grave concerns about the unavailability of what they are accustomed to eating and the suitableness of the fare on hand. We travel in a parallel universe that ultimately ends in a restaurant in downtown Beijing and a detailed discussion of what is available, what goodies have been included in the treasured package from home and the food we miss the most.

As the session comes to a close there are several events that focus our attentions more and more keenly on our palates. First, there is speech day, where we share and enjoy with our students Krista’s culinary efforts to transform the coveted ingredients sent from home into delicious cakes, cookies and pies. There is nothing like a homemade cookie to ease the anxiety or tedium of presenting or listening to a couple of dozen student speeches.

Next, is the class dinner. This session closed with nearly all classes heading to the same restaurant in Changping for individual hot pots. After weeks of slogging through cafeteria food, the joy is palpable as we simmer a myriad of meats, seafood, bean curd and vegetables in hot, spicy broth before burning our mouths on the finished delights. Dragonroot, mutton, beef, fish balls, tofu, kelp and cabbage arrive at the table in seemingly endless waves.

We kicked off our short break between sessions with a “double date” with another couple on our team and a trip to a reasonably priced buffet of international foods in Beijing. There were plates of sushi, potato wedges, fruits, meats, fowl, a dessert table and serve-yourself ice cream bar. Lobster was included by there was an extra charge for Diet Coke.

Following church on Sunday, we headed to a western-style eatery to quietly enjoy some “us” time over a hamburger and a taco salad. In a city of several million, we were only mildly surprised to find that nearly all of our colleagues had ended up at the same restaurant.

We return to reality this morning as we debate when the cafeteria will be open, if it will actually have any soymilk and who will trek into Changping to buy food for the week ahead.

spring in Changping

2009-03-21T01:50:00.008-05:00

Blossoms came out this week in Changping and the weather gave us cause to play outside and hide winter jackets! It is such a beautiful time to watch the colorless transformed one stroke at a time into a full color masterpiece.

This session has been so relaxing that we’ve taken to eating lunch with our students in the cafeteria – even when we are not required to. Of course, they think we are crazy to do such things; but they appreciate it nonetheless as we chat away.

It’s funny how the joy of spring has also caused “cabin fever” to come out in full force. While the students have been great and individually TIP facilitators seem to be having a great time, our team has struggled with unity and experienced much conflict. While God has carried us through as we have depended greatly on His comfort and strength, the leadership group, which includes Krista, has been somewhat drained by the consternation. All of our challenges are not completely resolved, so please continue to pray for God’s clear direction in our lives and decisions.

On the exercise front, we have forged ahead diligently finding time to walk together and explore the village at the same time. We have “regulars” who we meet along the street everyday. Preston practices his Chinese and we get many laughs and responses too.

We have apparently become “famous” in the village according to colleagues who made purchases of their own there recently. We are the “older couple” from Beida, who are very friendly and kind. It seems we are the first of the TIP team to make the village a regular routine… as we find shopping within walking distance more convenient and visiting with our neighbors rewarding.

To round out the week, yesterday we bore witness to our Chinese colleagues struggle to stand eggs on end to take advantage of the spring equinox. We’re not sure the ironing board is a truly flat surface, but cultural differences aside, it was fun to hang out with our friends and share in their joyous attempts. Here’s to more light coming your way!

dessert please

2009-03-15T09:00:00.006-05:00

It has been a sweet week at TIP. We have a large yet enthusiastic group of students who have been really great to work with. It is a situation we are all grateful for after the challenges of our last go-around.

Most of the students are from the south and we are pleased to be able to offer them a little pleasant Beijing weather for the first time in months. While most still feel it is “very” cold, the faces of utter despair have been reserved for the cafeteria food, which is not nearly spicy enough.

The cafeteria is a madhouse with so many students, who all arrive at the same time to the only place to eat on campus. The crush of hungry people has had a very interesting effect on behavior, as there are actually organized lines at the food windows instead of 200 lines of one. It makes the 10-minute wait for food a little more bearable. Some sneaky facilitators let their students out of class a few minutes early and earn undying adoration. No names, please.

