It was our last day of ministry in Asia. I was excited when I woke up and couldn’t believe we would be leaving Asia soon. As I brushed my teeth, I ran through the list of conversation topics I had planned on using that day. Our host had told us that on our last day we would be teaching conversational English to middle and high schoolers for the morning and afternoon.
Perfect! I had been practicing conversational English for the last two months and had some great topics in mind. One surprise was that the YWAM students would be joining us! That helped a bit because we were a bit nervous to be in a large classroom with kids who don’t speak English very well. Now we had translators with us and we wouldn’t have to fill the whole time ourselves. Perfect.
Team Warriors piled in the van (which we had given the name Earl) and we set off for our destination. Upon arrival, we were greeted by one of the teachers. We had met her before so it was nice to see a familiar face.
And then she welcomed us to her kindergarten.
Wait, what?
Kindergarten does not equal middle school. I don’t think we will be having many conversations in English with children who are 5 and 6.
But no problem, we are flexible! They told us we only needed to have an hour program prepared and then we would help the children with an activity of making puppets out of paper bags. Having the YWAM students there helped as well because then we really only needed to fill half an hour of the time.
We walked to the main room that we would be teaching the kids in and were told we had half an hour to prepare something to perform for the 100 children that would be coming in. And that’s when our host turned to us and asked…
“So do you have a recycling skit prepared?”
“Ummm what? Sorry, no, we don’t”
“You don’t have a recycling skit?”
*blank stares from our team* “No, we don’t have one prepared…”
“Ok well you should prepare one”
Okay sure no problem. We can teach kindergartners about recycling! We sat down and brainstormed up a recycling skit. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!
Our half-hour of preparation was up and the students came walking in….more like crawling in because they were TWO YEARS OLD. They were not middle schoolers and they definitely weren’t kindergarten age which is what we had been told.
I don’t know if you have ever tried to teach about recycling to two year-olds whose first language is not English…but we haven’t either because we ran out of time and only performed one dance while the YWAMers used up the rest of the hour. We never even used our recycling skit.
Welcome to the World Race.
If you are a future Racer and are reading this, my greatest advice to you is BE FLEXIBLE (and make sure you always have a recycling skit prepared).
