Greetings to all our friends and family and welcome to our blog! Please come back often and leave comments… Taiwan is a long way from home!

This site is created and designed to give our friends and family as big a window as we can into our China adventures. We want you guys to be as much a part of our experiences as possible. In addition to the stories and pictures, we’ll also occasionally post downloadable audio and video (once we have some worth posting!).

(This post updated 09 July 22.)

We were intending to settle in Surrey, BC for the year to finish up that last year of grad school. There’s plenty of opportunity to study Chinese culture and language in greater Vancouver, and it was relatively close to the university. We planned to work part-time while we finished our studies and continued preparing for language school in Tianjin, China in February 2007. We’re still doing all that, except we’ll be in Taiwan instead of Vancouver.

When we committed to an extra year of full time graduate study we never dreamed that we’d get to complete it in Asia! We are overwhelmed with the ways in which we’ve been blessed. Taiwan may not be the Mainland, but it’s about as close as you can get.

Soon after arriving in Surrey Joel applied for a Teaching Assistant position at his old high school, Pacific Academy. P.A. came back with an offer for both of us to work as elementary school English teachers in a satellite school P.A. is opening in Taipei, Taiwan this January. We hadn’t even unpacked our bags yet from our sojourn in the Untied States, but after prayers, interviews, more prayers, and more interviews, we accepted.

The upsides are numerous. Aside from the cultural exposure, our total costs for the year will consume less than one of our two salaries; we’ll be able to save much more than we could have in Surrey. Our employers are accommodating our schooling requirements, flying us back for our June session in California and providing us with computers and high speed internet to do our distance learning in Taiwan. In the summer we’ll return to BC with some of our Taiwanese students to teach in P.A.’s international student summer program and take about three weeks of vacation with family before returning to finish out the year in Taiwan.

There are some downsides, too. Having much less time than we anticipated with family and the SBCC is the biggest – we leave January 4 and we just got here at the end of November! That, and balancing full time English-speaking jobs with 9 credits each of grad work per semester leaves little time for formal language study and running wild in the streets (two of our favourite overseas activities). We’ll be diving into the local culture less than we have in past overseas experiences.

We leave for California January 4, and Taipei, Taiwan on January 13. Our contract ends in mid-January, 2007.

The official December 05 China Hope progress report is done and will be e-mailed out tomorrow.

One of our annual family traditions is picking out and cutting down a Christmas tree. Since they have laws here about people just picking any old wild tree and chopping it down, we have to cut down domesticated tree farm trees. But it still makes for a great annual family event, especially on a sunny day with lots of snow like today! More pictures here.
 
 

It’s been snowing since last night… big fat flakes, too. I took some pictures this morning and posted them here.

We made it to Butte, MT (that’s “byoot”, not “boo-tay”). The 1977 Dodge van is running superbly. We left Silt at 5:45am, and got here around 8pm. We’re getting up at 2:30am to leave by 3, so I’m going to bed!

We arrived in Silt, Colorado this morning at 9:15. We got a late start in Dallas, plus the tail-pipe burned off of the muffler about 10 minutes down the highway, and there was a lot of snow in the mountain passes in Colorado that slowed us way down for a couple hours. But the van did surprisingly well – we’re pretty confident it will make it to Canada. Thanks for the prayers, and please keep praying!
 
 

We made it to Dallas. Tomorrow we leave for Silt, Colorado after a good night’s sleep.

PLEASE PRAY FOR OUR VAN!

Our Long March to the Great White North has begun. It looks like this:

Thursday: Baton Rouge, Louisianna -> [7 hours (+4 for breakdown & repairs)] -> Dallas, Texas
Friday: Dallas, Texas -> [16 hours] -> Silt, Colorado
Monday: Silt, Colorado -> [11 hours] -> Butte, Montana
Tuesday: Butte, Montana -> [11 hours] -> Surrey, British Columbia

Please pray for our van, and for our alertness on the road!!!

We finally made some decisions. Here they are:

- We have moved our leaving-for-China target date from February 2006 to February 2007, because we’ll need an extra year of school.

– We’ve applied to a school in Southern California. It will take us year to complete the remaining Intercultural Studies and International Development courses. We’re actually pretty excited about getting into their particular program for a lot of reasons – one being that for much of their offerings they use a “block” model of graduate education rather than the standard 3-credit lecture format. They’ve done this for 5 years and love it.

- We’re leaving Baton Rouge, Louisiana for Surrey, British Columbia, Canada on November 17. It’s about 45 hours of driving time, but we’re hoping to drop in on some conveniently-located friends in Colorado and Montana. We’ve gotta get there in time for Julia’s starring role in Fiddler on the Roof!

Also, we’ve e-mailed out our first progress report. If you didn’t get one and want one, just let us know.

We fly out at 5am tomorrow morning for California to attend a couple of Chinese educational opportunities. We’ll be gone for a week before returning to Baton Rouge. By then, the shelter will probably be emptied and closed and we’ll get to start doing what we came here to do in the first place: Chinese stuff! First thing we do when we get back is move in with a Chinese host family. We’ll live with their them until we leave for Canada around the middle of November.

Every night there is a “family meeting” in the shelter for announcements, feedback, Scripture sharing and prayer. I’d just finished the announcements and feedback and was about to read a short passage before one of the residents led a prayer, but we were interrupted by one of the church volunteers who suggested we should ask if anyone had any “special needs” we could pray for. So we asked, though I was thinking, “Are you kidding me? How can you ask these people if they have ‘special prayer needs?’ And what kind of need counts as special in this crowd anyway? And who’s going to actually word a prayer in response to those kinds of needs?” One man raised his hand and said he didn’t know what had happened to his son or where he was. I asked for a show of hands of everyone who had missing family members – at least 45 out of 50. A woman named Simone led the prayer. She arrived today with her baby. She was air-lifted off a roof. The hundreds of people in her neighbourhood waiting on their roofs directed the helicopter to her house because they new she had an infant. Her other children are in a shelter in Dallas and they’ll be reunited there tomorrow.

Today I’ve heard these words more than once: “This is not a third world country! Why did [the government response] take so long?” 9/11 got day-of response. For Katrina, it was four days later than it could have been. It seemed like Bush’s inspirational and action-galvanizing sound bites didn’t start saturating the airwaves in town today until after they were prepped by about three solid hours of sensational, positive, hope-filled, non-stop rescue reports and video of military trucks bringing in supplies to New Orleans. By now (3:30am Saturday), the emotional roller-coaster has long since come back down. I wonder if America is beginning to realize that our perceived special status – the self-righteous double-standard that assumes we’re made of better stuff than everyone else – is really a delusion. What happens in Africa, Asia, and South America can happen here, too.

In the end, the majority of those still in New Orleans will be rescued. But thousands of people who could have been saved weren’t. During the storm our technology and wealth didn’t protect the people who chose not to heed the pre-storm evacuation orders. And even with all our technology and wealth we didn’t get them out in time after they were trapped by the floods. As truly heroic as efforts of individuals and various organizations have been, at some level this nation failed. In Bush’s words, the current results are “unacceptable.” Many of our residents won’t watch the TV.

I’m left with many questions, and this is one: Does the “unacceptable” nature of peoples’ responses to this disaster reflect our over-reliance and unrealistic expectations of money and technology, or does it reflect on basic flaws in the nature of humanity in America? Perhaps events like this show us – people, Americans – what kind of a people we really are.