Krista headed into Beijing Saturday to visit a former student who was unexpectedly in town. The woman introduced her to some of her friends and they spent time exploring a hutong, seeing a show and having dinner. Evening turned into late evening so she ended up staying the night and having a bigger adventure than originally planned. Key mindset in China: remain flexible, so much fun!

Preston continued his ongoing investigation into how to navigate the Chinese postal system. After biking to a favorite (less busy) branch office on the far side of Changping, it was discovered that the parcels could only be mailed from the main branch in the center of town. The main branch was very busy but no lines (see above). Also the carefully pre-addressed parcels needed to be readdressed and several forms needed to be completed. Wo bu dong (I don’t understand). Soon, we hope, it will all become clear.

We are thankful to both be in good health (finally) and to have the time and energy to reestablish our exercise routine, which has been sporadic of late. We feel very blessed to be celebrating this season of lent as a team as we look forward to the abundance of Easter! On Sunday we even were able to spend time with a Chinese seminary student studying at TIP and we were able to encourage each other. How great is our God. ☺

getting to know U

2009-03-08T07:54:00.002-05:00

We ushered in a new session Saturday with an afternoon of interviewing close to 200 new students. While the interview process can make for a long and somewhat taxing day, it is exciting to know that in a couple of weeks many of the shy, quiet students will be talking our ears off.

While each group has its own dynamic and there are always a few students eager to jump right in and share every bit of English they know, we had a couple of really memorable encounters. One woman was so excited and animated about relating a story she had read that many people stopped to listen and time expired before the interviewer could pose more than the most basic questions. Another woman insisted that she didn’t want to talk about anything except the Bible and find out why Jesus was so nice to everyone.

The weather is mild and sunny, which makes everything seem exciting and possible. Though, one man from the humid climes of Yunnan province, who is experiencing the dry air of Beijing for the first time, wanted to know why we made the weather here so strange. Food and weather are always big concerns for students who have never been far from home, where is the weather is always just right and the food delicious.

We are grateful that the fruit stand next to the cafeteria reopened after being closed all of February and now stocks a wide variety of food, toiletries and household items. We were particularly pleased as we had been oblivious to our toothpaste needs and had entered into serious negotiations about which of us would take one for the team and trek into town. It was fun to talk to the store owners again and discover that their small son is now able and willing to correct our crooked Chinese and offer bits of instruction. Children apparently are our future, at least when it comes to learning Chinese.

Overall, we are all refreshed and seem reinvigorated after a good break and ready to continue the marathon with renewed enthusiasm. As a team, we spent a fair amount of time during the break discussing what we hoped to accomplish and setting some realistic expectations and goals. In a sense, it feels like a fresh start here, with much of the awkward and frustrating parts of learning to live in a foreign country behind us and greater sense of community for the entire team, both Chinese and foreign. God really is doing amazing things.

bit o’ heaven

2009-03-02T23:21:00.010-06:00

We took advantage of a 12-day break to explore southern China and try to find some warmer weather, green plants and humidity!

We didn’t have any time to plan, but travel costs have recently dropped dramatically, so we figured we could find a good deal. After several failed attempts to book tickets online, we finally had success Sunday night after a day of bowling AND e-mailing all of our personal information to the airlines. We are sure identity theft is just around the corner.

