January 2002

Dear Friends,

2001: A Summary of Our Activities

January-February Winter Break

During our winter vacation time John’s mother and big brother came to China to visit. We spent time with them in Beijing, Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai.

Late February-June: Spring Term

Kim resumed her 16-hour teaching load at Jiangsu Institute of Education. John resumed his language studies in his spare time, while continuing to help out at Amity Foundation’s Headquarters. Among other tasks, he was involved with producing a new brochure for the teachers program and helping to translate and record narration for an English language version of one of Amity’s existing promotional videos. Meanwhile, John also began a tutoring job, meeting weekly with the 7-year-old daughter of one of our school officials to help her begin learning English. (Her name is Pang Keren)

July: Summer English Program (SEP)

Kim was one of the seminar presenters at the orientation of volunteers in Amity’s Summer English Program, while John used his camera to document the orientation for future promotional material. Once the teams of volunteers were at their assignments teaching, John paid a two-day visit to the Guangfeng City team in Jiangxi Province to further document the program.

August: Summer Training Program (STP)

Each August, Amity conducts a three-week orientation for incoming Amity teachers in Nantong, which is near Shanghai. The orientation is hosted by the Nantong Teachers Training College. This time, Kim took on the duty of teaching the orientation course, and John was the extracurricular activities director. The college provided us with a couple of female students to be babysitters for Benjamin while we tended to our responsibilities, which was crucial to our participation in the program, but still the month really took a toll on us. It had already been a challenging summer with little or no down-time, and we knew that there would be practically no time after the orientation
for us to prepare for the coming school term. Incidentally, John would be taking on his first formal teaching responsibilities as of the fall term and felt it necessary to halt his tutoring with Pang Keren.

September-January: Fall Term

As a way to try to enable both of us to be able to work part-time in the Amity Education Division office, John took a small part of Kim’s teaching load. Now Kim has 12 hours (four classes, two subjects: junior writing and analyzing and appreciating English films), and John has taken two freshman conversation courses. This being John’s rookie year as an ESL teacher, he has required a considerable amount of preparation time crafting his classes. It’s no cake walk!—but very rewarding to have the personal interaction with the Chinese students. He finally feels more like a mission co-worker than a foreign-exchange student.

With two writing courses and a class in English film analysis, it is still a challenge for Kim to be available at the Amity office, and yet she has helped sort through evaluations that were filled out by the 2001 SEP volunteers, and has begun some re-organization for the 2002 SEP orientation, for which she has now been appointed coordinator.

In the fall of 2001, Kim also made a number of weekend trips with one of Amity’s Chinese staff to visit other Amity English teachers at their schools. Amity teachers are always placed at schools with one other Amity teacher as a partner. Each year, every Amity teacher gets a visit from Amity staff to see how things are going with their teaching partner and with the school, and to address any issues, large or small, which may need attention. It’s also a way to maintain a positive relationship with the schools to which Amity relates.

We had more family come to visit during this term. Kim’s parents came during the National Day holidays (first week of October), and we took them to see Wuxi, Suzhou, and Shanghai. Late in November, John’s big brother returned with their youngest brother to spend a few days with us in Nanjing, meeting our students and witnessing the daily grind here, and then going on their own to other places in China for another week before returning home.

During the Christmas season we both invested a lot of energy into trying to enhance our students’ understanding of the holiday and its origins, and we organized Christmas parties. I think you would be very surprised to know how easily Christmas decorations can be found in China now! We caroled in the students’ dorms. Lynn Yarbrough, our American teaching partner and next-door neighbor, baked loads of cookies to share with her students. Kim and I told our students about one of Amity’s charity ministries, the Back To School Project, which finds sponsors for primary school-age kids from poor families. Kim’s students took a collection and, as a Christmas gesture, donated money to sponsor one child all the way through high school.

In both December and January, John went on two trips to visit and photograph communities where some of these sponsored children live. Amity periodically sends out teams to visit the children, bringing gifts and lots of loving encouragement to give them hope and support.

Two different times during this term our computer hard drive was completely erased by viruses that came attached to e-mail. This was especially devastating to Kim, who had created quite a lot of documents for her classes that we did not back up! (Major lesson learned!) Since we had bought our computer used in Nanjing and did not have any driver disks for the Windows platform or the Office software, we are quite indebted to some friends in town who did have drivers that they were willing to let us use to reconstruct our system. After these trials and other hardware-related woes, we resolved during the winter break, while we vacationed for a week in Hong Kong, to
invest in a brand new laptop, a Toshiba Satellite 3000, equipped with Windows XP, and a CD writer to boot!

This just about sums up the most newsworthy events of our year, although it is also worth mentioning that we are approached on a regular basis by book publishers who are looking for native English speakers to help them record dialogues on cassette tapes that are marketed with English language textbooks. Sometimes we turn them down, sometimes we accept the job, depending on our schedule. There is a publisher in Suzhou with whom we have worked a few times now. In 2001, as I recall, we helped them with three different projects. Once, John was also approached by someone scouting for a foreigner to play a small part (a Western journalist) in a TV series about Sun Yat Sen, which he might have done if it hadn’t been right at the start of the fall term when we were particularly short on time.

Ben’s Year

Ben started walking just after his first birthday in January of 2001, and he’s practically been running ever since—at least it feels that way to his mom and dad! He grew quite a bit in the last year and is now over a yard tall even though he just turned two on January 26. As for language activity, he’s still keeping us in suspense! He understands quite a lot in both English and Chinese, and he says a couple of Chinese words, but for the most part he prefers speaking his own personal language (as if everybody has one of their own.) The most difficult thing about his year has been ear and throat infections which have been far too frequent. We’ll be seeing a specialist in Shanghai about this soon, and probably having tubes put in his ears either here or when we return to the U.S. in July. Things he likes best are
dancing to Glen Miller songs, playing outside, bath-time, Helen Oxenberry books, blowing out candles after meals, riding busses, bird-watching, cat-watching, and exploring Daddy’s toolbox. His smiles are a wonderful way to start the day, and his hugs are a wonderful way to end them. God is good, and we are thankful.

Happy Year of the Horse to you all.

John, Kim and Benjamin

The 2002 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 179