I love living here in Taiwan! The people, the beauty, I am even getting used to not being able to communicate with most people (you just smile and say “Wo ting bu dong!”). It is hard to believe how far way home I am over here...well, except when I'm trying to call my family without waking everyone up in the middle of their night! God has been so good in creating a home away from home for us here and while there are things that come up, He is the process of uniting us as a team to module the body of Christ to the Taiwanese.
Our days here are beginning to fall into a pattern as we get up have devotions, breakfast, team prayer and head off to our various schools, sometimes by train and sometimes getting a ride with another teacher from our school. I am teaching at three different schools, four days a week and am starting to get to know some of the teachers. Keeping the kids straight is another story as I teach seventeen different classes (a couple of those I have twice a week) and each class has an average of 20-25 kids so that equals...a lot of kids. I am taking pictures and starting to collect lists of names for the different classes and hope that I will be able to get a better handle on who's who and which school I know them from when I meet them in the night market. Two of my schools are country schools near by and are mostly aboriginal (Taroko) children and the third is a small school in Hualien City. One thing that really surprised me at first was the amount of variety in the kids because they are not just Chinese. I have some that look very Chinese, a lot that look more like American Indians than Chinese, and a few that could pass for Caucasian with countless variables in between. Some of my kids have auburn/red-ish hair, some are freckled, some are tiny, some are big, the list could go on and on. The one thing that is the same with all the kids at all my schools though, is that they are so eager to be close to me or talk with me. It’s “mob the teacher time” for a group hug when the bell rings that class is over, but I love interacting with them in-between classes.
I plan the lessons and all the teaching for 2/3rds of my classes, which has been a learning experience for me as well as the kids, some classes go really well and others, well, a few of them bombed. As God places me out of my comfort zone in some of the schools were the teachers English level is lower, it has been Awesome to see His’s faithfulness. Especially as I gain confidence in my ability to teach, God has been reminding me of how much I still need to depend on Him. My responsibility is to do the preparation and plan my lessons to the best of my ability, but it is God who makes a class successful and prayer a big difference.
Christina Furrow
Hualien County