Our tickets were for 7:30 a.m. Wednesday morning to Guilin and then we planned to take the bus into Yangshuo (another 1.5 hours away). It was pure China from the beginning as our taxi driver arrived in our room at 4 a.m. – a half hour early. Then we opted for the kuai (fast) way to the airport and arrived in a record 40 minutes – at 5:10 a.m (it normally takes nearly 2 hours). So we had a good 2 hours to enjoy coffee and lounging in Starbucks before take off. God mercifully arranged for us to secure seats in the exit row and before we knew it – 3 hours and a nice meal later – we were in Guilin. It was 80 degrees – lush, green, humid and there were towering-limestone hills all around. ☺

Avoiding the touts who wanted to know who, what, where, when and why we were in their very touristy town, we managed to get on the public express bus and get to Yangshuo early in the afternoon. We hiked the last 5km to our farmhouse hostel in the village – and settled into our beautiful hardwood-floored room, with a table and chairs and comfortable bed and bath.

Renovated this winter, all of the rooms and farmhouses were connected and faced a courtyard filled with aloe Vera and spider plants. It was smack in the middle of Confronting the Dragon village and we felt like we were living in a time warp. But we also had access to a pool table, books/magazines, all the free water we wanted and freshly-cooked food on demand (both local and western). The place is 6 years old and managed most recently by a family that hales from England and Switzerland. Their sons, who were 6 and 8, were entertaining.

The weather turned progressively sour throughout the 5-day visit, raining and dipping into the 40s by our last day. But that didn’t deter us from biking, hiking and birding – all the while enjoying the wonderful world God gave us to explore without ever getting into a vehicle. We saw at least five new birds and heard many more. The bamboo was amazing, the river languid and the rock mountains awe-inspiring. It was painters' paradise.

Our life went like this: sleep until 9; lounge around until 11; head out for exploration and discovery by noon; wander back home by 5 and nap; head out for dinner in town or a walk through the village along the river; fall asleep by midnight; and repeat.

What we did: mountain biked on foot paths and single-lane dirt alleys through village after village along the Yulong River to Dragon Bridge; searched caves and avoided flying bats; saw a man pierce the nose of a water buffalo (by tying it to a tree – head and front hooves secured up between two branches); enjoyed the wildflowers and amazing birds; climbed up rocky mountain sides to find “lost worlds” of meadows, bamboo and amazing views; bought headdresses made of local flowers; and watched a rat run around a restaurant.

Fortunately, the cold weather forced us to spend more time outdoors – as our farmhouse was designed to be enjoyed only in warmer temps (e.g. – no water pressure for the shower, Krista slept with her stocking cap on, it rained in the room). It also gave us the opportunity to get to know the Chinese staff, who spent many hours warming their hands on the community room hearth.

While we were sad to leave the green and peace for the noise of our modern Beijing home, we had taken advantage of what Yangshuo had to offer – including local specialties like spicy river shrimp; braised pork and taro; spicy bamboo; and beef and tofu stew. Of course, we also enjoyed our farmhouse western fare, like French fries and muesli once each.

So God gave us just the place we needed to restore our minds and bodies and ready us for the second half of the year. Our photos will be online soon. (P.S. – as of this writing we expect 217 students for the March session; insanity here we come)

real life

2009-02-22T08:55:00.007-06:00

We worked in our dorm house this week since our abbreviated session left us sans students. So we spent the time working on special projects like brainstorming a TIP for Mandarin; strategizing about a TIP for children; improving the facilitator-training program; updating ideal lesson plans; working on the Web site makeover; and overhauling the all-inclusive manual.

Needless to say, it was an intense week for some of us who are able to work from home and an even more intense week for those of us who are UNABLE to work from home. The team did a fantastic job, regardless of the lofty goals we set going in and the reality of what was accomplished. Plus we managed to move our TIP office once again and hold a team vision- and goal-setting session. Our brains still hurt but we like it!

We have just shy a couple weeks off now before the next session officially begins on March 5, so we have been throwing around plans and will let you know what finally sticks (we’ll know probably on Monday or Tuesday ☺).

