Monday July 3, 2006

The trip in Taiwan reached new heights as we began our English camp this morning. Before each day would really begin, we met together to sing, pray, read, laugh, cry, voice concerns, and prepare for our day at mission.

For the actual school, each morning began with a “pep rally” led by Wes which led to taking the students to our classes. The camp contained seven teaching groups – 2 to 3 leading each group. My partner was the somewhat quiet, but always funny (and tall) Don Akers. 16 students occupied our classroom with nearly each of them being 12 years old and speaking very little English – except one. One girl was actually from California, in Taiwan for vacation, and was at the class to “help out” – sort of.

Our schedule was comprised of teaching, crafts, review, and recreation in a 2 ½ hour span. In teaching, we would have the students read a story from the Bible in Mandarin (a dialect of Chinese), repeat the same story in English, and then practice repeating English out loud using sentences on the board. Each time that a sentence was repeated, pictures of what was being said or described would also appear on the board.

Crafts usually paralleled the story that was taught in hopes of teaching a little more than just English to the students. On this particular day the Creation of the world and man was taught so each student made a sort of “flip book” that displayed what events happened on each day of Creation. And recreation, led by the young summer missionary couple Jon and Jen, and assisted by Trey, son of missionary Wes, was a great way to get the kids active and to “loosen up” a little.
The kids seemed to enjoy the school overall, but still do not know what to think of Don and me – me especially. They are used to teachers giving lessons very straightforward and minimal enjoyment. We, on the other hand, tried to make it an enjoyable experience. A few are ready to be friends, though many give very confused looks. I did make a couple of friends, though. There was one boy that knew the opening music for the original “Mario Bros.” video game. He would sing out the opening notes and rely on me to shout out the last note accompanied with a kick or punch into the air. Quite funny.

Following a lunch at school and an early afternoon rest, we headed about a half hour to an area where Hakka live for prayer walking. Part of the purpose of this exercise (excuse the exercising of this pun) was to – duh – pray while we walked. The other side to this was to invite both children and adults to an English camp that would be coming in that area within the next few weeks. During this prayer walking experience, I got to meet three different sets of kids.

The first bunch was some teenagers playing basketball. We (I was walking with another missionary couple – the ever funny Norm and his sweet wife Teri) stopped and I displayed my fantastic skills of looking like an idiot at playing basketball. As we further walked along, a group of brothers who were playing in the mud (or least it looked like mud) ginned for a couple of photos and we went on. One of them, however, decided to follow us several houses down. When we met back at our original meeting spot, there was a group of five young children with an older man, presumably their grandfather, who I had the privilege to play with and get a great group photo with.

The evening consisted of an adult class (which I did not attend until Wednesday night) wherein Hakka adults were taught the Bible using English. The class was held at the school where we had taught earlier. The remainder of the group rested at the hotel or went to the internet café.

I would now like to share a funny little story that I experienced sitting on the porch of the hotel with Norm. We (Norm, his wife Teri, and I) had a conversation about movies and old TV shows when we discussed “Superman.” The old 50’s “Adventures of Superman” with George Reeves became a subject piece when Norm made a keen observation. Why is it that Superman can take all those bullets in the chest but when the bad guys throw their gun at him, he ducks out of the way? I laughed all night long and woke up laughing the next morning.