{FECA Vision Choir} Report 8

Saturday July 27

A few more details about last night's program.  We sang a total of 12 songs, a few by ourselves but the majority with our Taiwan students.  We also performed the old Vision Puppet Skit with Belle doing an excellent narration of the story and Michael playing the role of "God", a superb rendition!  We will certainly miss their talents but we leave with fond memories of our time together.

We met at 6:30 this morning to make sure we can arrive in Hualien by 1 PM.  Everyone from the church was there and they had packed two boxes of food and drinks for our breakfast and lunch on the road.  Annie, Rev. Chou's daughter who had daytime classes but practiced and sang with us every time she was available, wrote us a nice send off note.  We also welcomed Mickey's friend Patricia (Tricia), who is a non-singer but just wanted to hangout with us.  We saw this as an opportunity to share our lives and maybe she too can catch the good news.  So besides the 14 from the US, we have Tina, Mickey and Tricia.  Terry saw us off but will join us later next week.  We stopped off at Taoyuan Airport to pick up Auntie Jennifer at 8:15, who landed about 5 this morning and headed off to Hualien.  Because of bad traffic, we did not get to the elderly home until 1:30.  There were about 25 residents there.  It is a Catholic nursing home so we felt quite free to sing there.  We were met by Grace, a gracious Filipino lady who with her husband runs the AirBnB we will be staying in for the next three nights.  We greeted the elderly residents and sang for about 30 minutes.  We stopped by a dumpling house and ate our lunch at about 3 PM, then proceeded to the Queen 5 Hostel AirBnB.  This is a very nice facility which normally charges US $120 per room, but gives a special rate of only $27 for missionaries (basically covering the cleaning fee) as their ministry gift.  The rooms are specious and clean and the bathroom as good as any 5 star hotel's.  We ate a boxed dinner, spent an hour doing our devotions, and debriefed the last two days' activities.  We were all very impressed with the servant attitude and dedication of the Zhudong Church youth, who woke up at 5:30 everyday to cook breakfast for us, then participated with us on all our activities, even acting in our skits.  One of them shared that if it wasn't for us, they would be sleeping until noon.  This challenged us to think how we treat guests to our church.