But the fun has already begun starting with a trip to Nanshan Ski Village on Saturday. We took off about 9ish and after a few dozen stops along the way to confer with the locals, our favorite taxi driver got us there about 11:30. As for the ski hill, think skiing in So. Cal – lots of dirt, lots of weeds and more than enough snow making machines. Of course, we managed to find ourselves at the top of the mountain as always with no way down by the TERRIFYING way. Fortunately, we survived. We were blessed by a gorgeous day and cheap tickets, so all in all it was a fantastic time. We rounded out the day at a restaurant owned by our taxi driver’s good friends – we found out that they are all Christians too and it was a great place to eat, relax and practice our Chinese.

Sunday we commandeered our Chinese staff for a thank-you outing. Some thought it was fun to tell them they were “working” and then surprise them with bowling, dinner and game night. As an added bonus, they joined us for church and then a b-day lunch hosted by the b-day boy – our boss, Danny Yu. It was the first time everyone was together for a meal and socializing. We bowled on company-owned private lanes, which can be rented out for special groups. Bowling in China is the same – even down to the cartoons and words on the screens! It was a blast and good team-bonding time.

Now we are back, trying to recover a bit from both ventures and secure our tickets to head out for a new one. We know that God is good in giving us both a successful workweek and playtime.

a bit of Americana

2009-02-15T21:43:00.007-06:00

Think burgers, fries and salad bar at Sizzler… long restful periods with magazines and drinks at Starbucks and SPR… shopping with friends and lots of TV and ice cream sundaes. NO INTERNET and few cell phone calls. That’s what we needed this weekend after our harrowing teaching adventure that ended mid-week. We needed to feel the comforts of home and take a break. ☺

So we packed up our bags as soon as we had settled back into our home “room.” We essentially ran away.

We stayed at our favorite local business hotel dive – and this time found a sweet deal (even if there were a few bugs). It was Valentine’s weekend (as well as the end of the Chinese Lantern Festival) and roses were being hawked left and right. While we didn’t indulge, we did end up with either a “free” one or a rather expensive one, depending on how you look at it. It came with our meal Saturday night. It was just like being in Americ on Valentine’s Day – lots of red and pink, couples out for strolls and just as we settled down to enjoy our first take at the salad bar, our friends Laura and Peter walked in for their own table. Small country – 1.3 billion people and all.

As we reflected on the fun of living in Beijing, we realized that we hadn’t been out to dinner on Valentine’s for years. Maybe never. But it was an interesting cultural experiment and somehow refreshing at the same time.

We did take a timeout from our general slumming for a cultural stroll through the National Art Museum of China. It was our good fortune to show up for the last days of an exhibit featuring art by and about the country’s ethnic minorities. We thoroughly enjoyed the wide range of styles and subject matter on display in works produced over the course of the last 80 years or so.

As for the TV – the only channel in English is Central China Television 9, but we enjoyed the various cultural programs that were being broadcast. We learned about China President Hu Jintao’s visit to five African countries; a little about the economic stimulus package in the US; and in general, that the world seems to be falling apart – a least where money is concerned. Fortunately, we didn’t build our life on or around money. While we feel somewhat removed from the fray, we do pray continually for those who have lost livelihoods and fear for the future – God’s grace and peace are sufficient.

school daze

2009-02-07T23:26:00.008-06:00

It has been a very long week here at Beijing Middle School No. 47. While there is a sign nearby telling us we are in a scenic rural area, all we really know is that we are living and working somewhere midway between Changping and downtown. The greatest attraction for us has been the two small convenience stores we pass on the 15-minute walk between our hotel and the campus, where we spend most of our time with some 200 very energetic middle and high school students.

While the cafeteria food is provided free to us, the meals lack protein except for the pieces of hair, which we find all too regularly. Some of us find the fare a welcome change (sans the hair), while others think maybe it is “not so delicious.” One would think free meals would be a financial boon, however the cost of snacks, which are expensive, necessary for sustenance and emotional health are more than making up for any savings. Our environmental friendliness rating has fallen drastically as we must buy all of our drinking water and juice in small plastic bottles. Perhaps, the convenience store owners can now afford orthodontia for their children.

