Last blog

I think this will be the last blog entry about Korea! We are leaving on Tuesday in the afternoon. Please pray for safe travels for our group and also for the many Korean exchange students who will be studying at Taylor this year. I got to meet them in Korea and now I will see them at Taylor.
It has been sad saying goodbye to our friends here. Friday was the last day of teaching and my students wrote very cute notes to me. One of my students brought me pig intestine as a treat! (it is a popular snack here) It's not as bad as it sounds! I will miss my students.
Today was the last church service as well. The Taylor group sang He is Mighty to Save on stage in front of everybody as a farewell song. The college sermon was about evangelizing to the lost, so afterwords we did street witnessing. Then our cell group threw us a farewell party.
Some of the most memorable things that happened was working with the disability group. I loved seeing their smiles and playing with them. I also loved the relationships that I made while I was here. There are lots of friends that I will miss.
I'm excited to come home again, though and see everybody once more! Thanks for reading!
see you soon!

We had a very busy weekend traveling. We took a train and bus for 5 hours to the very southern tip of Korea and stayed in homestays with people from the sister church. It was out in the country and we got to see rice fields and green tea farms. We got to see the view from the train window the whole way. The mountains were very beautiful. I read Psalm 95-97 in my devotions. It put a cool perspective when you are watching God's creation as you are reading it.
We taught English Bible camp while we were there. Some had never seen Americans before. I quickly learned to be flexible while there. They put me in a room full of middle schoolers and gave me a mic and 1 1/2 hours to teach them. I made the lesson up as I went along, because we didn't know beforehand what they wanted us to teach! It was rough, but a good experience though. While there, we went to the beach and a famous steel factory. We also visited a historic island where the Japanese killed many sick Koreans at a hospital. We got back on Tuesday, just in time to teach our normal classes. We only have 3 more days of classes. They are going very well now.



This is me trying on the traditional Korean outfit called hanbok. It was a lot of fun. The wig is queen's wig and is VERY heavy! I could hardly keep my neck straight.
Thanks for your prayers! We only have 6 days left and we want to make the most of the rest of our time here with relationships and experiences.

Call me Min-Jin

Danielle and I are eating noodles- Korean style. It is common to eat out of the same bowl or share a plate with the whole table. At first it was hard to do, but now we are used to eating out of the same plates and bowls.




Here we are hanging out and eating Korean style hotdogs!

Here we are eating raw squid!

I’ve been learning Korean phrases and words since I’ve been here. People are surprised when I randomly pull out a word that I know in Korean. My middle school class has also tried to teach me Korean. The other day they taught me a word ‘that you say when you’re mad’. It wasn’t until after I had practiced saying it a couple of times that they told me it was a cuss word! I was mortified!

Another thing I thought was really cool was that some Korean friends gave me a Korean name! They gave me the name Min-Jin which means smart/intelligent jewel.

We only have a couple of days left to work with the disabled students. I will really miss working with them. They are so precious. Even though they have mental problems they can still pray to God and worship Him. Their prayers aren't elaborate and don't make sense all of the time but they still pray from the heart. Last night the staff held a dinner for the volunteers who helped with the disabled students. It was really nice of them.

The picture on the left is my 3-4 grade class after we learned about counting and saying animal names and Noah's ark. The boy in the back with the glasses used to cry everyday because he is shy and scared of everybody. Now he actually answers questions in class and hasn't cried in over a week!

My middle school class is sharing more and talking more. They even joke around with me now. They are still memorizing the fruits of the spirit. It is sad, but a lot of my students tell me that they have a lot of fighting in their house. They tell me to pray for their family, that there wouldn't be bitterness and fighting.

One of our group members is leaving early to go to the States because he is in charge of international orientation at Taylor. He is the only guy in the group, so we call him Opa (older brother). We are having a good-bye party for him. Koreans are teaching how to make Korean food for the party. I'm excited!

Early tomorrow morning the group is traveling a long ways to a coastal city. We will be gone until Tuesday and won't have internet access during that time. We are teaching English Sunday school at a sister church there. During our free time, we will go sightseeing and go to the beach! Pray for safe travels and health. We have been a little tired this week and getting small colds. Have a good week!

This week at church I helped out with the Vacation Bible School program for the disabled. At times I felt that I wasn't really needed and that I wasn't making a difference, but I need to remember that it's the attitude of serving with joy that is important. The theme was Love PLUS(in other words, love completes everything). It made me realize that love and smiling are universal. Although it was sometimes hard to communicate with them, I don't need to know Korean to show love to them. They disabled students are just happy when you show them attention and play with them. One girl kept hugging me and gave me a picture that she drew of me. It was really cute. Throughout the camp, we had worship songs and activities. Then we spent the night at the church. In the morning, we had stations with games, crafts, and snacks. They even had a dance party where they made us dance on stage in front of the campers. We ended the camp with a water war outside. There was a bubble station, water balloon station, and water gun station. They even had a relay race where you had to carry eels with your bare hands from one bucket to the other! I think I screamed one too many times!! They were soo squirmy!
Our church last week started the 24/40 prayer challenge with the youth. This means that there is always someone praying 24 hours a day. They set up a prayer room and a different person prays every hour. This goes on for 40 days. At first I thought that an hour was a really long time to pray, but the hour went by surprisingly fast. It was a really good time of being still and worshipping and thanking God. It is really powerful to think that we are praying continuosly.

On Saturday, we visited a palace built in the 1400s that has been kept up over the years. It was very beautiful. It's hard to believe that we only have 2 weeks left. We are trying to cram a lot of things in during that time. Next weekend we are traveling 4.5 hours to stay at the beach.