Help from an "expert"

It's Monday now!  I never got around to posting last week, so of course now I won't remember a whole lot of details.  Oh well!

It was fun to have a team visit from Shanghai...a very interesting group, at that!  I think they all go to an international church together (although they actually didn't all know each other!), so there was a Chinese couple with a little ten or so year old daughter, an American man and his Chinese wife with their middle school aged (I think) daughter and elementary son, a Chinese mother with her teenage daughter (and the mom has lived all over the place so she had an interesting accent.  The daughter had an "American" accent), another couple maybe from Europe somewhere with their teenage son and daughter, a lady from the UK, and a girl in her late 20s from the US.  They helped with construction at the school and did all the feeding sites for the week.

Leslie, the girl from the US, teaches first grade at an international school.  I got some new fun ideas from her!  Usually, part of the team helped with the construction and the other part helped tutor kids at school, but Leslie actually taught a couple lessons in my class and we had other volunteer teachers come in to watch one time.  No, I didn't get the week off, as Carla has teased me about...Wednesday was the only day I completely gave up my English lesson for her to teach.  But she was a huge help for the week!

It was pretty funny on Monday when she just tutored with the rest of the team and she was surprised to hear that the volunteer teachers go home at 11:30 every day.  Then, on Tuesday, she did a Math lesson and commented afterwards how tired she was!  My class is so energetic, it zaps all your energy to keep them focused.  I felt so bad for her on Tuesday.  I probably didn't prepare the kids well enough ahead of time to let them know she would be teaching, so it was partly my fault, but they acted as bad as they had been when I first got here.  However, by the end of the week they were much better.  Based on her comments, though, I am now more sure that my kids are more energetic than a normal first grade classroom.  I'm glad there's only 14 of them!

Jhing, Leslie, and I at the going away/thank you party for the team.

 Aside from school, Leslie had asked me on Thursday where the grocery stores are because she finds it interesting to see the different foods in every country.  It was kind of hard to tell her, so I was her tour guide and she got to walk down the main road for the first time.  We went to three different grocery stores, then cut through a strip where people sell fruits and veggies to get to the beach road to walk back.  It was pretty fun.  It was neat to see what she found interesting, and therefore helped me to stop and "re-appreciate" the culture here...plus I noticed some things I hadn't paid any attention to before!

I went ahead and went with the team to my normal feeding site on Thursday as well.  It was fun to see the story they had for the kids and to learn a couple of new songs!  I would say I have children's worship songs stuck in my head about, oh, 100% of the time here :)

Also last week, we gained a new teacher at just the right time!  Friday was Carrie's last day here, but a guy named Russ has now RE-joined the Agape volunteer staff.  I think this is his third time here.  He left in June (or around then) to fund raise at home before returning.  Yay for new friends!  Anderson, the Johnston family, and I are the only ones who hadn't met him before.

Outside of school and feeding sites, we had lots of game nights.  I think Carla, Russ, and a couple others played games a lot last year so I think Russ' return has given Carla the idea to do that more often again.  Fun!

The weekend was full of sports.  Saturday, I did volleyball with the kids in the morning, then played basketball with some of the "singles" and the kids, then played ultimate frisbee after lunch for a few minutes before deciding my stomach was too full to be running, and then played volleyball with my Filipino friends.  We also had girls night: Elizabeth, Carla, Olivia, the Johnston twins and I went out to eat and watched a movie at the house.  The girls stayed the night...I left partway through the movie because even in the plastic chair (cushioned furniture doesn't exist here), I was falling asleep.

Sunday after church, I played basketball with some of our "missionary crew" or whatever you would like to call us.  It was fun to get together with the family kids and play, even if most of them didn't know what they were doing :)  Then, I played volleyball.  Quite the active weekend!

I wish I could be here for the last of the school year...if I knew someone was coming that could take my place, I would feel much better about leaving.  Please pray that something works out!  The school year here ends in March, so it would only be for a couple of months. Any takers? :)