On Sunday there were 6 people. Mark, Sophia, Jane, Cheryl (Canadian teacher), Jack, and Amy (Jack's girlfriend and Colonel's student). It's a good start to this semester. It's definitely much better than what we had last semester.
English corner has been going well. On Monday we both had some good conversations about higher things. That's pretty good for our first English corner. On Wednesday, I attended English corner without Colonel. He has classes on Wednesday nights, so he'll always come to English corner late (after 9pm). I met up with Sailing, Katherine, Jasmine, and a few people I didn't really know. On Monday, our conversation was somehow shifted to talk about Japan. I told the students about the work that Colonel and I did in Japan about 6 years ago. Tonight at English corner, Sailing brought this up again. She wanted to know where we taught them English. I told her we did it at the local church there. Then they wanted to know what I taught them, so I told them that we taught English using the Bible. This opened up a whole other conversation. They wanted to know if the people really believed, if they were serious about studying, or how we taught them. It was a really good conversation. They stayed talking with me until we left at 10pm.
In the end, it's been a good week even if nothing else goes right. I expect we'll have one more person join us for our next meeting.
We've signed up to get Chinese lessons over the summer. The plan is to go to America and then return to China in July. In August we'll travel to Shanghai to get our lessons. We need to raise about $ 6000 for the lessons. This amount needs to be in our hands by the time we leave in July to return to China. Here's hoping that the Father is going to bless this effort. Some of our friends said that they can give up to $3000. We're very thankful about that. I know that the rest will come in soon.
Oh, and hallelujah, we just got paid today! We've gone since early December without getting paid. It's wonderful to finally get some money. If we had gone one more week, we would have had to use our savings for our airplane tickets in order to eat. The Father is good and He's Always right on time!
We were paid for January, February, and we received our bonus for completing one semester. Normally we would get this later, but because we're buying our airline tickets soon, we requested that the school put in an early request. They're working with us, so that's great.
It's nice when things work out right.