FROM JUDY PERRY -- OUR MISSIONARY IN CHINA
Another Home Assignment completedÉ
I have been back in China two months now. I enjoyed seeing many old friends and making new friends at new sponsoring congregations.
My impressions of the USA? Green grass and trees! Clear blue sky! Quiet. Big houses. And change! I tried something I had not even heard of until a month before I got to the USA: Wii bowling.
I also learned that there has been change at the ELCA Global Mission as well. There are new resources on line at www.elca.org, the key phrase to look for is 'Hand in Hand'. There is a blog, and resources which you can download.
After returning in early October, I jumped right back in to the usual fall work: project evaluation and planning for the next year. We wrote up project reports for the Evergreen annual meeting and for foundations that fund the different projects. Often my main job is translating or editing the English reports since the project leadership is all local staff now.
The Visitation Team training has been done two summers in a row now. Our goal for the next few months is to help the local pastors revise the sessions I prepared two years ago so they can present all the topics in the future, perhaps to other congregations in Shanxi. We meet and discuss each session, come up with goals, objectives, and then they rewrite the material and present it to our small group, and we revise it again.
Another project has been revising three medical papers to submit to journals about the results of the Metabolic Syndrome Study. We found interesting resultsÑthat the rate of Metabolic Syndrome is higher than expected overall, and that the people who drink any strong liquor have much higher rates than non-drinkers.
Pray for me as I travel to present our research results at an international meeting being held in Hong Kong in late January. I am familiar with everything except how the statistics were done so I hope that no one questions me too closely about Chi-square tests!
Blizzard of 2009
November 10 to 12, 2009, will go down in history as the worst snow storm in 60 years in Shanxi. Even though only about 12 inches of snow fell, this was exceptional since the usual snow fall is at most 3 inches and melts within a day. This year the temperatures have remained below freezing and with no salt and no snow plows, the impact was similar to a blizzard of a few feet in the northern USA. The roads were so dangerous that the freeways were closed, so shipments of goods were held up until the weather improved. On Friday the 13th, one expat family spent hours on public buses getting home from a meeting held at the Evergreen International School. They stopped to eat supper at Kentucky Fried Chicken near their home as a treat. I got a text from them "no chicken at KFC". Their supply chain had been disrupted by the storm, so there was no coke and no chicken at KFC!
After the service on the Sunday after the blizzard, about 20 of us, some with shovels, others with buckets, cleared away the huge pile of snow that had been shoveled off the roof of the Sunday School building and was blocking the door. We carried it out, bucket by bucket, and piled it up in a place where it could melt. I am sorry to say I have no photos, but this style of snow removal was an new experience for me.
A thief in the night
October 24th was Xiaoqin's birthday. She arrived at work in the morning all excited. It seems that a thief opened the door to their apartment during the night, and had gone through her clothes and her back pack, stealing about 1/5 of her monthly salary, but leaving behind her ID card and bank card. Her cell phone was next to her bed so that was not taken. And her baby was safe. "Not bad," agreed another staff member. "Only money. They did not get your ID card or your cell phone." Xiaoqin's attitude was an example to all of us, especially when two others had their pockets picked in the next few days.
A stomp in the night
On my return to China this time I noticed an interesting aspect of living in China: the lights in stairwells. For years, to save electricity, the lights in the stairwells are usually off. There is a sensor in the stairwell and the lights come on automatically, in theory, when you walk up the stairs. Unlike the yard light at my parents home which comes on whenever an animal or person walks by, these sensors are activated by sound. One has to know the trigger in each stairwell. Some lights are very sensitive and the softest sound will turn them on, some turn on when you stamp your feet so you have to stamp hard at every landing. Others turn on with a sharp clap of the hand. In one stairwell only a barking cough will do the trick. So when you first enter a new stairwell, you have to experiment to determine which sound works best. A stomp? A clap? Or a cough?
Prayer requests for new year:
- Pray for our team as our local staff plan to start a new work serving new mothers and children. A donor has given enough to support the project for a year, but we want to
- find a way to make it sustainable with local income.
- Please pray for the ELCA as many struggle to come to terms with the results of the August General Assembly vote.
Blessings,
Judy Perry