Dear Prayer Warriors for TMT2024,
We started off our morning at 7 am with breakfast and devotions. Today we read 1 Peter 4:11 which talked about the special roles each of us play within this mission and our cumulative teamwork to achieve our goals. Praise God that our team has been so unified.
During class, we Team 2 spent time connecting with the students and having fun with them, whether by dancing in Just Dance battles (pictured) or by playing fun games. Many students knew the dances by heart and were willing to join us as we struggled with the funny dance moves.
Other happenings on campus in the morning included Ps Ziyi being gifted an old-fashioned Taiwanese map by the school (pictured), some team members joining Teacher Li (on guitar) singing a Taiwanese song in the hallway (pictured), and excitingly, Class E student Yuzen celebrating his birthday by playing catch and release of the Taiwanese beetle 獨角仙with a mixed of classmates and TMT members (pictured) – there is no more boundaries among the classes into the 3rd day, which is such a beautiful scene to see!
For lunch, we took a short 5-min walk to the nearby 源泉社區Yuanquan Community Center and tried rice balls and various delicious local dishes. They also offered a fancy cold drink with a plant seed 山粉圓 nicknamed frog eggs青蛙下蛋. Our hosts Mr Lai and his wife Director Huang play-backed serval videos for us that promote their culture heritages and points of interests in ErShui. The use of English captions in their videos show their great commitment of international outreach, which is so cool. For our mission, it is super cool that one of our students, Rack, as well as Teacher James’ sons Henry and Cheney, came along for the meal and biking. Bonding leads to trust and mutual appreciations – God is at work!
For the outdoors activities that followed, we were arranged to bike first, while others were offered a guided walk. We biked along the water aqueduct and saw many interesting local views, including taking pictures with a passing train (pictured). The walking group eventually inherited our bikes for their own biking tour, but was rained on soaking wet! (pictured at the same park!) Nonetheless they still had great fun!
We returned to the school tired from all of the activities. After enjoying a takeout dinner in the kitchen, part of the team worked together for the food and trash recycling – we now live like the local!
For our daily debriefing, Jan led us in a gametime to keep our energy levels up. We played a fun water game (pictured) and then Nintendo Switch. Now that we are all back to our dorms, it’s our prayer that those of us under the weather will fully recover tomorrow, and those got rain on today won’t catch a cold!
Praises:
1. High quality classroom time in the morning
2. Rack, Henry and Cheney joining us for our afternoon activities
3. A great lunch and fun biking and walking activities
Prayers:
1. For the sick to get better and for no more people to get sick
2. Energy as we enter our fourth day with the kids.
3. Top student award nominations tomorrow who will be awarded with Abby’s paintings at Friday’s Campfire Party.
4. Final debriefing tomorrow Thursday night to set stage for Friday finale.
Love,
Team 4
Aaron, Sophie and Max
