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Good bye 2005…
…2006 will be here in a few short hours! (We in China get to welcome it in 13 hours earlier than the east coast of the US. Aren’t we lucky!)
The week has continued on with cleaning and preparing our new school building for students on January 9th. It looks better and better every day - the finishing touches being done by the construction crew are great. We’re looking forward to white boards, tables, chairs, desks, etc. next week.
The most recent news: we bought a scooter. The long commute from our present apartments to the new school building will be more convenient with our new mode of transportation! Hopefully pics will be up soon…
sweeping and painting and sweeping again…
We’ve spent the past two days out at the new school - it’s beautiful!! under the layers of dust and dirt and grime, that is. Each of us was armed with a mop, bucket and rags in order to get our rooms cleaned up and ready to move in. The workers are getting all the last details taken care of around us. The grounds look great - lots of trees, bamboo, and grass!
Today, I (Sarah) began re-painting my bookshelves with the help of two students. They haven’t been painted in a couple of years, and were looking a little worse for the wear, especially in contrast to the new wood floors and white sound panels in the music room. The first one turned out all right, so we’ll get the others taken care of tomorrow.
We’ll have some pictures up soon!
step one done
The first step has been completed: yesterday we finished putting all of our school into cardboard boxes and labeling them with their respective destinations. The next couple days are going to be moving using moving companies under the watchful eye of some staff members, and next Tuesday we start to unpack!
We had our first holiday soiree last night - co-workers from our apartment building came over. It was a relaxing time. We played games and watched "Rudolph: the red-nosed reindeer." We are slowly finding out who has the holiday dvd’s that we cannot otherwise find here.
Lazy Saturday… well, kinda
It’s Saturday again… this week has flown by! I am trying to wrap up my message for tomorrow morning, and Sarah is out shopping with Adelle at Metro, a members-only department store like Sam’s Club or Costco, so I thought I would update you on the week!
This week was finals from Tuesday to Thursday, and with Friday being more for relaxing than anything else, there wasn’t a whole lot going on. We are preparing for boxing everything up this next week and moving it all to our new school - we got keys on Thursday! There’s a fun (I think) new security measure at our new facility - all people on campus have to have biometric data on record in the form of digital fingerprints. I don’t know if we have to do this to get in the school or not, we’ll see…
Friday night was our staff Christmas party, which was fun… this morning was a wedding for one of our staff members, Ge Hao - very exciting! I led some P&W music during the reception at their request… it was moving to sing songs like "Great is Thy Faithfulness" and "Amazing Grace" in English as well as Chinese. (1 Jn. 2.2) When the waitress was bringing the food to our table, she accidentally tipped my full wine glass over, baptizing me and Sarah in red wine. Hopefully it comes out!
We received 4 packages from my parents this week - they are currently sitting under our tree, nicely wrapped, waiting to be opened. I’m trying to be patient.
That’s about all for now… gotta finish this message for tomorrow. Merry Christmas!
It’s all over
The week has finally ended, and with that ends the Christmas plays! Sarah and I have been busy with both plays, and Tuesday marked the culmination of the Elementary School’s work while Friday night brought together all the achievements of the upper school.
I am so happy for my upper school play cast. Truth be known, I was a little worried when they were doing one last run-through 4 hours before performance… but they brought it all together and put on a great show. Props to the crew who did the set changes from bell choir to band to play - it was a ton of work, but they did well with it. Though my primary thought right now is that it is all over and I can have my life back now, I am also glad for the opportunity that I had to work on this.
Next week: finals! After that, the kids take off for their 3-week vacation. The staff, on the other hand, has had their break shortened to a 4-day weekend around Christmas. The end result of this change will be us settling in to our new school building - very exciting!
almost…
The end is in sight!! Tonight is the lower school Christmas musical and Friday is the upper school program. We’re as ready as we’ll ever be, and excited to see all the hard work come to fruition. It will be fun to share these things with the families and friends of our students. The LDI leadership team is in town for a couple of days. We met with them last night - such an encouraging group of men! They had lots of updates on how the Lord is keeping them busy & expanding our horizons.
A week and a half and we’ll be packing up to move to the new school! What a huge blessing!!!