We made it safely to Bangkok from
Beijing late last night. China was amazing and not quite what I was
expecting. First of all the people where we stayed in Jaozua in the
Henan province were very very happy to see foreigners, and were very
hospitable to us.
The language barrier is so huge it is
almost impossible to communicate. In addition to the spoken and
written language, they even use different signs for numbers between 6
and 10. All of this together with the fact that almost no one knows
more than hello and bye bye in English made it the most challenging
month for communicating.
The people were for the most part more
than willing to try to figure out our charades and laugh with us when
communication proved too difficult. Our contact told us on the first
day that the most useful phrase we could learn is Tin Bo Dong, which
means I don’t know. Because we were 11 of the maybe 20 or so
foreigners in an area of over 2 million people, everyone assumed we
spoke Chinese. Probably 95% of our conversations ended with those
words and a laugh.
This may surprise most of you because
you know how picky of an eater I am, but one of my favorite things to
do in China was eat the street food. Every market had at least a
dozen different stands selling all kids of things. Some of the
highlights are lettuce wrap in a tortilla with and egg in the middle,
gyro-esque flat bread sandwiches, roasted meat, kebabs, and little
pastries that tasted like strawberry toaster strudels. The food was
amazingly cheap and you could buy all you could eat for about $1.
China was also much greener than I
imagined. The buildings were all gray and the sky was almost
exclusively drab and gray, but there were parks all over the city and
most of the countryside was cultivated fields of green. However, the
air pollution was much worse than I had thought. My nose never
stopped running and I would wake up at night with coughing fits. Its
no wonder that lugies and snot rockets are acceptable everywhere,
even indoors. After you get over the initial shock it is really
funny to see an old grandma hawk a huge lugie a bus station.
Our main focus was working with orphans
and especially orphans with disabilities. I have never really worked
with kids like this before. It was really challenging to see a few
kids literally trapped in their bodies. The organization we
partnered with, Eagles Wings, was focused on taking the kids out of
the government run orphanage and trying to give them the additional
love they need.
My team was working with another team,
Team Cool this month and we were split into groups of 2 or 3 so we
could live in the homes with the kids.
Jon and I stayed with one of the full
time volunteers and coordinators, Donna, and her family which
consisted of 3 girls she had previously adopted from China, and 2
Chinese girls and 1 boy that were part of the Eagles Wings
Organization. She had just moved her family to China 5 months ago
and was still learning the language and implementing changes to help
improve the kids lives.
On most days our primary focus was on
being big brothers to the kids in our home. 4 of the girls were
being schooled at home and the two others spent most of their
schooldays (~7am-7pm) at school or at another house for nap/lunch
time. We tried to stay out of the way during the mornings when the
girls were supposed to be working on school work, but they loved one
of my favorite breakfast foods, egg in the hole. So often I would
make some to share for breakfast.
In the afternoon we would hang out with
the girls and do everything from kite flying, to eating street food,
to helping out with homework, to playing video games. It was a
blast, I’ve never had a younger sister before so having so many was a
little bit of a shock to me, but then I loved it.
So many awesome stories to share, but
I’ll space them out a bit over the next few weeks. Hopefully, there
will be internet near where we are going to be this month. This next
month is going to be a little different than all the others as it is
what we like to call MANistry.
Thailand is know as a huge global
center for prostitution, so the girls are focusing on preventing Thai
girls from getting involved in it, getting girls out of it and
helping them get back into society. So it’s not really a ministry
that guys can be super involved in so were are leaving our teams and
all going to a remote place to do some manly ministry. I’m not sure
what it will look like but I have heard rumors about goat herding.