Our hotel accommodations have been more than adequate once we got used to the shower draining directly onto the floor and having hot water once in the morning and once in the evening. It is a true luxury to have someone come and change the trash bag in the bathroom every day.

Like water, we seek the path of least resistance. Our Total Immersion Program has adapted and been transformed into the Totally Improvised Program. It quickly became clear after our arrival that “English only” was not feasible for the age and speaking level of the students. We have enlisted the help of our Chinese staff and volunteers to translate and help us maintain a semblance of order throughout the day, which runs from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. – chaperoning required.

As with most things, it is all a matter of perspective. While we see an exhausting challenge, the students for the most part are having an exciting and unique experience. Yes, it is difficult for them to speak more English than ever attempted, but it is great fun to be freed from the strictness of their normal school-day routine and experience an environment filled with patience, love and encouragement. Games, activities and fun are not part of their regular school day. If nothing else, students are getting the idea that learning English can be fun.

We will wrap-up this session on Tuesday and head back to our campus in Changping on Wednesday. We are looking forward to a couple of days of rest to unpack and regroup before we begin a week of special projects, planning and administrative work. Everyone is ready to go “home.”

spring festival

2009-01-31T09:02:00.007-06:00

Chinese New Year/Spring Festival was a long series of explosions, fireworks and food. The lunar Year of the Ox began with an hours-long roar of firecrackers and fireworks that has only today burned its self out. Well, not quite.

We biked into Changping New Year’s Eve and felt as if we were in alien territory as the usual chaos of cars and bikes on the road into town was eerily absent. Once in town, however, it became apparent where everyone was -- milling about and launching fireworks. In every direction we looked the sky was glowing with color and thick with smoke.

Wednesday we headed to Beijing where the aerial and aural festivities continued in full force. We took a New Year’s chance on a cheap hotel in the Dazhalan District and were rewarded with throngs of people, ubiquitous street food, non-stop fireworks and a pleasant room to call home base. The weather was mild and sunny as we roamed from street fair to temple festival in search of a dragon or lion dance. Even though droves of people were everywhere we went everyone was friendly, relaxed and helpful. We did have to be extra vigilant about how much we were being charged and had many opportunities to practice saying “too expensive!” in Chinese.

We saw traditional folk dancers, acrobats, calligraphers and an unbelievable array of souvenirs being hawked to an equally unbelievable number of people willing to buy the stuff.

Thursday we traveled to Tianjin on the slow train and rode in a standing-room-only car with an enthusiastic and friendly gaggle of people. The train staff rammed carts down the aisle with open vats of simmering pieces of duck and went from seat to seat selling toys and clothes while regaling us with demonstrations of why we should buy each item. We didn’t. Many did.

We cruised around Tianjin and marveled at the upscale atmosphere of the city. We also enjoyed the costal climate and remembered what it was like to have actual moisture in the air. We walked for miles through a bustling business district filled with well-dressed shoppers and crept through Old Town in the dark as the sky erupted in fireworks all around us. We took the fast train back to Beijing and were completely satisfied that it was well worth the extra cost of the ticket.

We took in more festivals and Beijing sights on Friday before heading back to Changping late in the evening. With the onset of the weekend, explosions and fireworks again became nearly constant. Based on our observations and near-death experiences, we can testify that you do not need to posses skill or common sense to launch explosives in China during Spring Festival.

Alas, we never did find a dragon or lion dance, however our disappointment was somewhat mollified by discussions with other foreigners who had also searched in vain and the incredible things we did experience.

Tomorrow we head to the outskirts of the Haidian District near Fragrant Hills where we will hold a TIP session for middle and high school students on their school campus. We packed our materials and clothes today and will leave in the early a.m. for our hotel and begin getting setup for the nine-day session.

