we are the pandas...panders?

i wish i could accurately describe the love i have for these students. there are not enough words in the english language to tell how much these kids kids captured my heart. i can picture every day that i spent with them. here are a few of my favorite stories about my class!

the picture above is from one afternoon. this afternoon, we walked to school with a perfectly blue sky with the sun brightly shining. we had planned for an afternoon filled with American sports like baseball, ultimate frisbee, and volleyball. all of a sudden, right as we are about to go outside, it starts pouring. don't forget that it was just sunny...well it was still sunny...but pouring. but to make it more interesting, it started to HAIL! no lie, a least nickel sized hail...crazy. so that day, i learned my students love card games! here we are playing go fish. seriously, every afternoon, i think they would have rather played go fish or uno instead of being outside. that is how much they loved card games! and i loved that they did!

this particular day my team and i planned for each class to participate in a picture scavenger hunt! this was a brilliant idea, especially since they A. loved taking pictures and B. loved not sitting in class. this picture was actually one of the assignments "to take a picture with your teacher." i don't know if you remember, but i had the smallest class. for some reason mine just kept falling off the face of the planet for all i know. here are only 5 of the 10 i ended up with. but these 5 were definitely my favorites...shh...don't tell anyone! :)

ok. this last picture is from the last day of school. we were waiting to have "graduation" and decided to take some pictures before instead of after. my team and i were obsessed with jumping pictures. if you saw the pictures on facebook, you would know that just about everywhere we went, we took a jumping picture. it became a tradition really. well, on the last day, i decided to take a jumping picture with my class. some of them grasped the concept...some didn't. i love this because even though my class was the quietest and most reserved, this picture clearly defines their actual personalities. 

legacy

Legacy by Nichole Nordeman

I don't mind if you've got something nice to say about me

And I enjoy an accolade like the rest

You can take my picture and hang it in a gallery 

Of all the who's who and so-and-so's that used to be the best

At such 'n' such, it wouldn't matter much

I won't lie it feels alright to see your name in lights

We all need an 'atta boy' or 'atta girl'

But in the end I'd like to hang my hat on more besides

The temporary trappings of this world

I wanna leave a legacy

How will they remember me

Did I choose to love?
Did I point to you enough

To make a mark on things

I wanna leave an offering

A child of mercy and grace

who blessed your name

unapologetically

I wanna leave a legacy

I don't have to look to far or too long awhile

To make a lengthy list of all that I enjoy

An accumulating trinket and treasure pile

That moth and rust, thieves and such will soon enough destroy

Not well traveled, not well read

Not well to do or well bred

Just wanna hear instead "Well done, good and faithful one"

something about this song always gets me thinking. i was driving home from work today wondering about the legacy i'm leaving. i hope and pray that its a good legacy. i hope i am a woman of integrity and always stands up for what is right. i hope that i live out God's love to the best of my ability. i hope that Christ shines in everything i do. i hope that no matter what i am the best daughter, sister, friend, wife (someday), mother (again...someday), follower of Christ, and teacher i can be. because, above all else, i seek to please my Lord and make His name known. nothing else in life is worth more than sharing the truth, grace, love, and mercy that is Christ.

mangy dogs, 76 stairs, and a combover.

i've decided today, to bring you a slight bit of humor into your afternoon/evening. the following stories are true...from my trip. they include pictures...because without the pictures they would not be as funny. :)

please meet, Nana, Pup, and Mangy. these dogs, along with many others were our constant walking companions. they would be walking around, lounging in the dirt, or sniffing other dogs. we fell in love with these dogs. while you may not love them, please enjoy their appearance. because, every day, even though we loved them, we marveled at their filthy coats. not only were they filthy, but they were the laziest dogs i have ever seen!

