Prayer Update #3

Hello Mina-san (Everyone),

This is Jonny reporting reporting for today's entry.

Today was the first day of the children's program. After a long day of preparing and discussing the overall structure yesterday, this morning met us with mixed feelings of excitement, anticipation, and a bit of nervousness with an expectation of long day. We started the day by loading our materials into the pastor's van we needed to transport to the gym.

Because we have about 40 kids a day this year, we rented out a gym to host the program, versus using the Otawara Church sanctuary that we used last year. Thankfully, the gym is only a 5 minute walk away.

The Children's Homestay Program runs from 10am to 3:30p. We got there an hour earlier so that we could set up the room and prepare for the day. This year, there were some members of the Otawara church to help us with the general check in for the children. To give you an idea of what the gym is like, let me start by saying that the two rooms we used are best not described as a gym than they are classrooms with soft carpeting. I would say the size is about that of a typical high school classroom.

Many of the kids, especially the kindergartners, arrived as early as 9am. The first person to arrive was a kindergartner named Mao. She was so quiet and assuming that none of the team members even noticed her! She had been sitting in the second room (connected to the main room) and peeked around the corner when we were not looking. I think I was the first one to actually see her and greet her. I welcomed her with a friendly "good morning" in Japanese (Ohaiogozaimasu), but she peeks at me and immediately shifts 180 and looks at the other way while pretending to read a book that she brought along with her. Soon the other team members got involved one at a time until we were finally able to crack her open a little bit by giving her a piece of paper and some markers to draw with. She drew the Hello Kitty head behind our backs (she was wearing Hello Kitty shoes), and when we went to compliment her drawing, she suddenly slaps her drawing with both hands, trying to hide it.

She was your typical cute kindergartner. At this point, even before the program personally grew fearful that it would be this difficult to interact with them. But thank God that it was not the case today. I will come back to Mao later.

The day started off with the kids drawing pictures and putting stickers on the name tags that we put together for them. I met three new kindergartners all of whom their English teacher had brought. I actually got the chance to briefly speak with the teacher, and I found out that the teacher spoke English very well even though she had never been to the US before. It showed, because her students very well for kindergartners, and there were generally able to understand the directions that I gave them throughout the day.

After all the children had arrived and decorated their name tags, we started the singspiration time with "Deep and Wide". I lead the singspiration time again this year. We sang this twice and the kids really got into the hand motions, and most of the kids were able to follow along with the lyrics as well.

Afterwards, we broke up into 4 different groups for the English lessons, grades K, 1, 2-4, and 5-6. I was responsible for teaching the K students with Karen and Catherine, while Megan was responsible for the 1 students, Xinxin and Paula (Pat's daughter) with the 2-4 students, and Will & Nathan for the 5-6 students.

For the K students, we started off the lesson with the simple phrase you can learn in the English language: "Hello!" and "My name is _____". It became quickly apparent which students had stronger command of the English language, and which did not. Do keep in mind that for the grade K students, we had students that were as young as 3 years old. We started the lesson with posting various things onto the whiteboard, such as a tree, a bear, ladybugs, bees, snakes, each one introducing itself with "Hello! Hello!" The point of the lesson was to get the kids comfortable with saying "Hello!" out loud. Then we played a song that we had on CD that went along the lines of:

"Hello!

Hello!

Hello, what's your name?

My name is _____!

My name is _____!"

It was not as successful as many of the kids could not repeat the lines or understand what it was saying. So we moved onto the next English lesson activity, which was to play "pass the ball" which is like "hot potato". The loser had to introduce themselves, but most of the time we focused on just passing the ball.

We eventually finished the English lessons, with varying successes among the different grades. It seemed like the 5-6 students with Nathan and Will had the most fun and excitement. In all cases, it seemed like the kids were enjoying themselves, as some of the shyer kids were opening up.

The next item our schedule was another Singspiration time, and this time we reviewed "Deep and Wide" again and taught them a new song "Father Abraham". At first, they did not like Father Abraham as it seemed like we were just teaching them different hand motions, but when we started the song and combined all the different gestures, all the kids started laughing and having fun.

Next, we had the Bible lesson, which was taught in Japanese. Unfortunately, most of our team missed that part, as we were in the other room preparing for the lunch time that happened afterward. I was told that the lesson was on Christmas. Shortly after the Bible lesson, Nathan played a kid's worship song while two of the Otawara church members sang in Japanese with the kids.

We had lunch, which comprised of taco salad and a sandwich with a choice of tuna, chicken or egg. The egg sandwich was the most popular choice, which was surprising to us. Most kids actually liked the food. We were glad because our team did not make it ourselves, the church members did.

After lunch, we moved onto some short activities, including playing Marco Polo with 40 kids, red light green light, doing the wave, and general chasing around. We followed the activities with crafts, which was a name collage for students of grade 1 and up. For the K students, we had them design their own lunch bag puppets. There was one kindergarten kid who drew the bird from the example animal placards we had nearly perfectly. The K student teachers were impressed.

Snacks came afterwards, and we made ants on the logs. Most of the kids did not like it, perhaps because they did not like the celery very much. Regardless, most of the students were good sports as they ate the whole thing anyway.

Next, we did a "prizes ceremony" in which we explained to the kids that they could obtain prizes by getting stamps on the back of their name tags. We had 3 tiers, which varying prize, some as simple as a glow-in-the-dark bug or as nice as a inflatable mallet. They obtained their prizes, and started playing with them.

We wrapped up the rest of the day with a game of pictionary while their parents came to pick them up.

Overall, the day was better than expected, but extremely tiring on our part. We all agreed that we were exhausted by just the vast amount of kids that attended this year's programs. While we did not have too many hiccups, there were some unexpected events that came up. For example, we had a lot of transition times between activities in which we had to engage them with silly play time and general chasing around. Xinxin, Catherine, and I did most of the chasing the kids around. It was quite fun, but quite taxing on our bodies as well. Many of these kids like to get very physical around us, from pinching, punching, to general climbing and pulling on our shirts. My polo shirt can probably be classified as large (from the original medium size), after today's rendezvous with the kids, and my knees suffer from some carpet burns.

In any case, at our debrief meeting, we discussed different ways to adjust to what we learned from today. Pastor Tomio also shared with us a devotional from Acts 16:6-10, which spoke of Paul being led by the Holy Spirit away from Asia into Macedonia (and later meeting the woman who sold purple clothing). He compared that us putting on the Summer Homestay program for the Japanese program in that we may not know who we meet, but still we would be doing God's work, and we do not know what will come out of it.

Praise God for providing us the strength to love the children and that we were able to function even with very little sleep. Thank the Lord that we were also able to make the kids have such a fun time today, as many of the kids, even the shyer kids opened up to us. Even Mao, the shy kindergarten was speaking some of our phrases very well by the end of the day.

Please pray for us for the following:

1) Energy for the rest of the program as we all are exhausted and we lack enough sleep.

2) Continual joy in doing the Lord's work for these Japanese children, and to put our joy first and foremost in that our names are in the Book of Life.

3) Encouragement for one another in times where our emotions are running high.

-Harvest Japan Mission Team