The First Day at Wudu & Huaxing.

bernard & karen:

bernard wen: today was the first day teaching at baifu/jilong/wudu (i have no idea which is which...). i had thought that after a week's experience teaching it at neili, i would have a better idea of how i should be teaching, but i was greatly mistaken since my new class consists of 1st to 3rd graders. some of the kids barely know their ABCs so it will
take time to find a new method to teach them. on the other hand, there are a few who have english better than last week's fifth graders. on top of all that we only have 3 hrs of class time compared to 6 hrs in neili. nevertheless, God provides: we have 5 helpers in class, which takes almost all the load off of karen and me. we can focus on
teaching in the short time we have instead of trying to help each student through the lessons.

our afternoon classes are...interesting. josh and i are teaching 3 junior high boys who barely know any english. today we taught them 10 words each that they wanted to learn and had them write them 5 times each. i want to try to teach them phoenetics tomorrow.

also, the baifu church has an electric guitar and we can lead some worship. awesome. like many others have said, pray that the teachers will become just as close to all these kids despite the lack of time spent with them. pray that we would use our time wisely to not only teach but sow seeds of the Gospel.

josh & elean:

elean yang: first day of class in baifu today :] I was really excited to see some of my students from last year! the class was shorter than our normal classes were so we had a lot of adjusting to do but thank God it went really well. my class has 4 helpers: KiKi, Ann, Betty, and Lily. they are really helpful to have in class; what's really cool is that in the afternoon, we teach another class at the church and 3 of my helpers were in my group. I got to know them a lot better and I can't wait to work with them again tomorrow! time to go play basketball with some of the kids from wudu elementary and baifu church! ^_~

jacqueline & marissa:

Jacqueline Lee: Hello everyone! It is finally my first day teaching! These past few days have been really tiring for me, but praise God that I have gotten over most of my jet lag today! Marissa and I are teaching 3^rd graders this year. Class went pretty well today. Since Norman and I taught together our first year, I kind of have the same teaching style as him. So, I am really thankful that Marissa was with Norman last week and learned from him. Marissa and I adapted to each other pretty smoothly. Class is cut short in half this week, so things seemed to go by very quickly. Tonight, Marissa and I need to figure out how to adapt to the new time change. Other than that, the kids are really interactive and quite smart. My prayer is that even though we have less time with the kids this week, their curiosity about the bible and God does not get hindered by it.

It has also been really refreshing to see many of my old students from previous years come back and attend. My students from last year are mostly in Shing and Si Chu’s class. Last year, a few of them would come to church to visit Victor and me and we would take them to the local café to have a few drinks. This year, they came to visit us again and I invited them to hang out at the local café with Shing, Si Chu, and I after class tomorrow. I thank God for enabling us to continue the relationships that were built last year. I hope this year that we take this chance to share the gospel with them and introduce them to the church members, so they can take over when we’re gone.

Marissa Liu: First day of teaching at Bai Fu with Jacqueline went well. We have a lot of Helpers compare to last week. We have a total of five helpers. It is kind of overwhelming but they work without us telling them too. The students were well behaved and quiet. Then Si Chu and I had three students in the afternoon that we worked with :) that went well too. It took a while to "break the ice" but it was awesome. All the time, God is good.

chris & esther:

Chris Sung: Today was the first day of teaching at Wudu. It felt very similar to the first day of teaching in Nei Li as we just met the kids and aren't really familiar with each other yet meaning it will take some time to get to that level of comfort with these kids that we had with the Nei Li kids at the end of the week (for me at least). However, what was different about teaching today was that we only have 3 hours to teach where as we had 6 hours last week. This makes it not only harder to teach all of the material, but we get even less face time with the kids. We are also teaching English at the church on top of our classes for the kids. I am teaching with Shing and Esther for a "more advanced" English class. I thought that it went smoothly today, however some students said that it was a little to easy, so we need to step the difficulty up a notch or two. Please pray for me that I will be able to be even more confident with these kids at Wudu than at Nei Li since our time is even shorter. Also continue to pray for us that we would be able to show Christ's love and patience to these kids.

shing & si:

so we are here in baifu...the internet is somewhat limited so who knows how often we will be able to update. so far in our two days here we have attended the baifu church's youth group, sunday service and a festival of christianity.

Youth group was quite a different experience. It was a different experience in that we communicated with the youth in chinese and had to go out of our comfort zones to do so. It was also an uplifting experience to be with a bunch of young people who are so on fire for Jesus.

On sunday, si chu shared her testimony! It went pretty well, despite a couple bumps along the way. Aftterwards, we headed off to a festival of christianity. We were scheduled to perform some of our songs in chinese that we have practiced for the last couple months. But once we arrived, we realized that a lot of other groups were performing in english and decided it would be appropriate to play a song in english since we're from america! But thank God that even after a bit of scrambling to praise Jesus in taiwan on a live stage with borrowed instruments.

Upon the completion of the festival, we all were able to grab a little r & r. si chu, myself and a few others went shrimp fishing! It definitely was a test of patience for a while, but we did reel in a decent catch and boy was it tasty when we got to devour the fruits of our labor. Top finish off our little recovery break, we all headed off to the miao-kow night market for dinner! We definitely had lots of delicious food...and i'm sure most of us look forward to the next trip.

And then today, we officially started week 2 of our vbs tour. Our class is about the same size as last week, but we only have half the classroom time. So far the kids in our class seem to be well behaved, but we'll see how things pan out. The second half of the day si chu is teaching with marissa and shing is teaching with chris sung and esther. Si chu is working with the lower level english kids and shing is working with the older students as well as the more advanced english learners, many of which are youth group members.

That is all for now...time to eat and head off to the christian bookstore in keelung!

pastor josh & norman:

norman ai: to be honest, when i was told this past saturday i would not be going to wudu elementary to teach, but instead traveling to another elementary school to teach, i was a little disappointed. one of the main reasons i decided to return to the missions team this year was to be able to see old students from wudu elementary and be able connect with them quicker and therefore be able to share more personal testimonies with them. i thought to myself, what was the reasoning behind this decision? i am separated from the rest of the team for half of the day and teach a class of 30 students with ages ranging from 2nd to 6th grade. that's a wide spectrum of english skill levels. but praise God, the first day at huaxing elementary went smoothly, and i feel i am already starting to become familiar and friendly with several students already. the class at huaxing is very well behaved and very smart. despite the different ages, everyone seems to be learning new things. not to mention i have pastor josh as a full time co teacher, so therefore things go alot more smoothly than usual. haha.

and God certainly provides. when i talked to jacqueline and esther [who are teaching my students from the previous two years] after i returned from teaching at huaxing, i was very much encouraged to hear many of the students jacqueline and i had the past two years are enrolled again. i was blessed even more when elean came up to me and told me that kevin and judy chou's mom had asked us both to lunch tomorrow with them. i had kevin last year as a student and judy was in elean's class. i was able to visit them last year a couple times when i walked them home from school and talked to their mom rather alot. so im glad i can still have some impact on these families though i am not at wudu. PTL indeed. he is good.

for afternoon english classes at baifu church, i led a small group which consisted of eden and eric, anna wang's students from last year. it was good to catch up with them. their english is pretty awesome. we finished the whole curriculum within an hour, with two hours left. so we practiced conversational english and did some drawings. pastor josh was able to remind to come to church more often. haha. i'm looking forward to working with them for the next week.

please continue to pray for the students of wudu and huaxing elementary, even though this is not how i imagined this week would go at all, that God will have his way and work his wonders in his own time.