Feeling Special

The picture on the left shows the YX team from our school, getting ready to board the Shanghai-HK flight at the end of the tour -- or more precisely, most of the team, since 3 members of our team had to return to HK right after the camp and couldn't make it to Shanghai.

Anyway, the picture doesn't really have anything to do with the contents of this post. But just thought I'd share it.

I went to church today for the first time in 4 weeks -- I somehow managed to be out of town for 4 consecutive Sundays in July. It was really good to be there again -- I hadn't quite realized just how much I had missed it. The thing that really touched me though was that I managed to have a really good conversation with the new pastor. That may seem like it's nothing -- it's just a conversation -- but honestly, he made me feel that what I was saying was worth listening to and important (when even I don't know how important what I was saying really was!) At one point, one of the elders came up and asked him something and the pastor told the guy that he'd get back to him, and he continued talking with me like nothing had happened! I was very surprised and touched -- after all, I am really not anybody important like the elders, and he's here spending time talking with me!

What that made me really think about is how we interact with our students, especially myself, in particular. I have an "open-door policy" in theory, but there are times when I am so busy and caught up with work and administration that I have am often too busy for students who come and see me, even if my door happens to be open. In fact, there have been times last year when students came to see me for help just as I was about to rush off to something, and I had no choice (I didn't feel like I could reschedule the meeting and be confident that I would have time for them then) but to tell them to walk with me to wherever I was going, and I would talk with them on the way. Geez, I wonder how important *that* must have made them feel (turns sarcasm off).

I think I have a lot to learn still about being a good teacher and listener.

Hubei Afterthoughts

It's been more than two weeks since we left Hubei. After the cruise and roughly a week back at school, I think that my thoughts and emotions have finally sorted themselves out enough for me to give a coherent account of this year's Hubei trip.

This is the third year that I have been involved with this project. The first year was simply as a participant, the second year involved only with the IT part, and this year, first as a planner/promoter, then as one of the organizers and finally as a teacher and coordinator.

To be honest, I think that I kind of overestimated my own abilities this time around. I had confidently expected that I would be able to "handle" it -- after all, this is my third time around, there shouldn't be any surprises. Leading up to the camp, I had hints of foreboding that I wasn't adequately preparing myself mentally and spiritually for the camp, but the overwhelming schedule that we had managed to saddle ourselves with in the 2-3 weeks leading up to the camp meant that the departure date was upon us before I was aware of it.

The stupidity of my foolhardiness crashed down on me on the second day of camp. I woke up with a sore throat and a heavy head, which proceeded to progress into a general fever and flu and an almost complete loss of my voice over the next few days. The worse was on the third and fourth days, when I woke up in the morning and seriously wondered whether I could last through the day.

But He was merciful. I have had it good this year with the best team I could ever have asked for: I had a fantastic co-teacher (who also happened to be my colleague) who was always there to pick up for me whenever I faltered and ran out of things to say (yes, it does happen. THE CAT can't talk nonstop, really); an enthusiastic youth leader who is one of the warmest people I have ever met; a devoted Wuhan student who put us to shame with her heart and zeal for Him; and a quiet, sensitive IT student who turned out to be fun and mischevious, but at the same time reponsible and mature. Together, they took so much of the load off my shoulders -- I always knew that if I felt that I couldn't handle anything, or even if I just wanted a break, I could just hand it off to them to keep the students occupied while I caught my breath.

And the students that we had this year -- I couldn't have asked for better. Three years ago, I had a group that took about 3 days of arguing and bickering before they decided to settle down and gell with each other; this year, our group was absolutely sweet and adorable and started looking out for each other right from the beginning. They were definitely well-behaved and cooperative, all of them -- I am glad that we did away with the practice of nominating the "best student" in class because I wouldn't have been able to choose any particular one of them!

(The funny thing about the "best student" nomination was that the students seemed to agree with me on the last point. We had left the "who is the best student in the class" question on the survey forms by accident, so all the students filled that out. I was in charge of collecting those forms, and I glanced through those of other classes -- the students in my class all put "everybody", "all of us", or something like that as the answer, unlike many of the other classes, which usually had one or two accepted "bests".)

