A World Racer wears many hats. Ministry this year has looked like nothing I pictured. Which hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing. After all, I was told to leave all expectations at the door.
I have done some pretty weird things like scrubbing toilets and washing windows of local businesses in Ireland to spending 3 months in Africa with my team akin to the Von Trapp family where we were paraded in front of the people and out of the middle of nowhere told to perform a song. It drove me absolutely mad sometimes.
More times than not this year I have been completely unqualified to do any of the tasks set before me. I never attended specialized training and I certainly never went to seminary school, yet I’ve preached more this year than I have in my whole life. I never needed a degree to preach; just an open heart to teach what God was teaching me. Simply acting as a vessel.
This month the task set before us: teach English. Ok, easy enough. I’ve done that quite a bit in the last few months. Not my favorite but I can do it. Well turns out this time we were teaching college students. Throwing my plans of singing the ABCs and the Days of the Week song out the window. I realized I’m probably the least qualified person ever for this job. These kids are really smart, so I find myself sitting down and having to create actual lesson plans. Gives me a whole new respect for teachers let me tell you.
Let’s just say teaching English can be pretty funny. I never really think about how weird our language is, I’ve found myself having to explain some really strange things.
From what uncircumcised means when reading a Bible story. That was a toughie let me tell you. To teaching plurals through a poem we’d found. The first example was how goose changes to geese but moose stays the same. We were trying to express that just because the endings were the same, the plurals weren’t always. Forgetting of course there aren’t moose in Cambodia. So we launched into a description of a moose. Luckily some boy was wearing some faux Abercrombie and Fitch pants with a large moose on them. Who knew Abercrombie and Fitch could be educational?
The funniest perhaps was explaining how a man could have curly hair when they saw a picture of him in a magazine. That seems normal to me, but not in Asia. You see people don’t have curly hair here; their hair is stick straight. First I had to explain what a curling iron was. They didn’t understand how American girls could have curly and straight hair. Then I have to explain naturally curly or straight hair. We explained it had to do with your genes, which confused them even more because we’d been teaching them homonyms and they were confused at how your ‘jeans’ affected your hair. Then I launched into a long explanation of DNA and your genetic makeup and how Americans can be born with something other than straight hair. To complicate the matter Bambi and I decided to throw in the notion that we had naturally wavy hair; our hair was both braided that day so they were beyond confused.
Over an hour later we think they finally understood naturally curly hair. One can never really know. Needless to say I am no teacher. English is so confusing. But definitely provides entertainment.
