March Madness

Alright, I just want to reiterate for those of you who do not know me. The NCAA Basketball tournament is with out a doubt the best sporting event. It is so much fun to watch the upsets, the buzzer beaters, and so many games being played in such a short amount of time. I have been able to watch a lot of games from "On Demand" from CBS Sportsline. This afternoon I came home from school to watch unbelievalbe endings to the UCLA-Gonzaga game, and the Texas-West Virginia game (wow, that was GREAT).

Let me add, that I did witness a great ending at the expense of my beloved Hawkeyes, but it's ok. I still remain excited for all of this basketball that is being played.

To school news.

This morning, the foreign teachers lead chapel for the Junior and Senior High Students. We made bracelets with different colored beads, each standing for part of the Gospel message (see previous post for a story on prep for this chapel). It was fun and the students really liked getting the bracelets. Giving them something interactive and tangible is great, because most of the time they just get a lecture or a message. Plus it empowers them, by giving them the opportunity to share the message with others.

For classes today, we had a fun day with the students. They had been taking tests all week, and this was the only day of full class. We did not want to do anything to get the students ahead of the schedule, so we played an smaller scale version of "4 on the couch". Some of you who read this might know that game, and if you are interested in hearing about it just post something and I could elaborate. Anyway, it was a much needed opportunity to have fun and build rapport with the students.

I only see some of these kids one time a week, and the others I only see 2 times a week. I realize that it has been a lot more difficult to build that relationship with the students. However, I have started to pray more about it, and asked God to give me ways to build stronger relationships with me students.

Until later....

Mark

Beads and other things...

We are trying to plan a chapel service for this Friday. Part of the service will involve giving each student a bracelet with different colored beads on it. Each color will represent some part of the Gospel message. Yellow-God created everything perfect, Black-sin, Red-Jesus' blood on the cross, White-forgiveness in Christ, Green-growth in faith, and Yellow-eternal life. (And yes, we repeated Gold).

To do this we needed to purchase the beads and string to make the bracelets. So Michelle asked a national to help us find a good store where we could purchase these supplies. Let me preface that our last chapel planning involved using technology and it ended up being an enormous hassle, but that could be a story for a different time.

Last night we went to find the store, all ready to start making our beads. Of course we got on the street and could not find the store that matched the character's in the name we had written down. So we wandered the street looking for the place to buy these beads. We finally come across the bead store, very excited that we can proceed with our bead buying. Of course when we get into the store they do not have all of the same sizes for the 5 basic colors we needed. In fact, they had about 3 different sizes for the 5 colors that we needed. Furthermore, it appeared as thought all of the beads could only be purchased in small packages of 7 or 8 (we need over 200 bracelets for chapel).

This was rather frustrating, but we rolled with it. In my broken Chinese I tried to communicate what we needed and that we required more beads than the small packages had. The situation took some more time than we had planned but, eventually we purchased materials that would suffice. Not ideal, but I mean why would a bead store have 5 of the same colored, same sized beads, right? Ah, the wonders of planning chapel!

We walked out of the store to go buy some dumplings for supper, satisfied that we would be able to actually make the bracelets. As we rounded the corner to go to the food stand, I saw a big sign with red characters. I looked at it closely to discover that those characters were the characters for the bead store we had originally been looking for. Ugh! We went to the wrong store, and did not even know it.

As supper was being purchased Michelle went to that store to see if the supplies were more fitting for our needs. And of course, that store also failed to have the 5 same sized beads with the five basic colors that we needed. So it had made no difference which store we went to, but was definitely something I can laugh about.

Ok, that is a story was just another crazy experience of trying to purchase things in Taiwan. I should share more stories on my blog, and will attempt to do this in the future. For now, it is way past my bedtime, and I still have 40 Senior 1 tests to check tomorrow. I would like to finish those before I get the 100 Senior 2 tomorrow afternoon. I must say I continue to have appreciation for all of those teachers I had in high school English, and upper level history classes at Iowa State. Reading all of those essays and paragraphs can get a little taxing.

Peace!

Mark