Tacos and apple pie

This week I spent some time visiting a woman in a city a couple hours south of me. She is a volunteer English teacher at a Christian center in the city. During her English classes she very naturally finds ways to share the gospel. Some of her classes are more informal, with students just dropping in anytime during a three-hour period for help with their English. During one of these informal classes the woman shared the creation story and the story of Moses. Several students said this was their first time to ever hear about Moses.

She is loved by her students and other teachers. They say that just her presence at the center makes things better.

This lady left her home and family in America to follow the Lord's leading overseas.

Here's the thing: She is 93 years old! And in a couple months she'll be 94. Maybe I enjoyed hanging out with her because she helped me feel young :)

She knows exactly how many steps she has to climb to get from her favorite restaurant up to the sky train platform. But she knows the city and gets around with no problem using the sky train. "If you put one foot in front of the other, you'll get where you are going," she said as she put on her sunglasses and got out her walking cane.

She was a gracious host, wanting to cook tacos and apple pie for me in her dorm-sized apartment (actually, it was probably smaller than a dorm room). "I love to share," she told me as she went down the hall to see if other teaches wanted to join us for lunch.

Her life of faithfulness reminded me of this verse:

"...aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one."

English camp

Earlier this week I helped with an English camp at a temple school. The children who attend this school are all from the same people group, and they come from migrant worker families. The school only goes to grade 6 because by that times most students have to go work and help earn money for their family. 

Last month I helped a team host a Christmas party at the school. We played games and shared the Christmas story. The "stage" for the Christmas drama was actually right in front of the temple. A few young boys who are monks weren't allowed to participate, but they watched us from inside.

For the English camp, the school asked us to help teach the students the English words for the measuring unit they had just learned. So words like centimeter, kilometer, gram, liter, etc. I kinda had to laugh the night I sat down to write a lesson plan on distance, length and height using the metric system, which I hardly know myself!

Several people who live here, as well as a volunteer team from America, helped with the English camp. We taught in the classrooms in the morning and then set up a "market" in the afternoon, when the students could practice using English to buy things and make things. 

A few pics from the day from a friend:

Craft time at the market

Using their ruler to practice measuring 

Busy buying at the market