However, even with all the blessings that He put in my path, there were so many occasions on which I felt overwhelmed and that everything was beyond me. On occasion, I caught myself heaving a sigh of relief at the end of every day and thinking "only 4 more days to go", "only 3 more days", etc -- and then feeling so overwhelmingly guilty about the fact that I would be looking forward to when the camp was over. Every night, my colleague and I would pray together for our students -- both those that we had brought from Hong Kong and also the YX students in our class -- and in my prayer every night, I would plead with Him to change my heart such that, when the camp ends and I tell my students goodbye and that I would miss them -- that it would be words spoken from my heart.

He answered my prayer, not in a dramatic fashion, but rather, through little things that had just as much impact and brought just as much comfort. Other more experienced team members confided their own feelings of tiredness and exhaustion to me, reassuring me that my guilty feelings were only natural and little gestures of concern from others showed me that He was looking out for me. And yes, when I told the kids goodbye and that I would miss them, I meant every word of what I was saying.

Over the course of the camp, 6 students in our class came to accept Christ as their personal Savior, and I know that 4 of them stayed behind in YX over their Summer holidays to attend new believers' classes at the local church. The seed has been sown; we have done what we can, save praying for them. All that we can do now is to pray and hope that He sends others along the way to nuture these seedlings as they grow.

Do I have any regrets about this camp? Sure -- I wish that I had spent more time with my students, both the local students and the ones that we had brought from Hong Kong, rather than being so caught up in managing the logistics and things. I wish that I had been more trusting in Him to take care of things, rather than trying to be a control freak and panicking whenever things did not go my way. Regrets aside, though, there is this overriding sense of gratitude and humility that once again, as flawed as I am, God let me have a part in His bigger plan. Not only that, but He also showed me that even when we feel that we are just treading water and making no progress, it's all part of His big picture and He will weave all the parts together into a unified whole.

That's all that I can say right now, and as you can see, my thoughts are still fairly unorganized, as so much happened during the camp. I will have more to tell. But to ask the big question: was it worth it? Yes, unequivocally.

A Study in Excesses

There are no ports of call today because we're on this long trip from Istanbul to Dubronik, so I have been trying to make the most of being on this floating city. And it seriously is a floating city -- when we were in Istanbul, I looked back towards the port and the ship looked like this giant white mountain against the backdrop of the city. Made the buildings and other ships -- some of them big container ships -- look like children's toys.

I have come to believe that cruising is seriously a study in excesses. There's such an incredible amount of stuff that's going to waste, chiefly amongst them being food. I guess that when you have 4000 guests and over 1500 crew to feed, with two dinner sittings and only 2.5 hours between them, you can't afford to be conservative -- better to have and not need rather than need and not have. But the amount of food that must be getting thrown away is staggering.

Anyhow, there's not much to report today. Have been wandering the ship in search of entertainment. They have a nice gym on board and nice swimming pools. However, the pools (or rather, the decks around them) are completely packed with people trying to get a tan. Some people kind of park themselves on a deck chair and stay there all day. Incredible.

Crossroads of Europe and Asia

We arrived in Istanbul today for a full-day tour of the only city that straddles two continental plates at once. Having read so much about Istanbul before, I had been expecting it to be rich in history and culture at once, while still bustling with modernity. I was a little disappointed by the latter (well, coming from HK, what do you expect, I suppose), but certainly not disappointed otherwise.

For a religious-architecture afficionado like me, Istanbul is absolutely fabulous. I could have spent hours in the Blue Mosque or in the Hagia Sophia Museum just staring at the domed ceiling and wondering how they had the technology to build that thing so many years ago. Or just wandering about the streets and soaking up the atmosphere. It was amazing to walk down a street of seemingly new buildings and all of a sudden come across a centuries-old mosque, or to be watching the metro go by and notice that it was passing next to an old city wall. The downside was our tour guide, who seemed to be on a quest to break the speed record for showing a group around Istanbul. I was tempted to leave our group several times, but then she was so conscientious about making sure that everybody was on the bus, I decided not to go about causing trouble.

