happy, smoggy days

Sunday was Baptism Day at the English service at Haidian Fellowship. And we were excited that

Blanca, Bob’s girlfriend, was part of the group who gave their testimony. Yay! Blanca began working as a Spanish teacher at a primary school this fall and it is always fun to trade stories as we talk in Chinese, English and Spanish – all at the same time.

Bob and Blanca both serve on the choir at church – Blanca plays the piano and Bob is a singer. They are a special couple, and we enjoy getting to spend time with them! To celebrate, we went out on Saturday for sushi, their favorite, and gave thanks to Father God for His love and joy!

 

This week we welcomed 100 teachers from Tibet to campus, who are in Beijing for a month of training. They are spending 2 weeks at TIP. While some of them are lower-confidence speakers, they are happily doing their best each day in the classes – singing songs, working on projects and making friends. We are blessed that two foreign volunteers – Dennis and Dave joined TIP for the October session to lead the classroom activities. We are thankful.

The rest of the week we continued to work on curriculum projects – editing, writing and fine-tuning. We are still putting together about 100 activity lessons that we have been working on since late June. We are still on schedule to meet a year-end deadline. Praise God that four of our teammates were able to jump in to help.



Besides the work projects, we met with Melissa for an afternoon of sharing and studying.

Then we traveled across town to visit Strawberry in her new apartment out in the hutong north of town. We cooked, sang songs and watched her online teaching videos. She’s a great teacher! We were also able to catch up for dinner with Jack, who we haven’t seen for a couple months. In between we talked online with Stephanie, who is learning to study, and Kerry, who is helping her students learn to study, and Holly, who just got a new job.

While we are tired of the smog that we have been living in these past few weeks, we have found joy and meaning in each day. Please continue to pray for the protection of the people in this place.