Monday July 23
We woke up before 6 AM so we could meet for small group devotions from 6:10 to 6:40. Pastor Joshua then led us in the armor of God prayer and we all left for the bus to go to our respective schools at 6:50. We ate breakfast on the bus. Our group arrived at the Da An school at about 7:45, but we were 10 minutes late starting assembly at 8. David Lin, a retired engineer who attended FEC Arcadia and was the Mandarin member of their Local Missions Committee, but now attends MBCLA is the main speaker for assembly on our team, David will speak for 3 assembly sessions and Vision will sing for one session. The fifth session will be the students presentation or showcase on Friday. After 45 minutes, we dispersed to the 10 junior high grades (three 7th grade, three 8th grade, and four 9th grade) with a total of 181 students, we are to teach. We were pleasantly surprised that 5 of our music students from last week joined us in the teaching classes. They live fairly close and couldn't wait to see us again, which is an indication of the impact we had on their lives. What was funny in the classes was Tania, who is 14 years old, is teaching 9th grade and some of her students are older than her, but the students guessed her age as 18, 23 or even older. Meanwhile, Pastor Joshua and the other older non-teachers met with the principal and after tea, were given a VIP tour of the school. This principal, even though not a believer, welcomed us warmly, and explained his goal for the school. Surprisingly, he does not emphasize for his students to get good grades, but to develop good character and life skills in his students. We were able to pray for this man and his school. We then drove for about 45 minutes to go to the school at Sha-Lu. We then quickly ate a box lunch at the school and started the assembly at 1 PM. The afternoon program is much like the morning except there are ten 7th grade classes instead of having 8th or 9th grade students. Charmaine stomach felt queasy in the afternoon so she sat out part of the teaching time by resting in the nursing station at the school, but she is fine and ate a lot during dinner. Health-wise, we are in pretty good shape: besides Charmaine's stomach and Tania's burn (recovering well, no infection, etc.), Gabbie has a sore throat but she said it is not from a cold but dryness. After dinner, we had a few minutes to worship together and prayed for those not feeling or sleeping well. We then had "family spiritual time", a half hour for each church group or in our case, Vision, to talk and pray together. Then each school had about an hour to debrief the teaching, discuss problems and issues that came up and work through them. Then the remaining time before 10 AM (clean up and bedtime) was used to fine tune tomorrow's program. Tomorrow afternoon, Vision will be singing and Hannah sharing her testimony at Sha-Lu for 20 minutes during assembly time. We will have at least 4 of the music students joining us to sing, a bass, two altos and a soprano, and maybe a tenor. Pray for this and that God will continue to draw these students to Him.
Here is a photo of the start of assembly at Da-An school.
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