A week in Taiwan

We have now been in Taiwan for one week! We have stayed very busy and the time is going so fast. We are staying at Concordia Middle School in Chiayi. It is a private Christian school where they have missionary teachers from the U.S. that teach Bible classes as well as regular classes taught by Taiwanese teachers. We are staying with the missionaries and it has been really fun getting to know them as we do programs in their classrooms and also spending time with them outside of school. We played Ultimate Frisbee with them one day after school. It was a blast and it felt so good to get out and run around. We haven't gotten to do that much overseas. It's very humid here and we were all pretty sweaty after the game. This is a picture of my shirt after the game. Dave calls it my "reverse swimsuit."


We have done many programs at Concordia Middle School, going from class to class doing 40 minute programs for the classes. They are short programs, but so many of them add up. We have had some days of 7 programs.

We have been splitting time between Concordia Middle School (actually middle and high school) and Chiayi Girls School. The two schools are very different and we have gotten very different responses at the two. The kids at Concordia have teachers from the U.S. so seeing foreigners is not as exciting to them. Some of the girls at Chiayi Girls School have never seen someone from the United States. Also at Concordia the students have Bible classes so they have heard the gospel many times. For some of the girls at the girls' school, our program was one of the first times they have heard the gospel.

Here's a picture of us with one of the classes at Concordia after our program.


Here's a picture of us with one of the classes at Chiayi Girls' School.


The girls at Chiayi are so excited to meet us after the programs. After every different class they line up to come by to greet each of us, the boys with a handshake and Jenny and I with hugs. The first day I received over 200 hugs! Then there is usually an incredible number of pictures taken with us.


During lunch our first day at Chiayi Girls School, one of the classes came back to eat lunch with us. Then they showed us around their school campus, making a stop at the snack bar to buy us milk tea. Here's a picture we took along the way.



This is a picture of us with Ming. Ming is originally from Taiwan but now lives near Denver, Colorado in the U.S. She was back here visiting and helped give us a tour of the area and came to school one of the days. Yiwen, the music teacher we are working with at Chiayi, translated one of our songs, "Unify Us," into Chinese for us and Ming also helped us learn it. That makes 7 different languages of the song: English, Chinese, and 5 dialects from the Philippines.

During our tour of the area we went to a Taoist temple. Ming told us a little bit about what was going on. In Taiwan there is a lot of ancestor worship and worshiping different gods. This is a video of them processing into the temple with the gods.



We still don't know all that much about the different religions here, but I think visiting the temple was a good thing, to know a little background about where some of the students are coming from.

The culture here is so different from the Philippines. Where as the Filipino culture is very laid back, the culture here is more like the U.S., so that has been a change for us. It has also been very different staying with the missionaries. They are all around our ages and from different parts of the U.S.. The other day I realized how weird it was that people were speaking English when they weren't talking to us. We haven't had that since we left home in January!

One thing that we have been really excited about here is the tea! We have been trying different kinds a tea almost everyday. I really enjoy the milk tea with pearls (little jelly-like balls/bubbles that you suck up through your straw as you drink the tea). You can go to the tea stand and mix just about any flavor into your different kinds of tea.

We are really enjoying our time here and it is already going so fast. Two weeks from tomorrow we leave Taiwan. I think three weeks here is going to be so short.