Please pray for our patience and positive mental attitude as we embark on a teaching/living plan that is currently composed mainly of question marks and that promises to be challenging

winter holding pattern

2009-01-24T02:32:00.003-06:00

As Preston began to get his health back this week, Krista took up the mantle and headed to bed with a lot of coughing, congestion and general illness. It was probably inevitable as more than 50 percent of our colleagues have been put down by the crud in the past two weeks. We are relieved that we were not booked into firm travel plans and are able to lay low and rest.

We bid farewell to another class of students this week as the session ended Tuesday in a chaotic flurry to get everyone on their way home for Spring Festival and Chinese New Year. It has been a huge source of anxiety for students the entire time they have been here as booking a ticket on the Chinese public transportation system this time of year is a messy and haphazard proposition. Tickets can only be booked a few days in advance of travel.

Despite the hectic departure schedule, we each had the opportunity to join our respective classes in a last hurrah. Krista, whose class presented her with a beautiful shawl, necklace and strict orders to purchase a pendant to go with the cloak, spent the evening singing songs and eating the snacks that her class slipped off campus to purchase. Preston jammed into a taxi with Class C and dined on dumplings in Changping. Class C presented each of us with a fantastic pair of gloves. They also gifted an infamous Peking duck in a bag for Preston to snack on himself.

The weather has turned bitterly cold - low double digits - and very windy to end the week. It may not be up to the Wisconsin/Minnesota misery index, but it is sufficient for the land of no central heat and a lot of walking to get to where you’re going. Many of the students were from southern China and already thought the cold, dry weather in Beijing was almost intolerable. They left just in time. We are relieved that we won’t be joining our colleagues who are headed to the Harbin Ice Festival, as it is many hours north and many degrees colder.

We will enjoy Spring Festival in our area as health permits. There are already explosions and fireworks happening all the time in the village near campus so we don’t feel that we will have any problem experiencing a full-on Chinese New Year without leaving the Beijing area.

We are thankful for many blessings this session including a fantastic group of students and the safe return of teammates who’d gone home to celebrate Christmas with their families. The two members of our group studying in Thailand for the past couple of weeks are expected back shortly. We said goodbye to Doug and his wife, Stella, who were forced to leave unexpectedly for health reasons and will be moving to the US at the end of February. They will be greatly missed. Woulter arrived from Holland to help out for several months while he completes an internship with ESEC. We are praying for good health and recuperation as we steel ourselves for the upcoming session. Plans call for moving into a hotel near the middle school campus where we will lead a 9-day TIP for some 250 middle and high school students beginning Feb. 1.

spread the love

2009-01-17T19:09:00.003-06:00

Each morning, our students spend an hour reading and discussing a Morning Motivational topic. Lessons focus on things like everyone is valuable; never give up; you make a difference; life is what you make it; attitude is everything; be a person of integrity… and well, you get the picture.

Students say this is their favorite part of the TIP program. They say they gain insight into how to be a better person, how to treat others with kindness and how to do what they can with what they have. They are simple messages really, ones we often take for granted, having grown up in very stable, loving homes.

For many of our students, childhood memories are bitter and the contentious parent-child relationship cycle can continue from one generation to another. Since there is only one child in most families, there is extreme pressure and a heavy burden to fulfill the dreams of the parents. Children do not think they can be successful. Parents will not let their child fail.

But these Morning Motivationals open the students’ eyes and hearts to new ways of thinking and new approaches to raising children and supporting healthy relationships. That’s why it’s so cool – what God is doing here at TIP, one student at a time. We are blessed to hear about the change of heart from our students who once thought they could make their child get better grades by hitting them or being angry with them. Instead they talk about recognizing that no one is perfect and that they need to encourage their child and say, “I love you very much. You are a great kid. You make a difference to me.”

Love is an amazing gift – and learning how to spread love is as simple as offering encouragement or a listening ear. That’s basically the heart of TIP. We encourage our students for 21 days straight; tell them, “You can do it! Great job!” They see the results and success as their confidence grows, their English improves and more importantly, they learn how to share what they have learned with those around them!