One thing that I have noticed about Turkey: the Turks seem to absolutely adore cats. I finally gave up on my usual practice of taking a picture of every cat I see on the street. There are just too many of them hanging around. The nice thing is that all of them seem to be happy and well fed. (Okay, not too surprising, but I just came back from Hubei. Ask Stephen what those kitties look like.)

Ruined City: Ephesus

The first thing that greeted me on Turkish soil was a magnificent orange tabby cat that was strolling nonchalantly around the customs area of the port of Izmir. She was kind of blase about the tourists who were trying to get her attention, but she did stop to let me pet her and give me a good meow. Quite a difference from those cats that we saw in Hubei -- I think that she probably weighed as much as 5 of those Hubei kitties that Stephen and I saw.

Ephesus was much more impressive than Olympia. It's one of the three big Roman ruins -- you have Pompeii, there's one in Jordan whose name eludes me at the moment, and then there's Ephesus. Of course, this being the height of tourist season, the place was positively crawling with people, and it was also an extremely hot day (about 40 degrees), which was suboptimal for sightseeing. But it was impressive nonetheless. I especially liked the theatre/stadium with its rows and rows of seating. Will post my pictures when I finally get back to a reasonable internet connection.

(Note about my pictures: It's incredibly easy to make pictures lie. When you see my photos, you'll get the sense that Ephesus is somewhat deserted and you're free to roam as you like. Not so. You can barely squeeze through some of the narrower passages at times.)

Our guide for today was a retired journalist and somewhat of a philosopher. He shared a lot about what he thought of the Jewish/Christian/Islamic conflict (he didn't even try to be PC at all, which was shocking at times but also a refreshing change), and though he was Muslim, he knew a surprising bit about Christianity and the Bible. As he pointed out where St. Paul supposedly preached in Ephesus, he talked about the Christian martyrs and then he said, "We learn about the basics from our parents, from our mosques, churches and synagogues. However, we never really think about the fact that people have died in order to give us what we believe in." He then went on to talk about the lions that they used to feed the martyrs to.

Some of the Americans in the group weren't too pleased about this, "what a downer", they were saying, but I appreciated the reminder about how we got what we have today.

Greetings from Olympia!

It's been three days on this ship now and it's starting to feel like forever, sort of. Well, okay, not that bad. At least I'm managing to get some good sleep in and get a good rest after the massive whirlwind that was the last three weeks. But this is a huge liner -- almsot 4000 people -- and I have to admit that I suppose I don't really like the floating-city-on-the-sea idea.

One good thing about this ship, though -- it has a chocolate bar! Everything's chocolate -- they even have shot glasses made of chocolate inside which they serve choc-flavored liquor. And the whole place smells like chocolate. It's fast becoming my favorite place on the ship.

Anyway, the ports have been nice so far. Went cycling in Bari yesterday for about two hours -- those of you who have been on the biking trips with me before, it was about 38 degrees Celcius and under the noonday sun, so you can imagine what it was like. But somehow it didn't seem as bad as it would have been in HK -- maybe because it was so dry that your sweat pretty much dried off immediately. I do have a small sunburn and a few bruises from a minor accident to show for it, though :-D

Today was Olympia, place of the ancient Olympic games. And to be honest, it was a little disappointing -- maybe it was the hordes of tourists (note to self: when a 4000 person liner docks, it regurgitates 4000 tourists onto the same small town at once), or maybe it's because I have been spoiled by too many Roman ruins before, but it was somewhat underwhelming. I much preferred the ruins of Leptis Magna in Libya, or those in Jordan -- those had more of a "WOW" factor to them.

Tomorrow will be Ephesus. Will report more then. For the time being, I better get off this expensive Internet connection (0.50 Euros per 30 secs!!!!!)

College Rankings

There has been quite a lot of discussion around campus recently about college rankings, and now that our school has decided to get itself involved, there will be even more pressure to "play the game" and toe the line on research and publications.

Interestingly, the New York Times reported that a number of US liberal arts colleges have declined to be ranked. I wonder if this is just a small, quickly contained "rebellion" of a few, or the start of a larger trend? If it is the latter, then HK will be picking up on something just as people in the US are starting to find problems with it... which wouldn't surprise me.