The Calm Before the Storm

Hey everyone! It's Doris :D Finally, it's my turn to share about our day!

Today, we started morning worship and devotion time at 7:30. We had Timothy and Ben lead in our worship time and we sang two songs: "There is None Like You" and "How Great is Our God". Afterwards, we ate breakfast! To my surprise, we had the most closest to American breakfast that I've seen since coming here. There was the choice of peanut butter with jelly sandwich or eggs with cheese.

Mmm doesn't it look so yummy? I bet you're hungry

Timmy is definitely enjoying his sandwich very much.

After breakfast, we had a time of praise/prayer, where we prayed a lot for our upcoming camp time, to prepare our hearts to not stress over the lesson plans and really allow God to work among us during the week. After worship and prayer, we got into our 6 small groups again to practice the lesson plans.

Timmy is looking rather interested in the teaching, wouldn't you think?

 For lunch, we had dumplings! My favorite! Even though they didn't have any spicy sauce, soy sauce was still okay. We also got to enjoy some yellow watermelon! Some of us have never tried or seen it before. I'm not entirely sure why they are different than our normal watermelon, but these are much sweeter than our usual red and green ones that we are familiar with.

SO MANY DUMPLINGS! :D

Yellow watermelon!

Taiwanese co-workers enjoying dumplings together!

 In the afternoon after lunch, we went over to the middle school that we will be holding the camp this week. This school seems overall a lot more modern and cleaner than BaoZhong. We got a tour of the entire campus and the classrooms are pretty big. Each classroom has about 21 desks. Each of us will have around 10 students in our class, so there will be plenty of space for everyone. We spent most of the afternoon looking around the school, arranging the desks in preparation for class tomorrow, writing a note on the chalkboard for our students, and picking classrooms for our London stations and workshops later in the week.

In front of DongRong Middle School

The auditorium

Pastor Lin is so fashionable

Basketball court and field 

Decorations for this week

Hannah is so buff

While we were at the school, two of my students from last year when I went to Taiwan came to visit me! Both of them are from GuoGou Middle School and have just graduated. They will be attending Chiayi High School in the upcoming year. I was incredibly excited and happy to see them. Last year when I was teaching English at GuoGou with a church from Seattle (SFCC), our team formed a pretty tight bond with this class. It was really sad to leave them and I had no idea if I would ever be able to see them again. So this year, I have been incredibly blessed to be able to come back again to Chiayi and be in a village that is close enough for them to come see me! Two more students came after this picture was taken, and they rode their bicycles for 30 minutes just to see me. Needless to say, these kids made my day. It was awesome being able to catch up with them and I hope to see them more often this week before we leave.

Jacey and Dan from GuoGou!

After the school visit, we went back and our STM members got some bubble tea! As we can expect, Ben was a part of that. Then we had about an hour or so of resting time and then dinner. Our evening time included worship, prayer and announcements for our first day of camp. So as we prepare for our first day, please keep us in your prayers:

1. Pray for good health. Some of us have been having some stomach issues lately, which may be caused by the unclean bowels (apparently they don't use soap...). Pray for strong stomachs to both digest and fight against bad bacteria.
2. Pray for protection against diseases the mosquitos may bring. Even though we use mosquito repellant, those pesky things are resilient.
3. Continue praying for the language barrier between the Taiwanese co-workers and STM members.
4. Pray for our first day of camp tomorrow! Pray for our hearts and minds as we are come in contact with our students. Since we have already done this once before, I have faith we will be more confident. But there are students who are coming who have been forced to attend the camp and may not want to cooperate with us. Pray for a good first day to break the ice between us and them.
5. Pray for humility. It's a good thing that we have already experienced one week of camp, but it's also bad because it can cause us to think we know what's right and possibly step on the toes of the Taiwanese co-workers.
6. Pray for God to work among us during the camp. We know that as much as we try to prepare every little detail of the camp, things can still go wrong or may not go according to our plans. Pray for flexibility and our ability to adapt to whatever situation that may come our way. Pray that we will be aware of opportunities to share the gospel. Pray that above all, we will have faith and trust in God that He can and will do great things.
7. If you can, please check out our friend Gary's website. As Ben shared yesterday, he is going to Japan after this camp to teach English and could use some help with funds. He has been an incredible addition to our team both from this week and last week. We are very grateful for his translations from Chinese to English and also his leadership in our team. He's awesome. Please help support him: http://www.gofundme.com/b40m38

Thank you all for reading! I know today's post is kind of short and possibly uninteresting, so here's a little bit of excitement to reward you for making it thus far. Hope you enjoy :)

"It's a bird! No...

....it's a plane! No! It's....

CHIPMUNK HANNAH" :D

Sorry Hannah, it had to be done :P