Selah and Malachi update

Just a quick note on how the kids are doing:

Malachi is officially walking now-except when he sees a sympathetic female who is willing to pick him up and love him. All of the sudden, his legs just don't seem to work :) He's saying lots of words, or at least trying to. He imitates ALL the sounds he hears, chinese and english. When Carrie walks with him on campus, he spends the entire ride waving and smiling at the passersby. He's a picky eater and still only has 2 teeth. He loves to read and do his animal noises. Selah is his hero.

Selah is still having a hard time with the kid at school. But her chinese is getting better and better. In fact, this week she and I had a conversation in Chinese and she told me afterwards "Mom, your Chinese is getting really good!" Ya, thanks Selah :) Last week she gave our leftovers away to a student without us even suggesting it. She's got a very caring heart and is attached to all our teammates. She welcomes the students into our home and asks them questions about their lives.

They are such a blessing to have as partners here.

bad negotiating skills

For the last year or so our team has been trying desperately to help this sweet like minded woman who sells shoe inserts at the gate in front of our school. We've tried just giving her money or food or offering to help in some way. She rejects all of these things...foreign help is not welcomed 99.9% of the time. After much frustration, I decided to just buy some shoe inserts from her. Well, tonite she wanted to give them to me for free! Ugh...that's not the point. For those of you who watch 'Friends,' it was like when Chandler was trying to give Joey money so he made up a pretend card game and let Joey win.

So I refused to take them for free. She kept insisting and finally charged me 1 kuai (chinese currency). I told her I wanted to pay 2 kuai...she refused....1 kuai she said adamently back. So I told her 1.5 kuai was it. I finally stopped and realized that I had been bargaining UP with her! I just wish she would receive our help instead of me having to negotiate UP the price. Sometimes we just need to receive help and not struggle to do it on our own.

Fate or Faith?

I had lunch a few weeks ago with a good friend here. She and I have spent so much time together and she's become really dear to me. She's the one that taught me to knit, who wouldn't love her?!?! Anyway, I've been really broken over her bondage to fate. That's a huge stronghold here where things are explained away by it just being fate. It feeds into the hopelessness and the need for a Creator. I asked her what she thought of some things and after much dialogue, she said to me "maybe all the things I've been calling fate are really the giver of Faith." This is a huge thing for someone that depends on the system and on herself for everything. Getting people to understand what their world view practically leads to will be eye opening in any culture. Most just don't take the time to think it through. She even admitted to that.

Selah "Stallone" Vaughn

Selah started back in school about 3 weeks ago after the Chinese New Year. Well with the beginning of the new semester, come new students who are now old enough to attend the kindergarten. One particular little boy who is from Korea and speaks no chinese joined her class this term.

Since the first day of class he has picked on her and hit her. She's not aggressive at all and usually just screams and runs to her teacher. Well, after a few days of that, she had had enough. We found all this out by the because Selah explained it to us when we came to get her, but the funny part is that she started to explain it in Chinese and we had to get a translator. So here are her words to explain the incident: "Daddy, that little boy who hits me....today he pushed me into a table. So I threw him to the ground and now his lip is all bloody!" Apparently there was some smack down after lunch. I didn't really get upset with her....actually I was kind of proud of her for defending herself. But we also had to visit the issue of forgiveness and loving those who are mean to us.

Needless to say, Brad and I have spent more than a few minutes laughing at all of this!

On Campus Suicide

We had an engineering major hang himself at the park on saturday. Scholastic pressures and family obligations are so suffocating at times that the students buckle under the pressure. Suicides go up around the time that test scores come back. We also had a student get killed by a car walking to the new campus.

Be thinking that the suicide will not plant thoughts and courage into any other frustrated and depressed students. Also that the call to question their purpose in life will be strong.