i don't know if you can completely tell, but our school was on a hill. every day we walked about 4 miles to and from school, most of the walk being uphill. well, in the first picture, in the background, you can see quite a bit of stairs. every morning, as we prepared for our class, we walked up these stairs. how many you ask? 76 stairs to be exact. and how did we make it? we sang the Rocky theme song. as if we weren't already strange, we became the strangest foreigners Longde Middle School 2 has ever heard coming up their stairs.

these are some of the leaders that took us to special tourist spots in Longde or surrounding areas. in pink is Mary, our resident translator and english teaching friend. in blue is Nancy, the head leader of Longde's daughter who happens to live in Suzhou...which made it a small world. and on the right side, at the end, is Frank. Frank was a very sweet man. he could barely get his words out, but when they came out, his english was fantastic. this man holds a special place in all our hearts. while he was nice and cared about our wellbeing so much, there was one thing about frank that made us smile every time we saw him.

he had one hat that he always wore, that had a huge brim on it. i had never seen a hat like that before. but what you don't understand is, his hat, was covering....this:

if you are wondering, that is a HUGE combover. it started from the back of his head and wrapped completely around touching his other ear. who knows how he got that combover to be so long, but however long it took, he was certainly dedicated to it! that is our beloved frank.

you are my star.

bottom (L to R): Mary, Jenna, Me, Nancy, Mary, Tom

top: Mike, Ellen, Danielle, Rebecca, Alice

the girl next to mike on the top was not actually in my class...so i don't know her name. 

this was my class. i had the joy of teaching the top level class. each day, i loved teaching them. they loved being silly about certain things. for example, pronunciation. this part of the lesson was my favorite! who knew working on pronunciation could be fun!? well, my students had a hard time pronouncing the "th" sound. it always, without fail, sounded like the "z" or "s" sound. to my students, they didn't hear the difference...until i taught it to them. they would say think, and it would sound like sink. even on the last day they would say something to me with the word think in it...and my response was always "is it think, or sink?" they would correct it and move on. if my students learned one thing from me, it better have been pronunciation!

one day we were doing an activity that required some extra pronunciation help. they weren't hearing the difference between words, so i kept correcting them. i would write the correct word and what i was hearing on the board. they all laughed, because once they saw it on the board, they knew what was wrong. every time they would say the word, i would laugh, because it was funny. then i would pick up chalk...and they would groan and laugh at the same time. this particular day was filled with laughter and joy.

as much as i hope those kids learned pronunciation and vocabulary from me, i learned so much from them. my class did not come from the richest of backgrounds. most of their parents were farmers, and they have to walk anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour just to get to school. when i first met them, my heart broke for their circumstances. little did i know the joy that they possessed. each day when i came into class, they all smiled. maybe they were smiling because i was smiling, but i knew that i would be uplifted when i came to teach them.

even though these students have enormous weights to bear, they have joy. i choose to believe that God has His hand on those students. that, if only for the summer, they had joy, it was God shining through me. i got this picture on the last day of class:

this is from a student who God placed on my heart very early. i choose to believe that i was her star, because Jesus is mine. i choose to believe that she found confidence in my eyes, because Jesus was telling her heart that He believed in her. i choose to believe that she thought i was beautiful, because Jesus radiated from my being. i choose to believe that God receives all the glory for this summer being a success. when you choose to believe Jesus, you cannot help but have joy.

power of prayer.

i've always known the complete power of prayer. i don't think i have always taken time out of the day to realize its power. my trip to China really opened my eyes to the power of prayer and how i need to look for it daily.

our school liked to take us on many trips. we had heard about this fact from our team leader as well as some other Camp China alumni. while our trips filled two weekends we were in Longde, it could have been worse.

one particular sunday, our leaders wanted to take us to see the beautiful and of course, very famous, sights of Ningxia, the province we were in. so, this sunday, we all woke up for breakfast at 7am, not really knowing when we would leave for the day. 8am rolls around, and we still have no idea what is in store for our day. about an hour and a half into breakfast (which consisted of both camp china teams staring at each other because of exhaustion), we got word that we would be leaving at 930am. so, we headed back to our rooms, got our tennis shoes on and headed out the door.

