Not a goodbye, but a see you later

Hello everyone!! It's Doris again. Sorry we weren't able to update for Saturday... We had a hectic day and got really tired by the end of it, so there was no time to write anything. BUT it's my job now to fill in the gaps.

Our team started Saturday morning with a short 30 minute devotion time, followed by breakfast and a time of worship. We then swept and mopped the first floor in preparation for the Gospel Meeting. A lot of the kids actually started showed up around 9:30 am, even when the meeting officially began at 10 am.

All the kids at the Gospel Meeting Saturday morning

We played human knot with them as an icebreaker. For those that don't know, human knot is basically when you get into a circle with maybe about 10 other people, cross hands with people in the circle and try to untangle yourselves so you form a circle again. My team sort of struggled and in the end, we ended up with two circles of people, with one circle entangled in the other. Following the ice breaker, our STM team performed our sin chair skit for the last time and then we had a time of testimonies from Nathan and Gary.

Nathan giving his testimony in Chinese

Gary giving his testimony! No skit this time :( I was sad. But it couldn't be the same without Raymond. 

 After the testimonies, Pastor Lin gave a message about the gospel and invited the kids to close their eyes and raise their hands if they wanted to receive Jesus into their lives as their Savior. 30 kids came to the Gospel Meeting and 13 of them raised their hands! God is good. It's amazing because the night before, I had prayed with my small group for Saturday and asked for at least 10 to raise their hands to accept Christ.

Pastor Lin giving a message

Some kids passing around an information sheet (I think)

 After the Gospel Meeting officially ended, we had a time of eating snacks, taking pictures and chatting. Many of us had some kids who truly liked us a lot and as usual, would ask to add us on just about every social media site (Facebook, LINE, instagram, etc.). Some of us were more popular than others :P

Ben was quite the ladies man the entire week... 

Eliza being super cute

Ben really liked this little girl... He kept talking about her after they left. She is very cute though...

 After most of the kids left, we had our last lunch in Dong Shi :( Pictures of our food are below.

I don't quite know what this is...

Some type of fried chicken I believe

Tofu!

 Since this was our last day in Dong Shi, I invited my kids from last year to come join the Gospel Meeting as well. Unfortunately, they came really late and weren't able to make it to see everything. BUT I was happy to be able to see two new faces (Ken in the far front left and David in the middle who isn't smiling). I still can't believe how sweet they are to come visit me. They got to know some of our team members (like the two Philips pictured below and also Angelica). They stayed with us until I left on our bus and even rode their bikes beside the bus for quite awhile... I will miss them a lot :(

On the bus, it didn't take long for most of our team to pass out. We were clearly exhausted.

I was tempted to drop something into Ben's mouth but... decided against it cause I'm too nice :P

After leaving all the coworkers and kids, we were quite sad. Some tears were shed, but at least we had one last coworker with us... Gary! Angelica and I spent a good 4 hours talking to him before the bus dropped him off at his home in Tao Yuan. Like we mentioned before in previous posts, Gary has been a huge helping hand to our team throughout both weeks. His English is incredibly good and he was one of our main translators both from English to Chinese and Chinese to English. We are so grateful for him. So before he left us forever, we as a team decided to pitch in our weekly spending money from Dong Shi towards his mission trip. We also gave him one of our extra CEC shirts (because he's an honorary member) and a card that we all wrote messages in. We tried to be as sneaky as possible, but he was so oblivious that it didn't even matter. He was very surprised and very touched. When he got home, he even posted the card onto his wall :D

Look at how happy he is. If you read his testimony on the go fund me page, you wouldn't even be able to tell he was once a gangster :P

 After many hours, we finally arrived at our hostel in Taipei at around 8 pm. We set our stuff down into the rooms (FINALLY ROOMS WITH BEDS) and then went to a nearby restaurant to eat dinner.

The view is quite nice. I believe this is from the rooftop.

Before dinner! We still look happy, which is good.

Mr. Lu ordered a ton of food for us... we ate a lot of it but there was still a lot of leftovers! But we were all very satisfied. After dinner, we went back to the hostel and had a debriefing session to talk about our two weeks and what went well and what could be improved. I was kinda tired by that time, but I think overall it went well... Though this has been our first overseas mission trip and first time working with VGM, I think we all had a really good experience learning more about each other, the coworkers, and getting to know the kids.

K-Pop stars are born

 Pastor Lin left after the first 15 minutes of our debriefing session to go to his home and visit his father. After our debrief, we met up with one of our Bao Zhong coworkers named Jamin! He came to visit us and we chatted for a little bit before going to sleep. We had church the next day and a lot of activities planned so we tried to start getting ready around 11 pm. So we ended our day being very excited to see everyone again!

Seeing Jamin again after a week!

All of us were quite excited

Cheese :D

So much excitement

We played a lot of "Silent Football", which is a really fun game that is a "gentleman's game". We started speaking in a British accent for fun, so excuse me if I started typing like I'm British... ANYWAYS. Thanks for reading :) Sorry again for the late post!