we took a 2 hour bus ride through some pretty amazing sights.

then...we hit this part:

if you can't tell, we are driving up a mountain. it had been sprinkling our entire trip up, then we got so high, we entered the cloud it was raining out of. the little black part in the middle is another car in front of us. there is no railing on the side of the road, and rocks were falling off the edge of the mountain onto the road. not to mention that drivers in China are CRAZY and we were going fast. any way you look at it, there was a huge possibility of us dying. i was imagining the american paper headlines "10 Americans fall off cliff in middle of nowhere China" or "Americans fall off cliff." in my mind, we were all gonners.

then, i started to pray. i remember very distinctly saying to God, "GET US OFF THIS MOUNTAIN!" i may or may not have screamed it in my head. the sheer terror overcame what i prayed, and i believe God heard. we made it off that mountain in one piece, and were able to see this:

this is just one instance where i saw the power of prayer. everyday i thought of the tons of friends and family here that were praying for my team and i. i cannot begin to imagine what the trip would have been like without that prayer. God really put His hand on us. none of us got sick or had conflict with each other. our students were the best students anyone could ask for. and i believe wholeheartedly that it was because of all the people praying for us.

the opening.

i decided that i have processed enough of my trip to start blogging it. i hope you enjoy tidbits from my trip this summer as the next few weeks progress. 


we arrived at training, not really knowing much about our destination city. over the course of a week, we were told our city is extremely remote, that we are pioneers, and that people were putting us #1 on their prayer list. it seemed as if we had it the worst. we thought that we would get there by donkey for goodness sakes! while that may seem funny and extreme, we were prepared for it.

luckily riding donkeys to Longde is not what happened. we flew from Beijing to Yinchuan, then took a 5 1/2 hour bus ride to Longde. This bus ride was through the mountains of rural northern China. i felt as if i was at the Grand Canyon....which i have never actually seen in real life. God's creation shouted His name as we rode along. fields of sunflowers lined the road with Chinese farmers diligently working their land. God's majesty did not stop at amazing me the entire trip. as we sat, singing praises in the bus, we all wondered what the next month would hold. then, we arrived.

our bus pulled into a small parking lot between 3 buildings, a courtyard of sorts. we all piled out, in our banquet best, for a banquet with the city officials and education leaders. exhausted from travel, we put on our smiling faces and did our best small talk as we ate traditional mutton. it was actually pretty delicious, it became a favorite of mine. after the banquet we were shown our hotel rooms. they had paired us up alphabetically into rooms. so, we filled, almost the entire first floor of this small hotel. our rooms were equipped with beds and pillows that felt (and could have very possibly been) like a sack of oats. our bathrooms were what we deemed them as a shoilet. the definition of a shoilet is a room with a shower head and a toilet. my roommate and i's shoilet could have easily been bigger than our actual room. but, we were able to use our bathroom with ease and comfort...if you look at it that way.

while unpacking, we were informed that the first floor was too damp for us, the foreigners, so they moved us upstairs. while the first floor was fine, we packed all our stuff, and moved upstairs. we rested, then prepared for another banquet. after that banquet, we returned to our hotel, which was yards away, and prepared for the first day of teaching.

*we were pioneers this summer. we were the first Camp China teams that have been to the city of Longde. we very well could have been the first foreigners they saw. and, we were different. i count it a privilege that we were able to do what we did this summer. we were able to show God's love, without ever saying His name. while that may seem insignificant, it was huge. everyone saw the difference in us. whether it was giving a 16 year old student a hug, the first in her life, or saying hello to a stranger in the street, we lived and breathed God's love. there was no way we could have done it without the prayers and support of people at home and with ELI. i am so thankful for those prayers, and definitely learned the power of prayer this summer. 

stay tuned!