Road to Rwanda---So What's the Point?

  This is a post by Joel Corbin. We taught him during our time in Senegal (2002-2010).  He is a missionary kid, born and bred on the African mission field. He and his wife and two little bitty sons serve in Gambia in a remote village to the Mandinka tribe. Recently he posted this on FB:      Since I started working overseas in 2017, I’ve noticed that actually being a missionary on the                ground is a ton different than what people in the US realize. Part of the fault of this is on the                missionary’s end. We are so driven to present the best parts of our work overseas as the “fruit” of        the investment of churches and inviduals that we often leave out the hard parts, the mundane           parts, the “real life” parts that make up most of our day- in and day-out grind as a cross-cultural  ...

Road to Rwanda----Letter Confusion

Repost from Facebook, May 12, 2017   Chinese have trouble with "v" and "w". I don't remember struggling with this issue in Taiwan, but maybe I was speaking mostly in Chinese, and here I am using mostly English. When the students were introducing themselves at the beginning of the semester, many said they liked "mooies". I thought and thought about that one, and finally realized it was "movies". Another difficulty was the student who asked me about Easter "wiggles". Dances for Easter, like the "Bunny Hop"? Telling kids to sit still in church? I had her repeat it a few times, and even had trouble when she spelled it, because it was an unexpected word. It was "vigil". You can see how things can get so confusing. However, there are always these kinds of difficulties for overseas workers. Do I have stories? In Zambia "r" and "l" are completely interchangeable. The house worker told me Paul had cut...

Road to Rwanda---Confucius Birth Place

  If one of my previous Face Book  posts shows up in my timeline inbox that might be interesting, I am trying to post it here.  The date on this post is May 1, 2017.  Confucius has been the main force in Chinese philosophical thought since about 400 B.C. I am talking a long long time and a very pervasive force. Yesterday we went to his birth place. By regular train it would have been 2 hours. By fast train it took us 20 minutes (price about $4.50). By fast, I do mean fast. It said it was going about 300 kph. (Rick says that is about 185 mph.) When you were on the inside of the train, the terrain was going by quickly but not at a dizzying pace. However, standing on the platform with a through train buzzing past was quite exhilarating. The town of QuFu itself had a more "Chinese" feel to it than what the big towns have. It was a long day of seeing old buildings and a beautiful forest with hundreds of huge headstones spaced through out. (As we were viewing the forest/ce...

Road to Rwanda---My Friend Sarah

  My friend Sarah, who was so very, very sick and you prayed for a month or so ago, came to visit tonight with her daughter and fiance.  She came to visit for a special reason.  As soon as they got here, they connected to our wifi and posted this announcement on the School's WhatsApp!  What a privilege! You can see how healthy and full of joy she is.  She thanks all of you for praying for her.  She prayed with us before she and her family left just now, back out into the rain to go home.

Road to Rwanda----Serving Meals

 You know I did not start to cook until I was almost 60 years old.  I have no idea how I raised 4 children to maturity.  I remember at one point in Taiwan when they were young that I had to put my foot down and tell them they could only eat out once a day.  Paul (our eldest), being the social creature that he is, learned to cook so he could feed his friends in Taiwan (1988-1995) when they came over....I always made sure I had expensive boxes of Hamburger Helper on the shelf for him to use, but I personally usually did not even fix that much of a meal.  Purity from about age 4 on, would get up in the middle of the night and fix herself a tuna fish sandwich and eat it all herself because she could not stand the thought of any of us touching her food.  Peter existed on fruit, whole boxes of kiwis, etc.  Because of her CP, Peace had to have soft textured foods or she could not chew them, so I remember making her scrambled eggs. In Senegal (2003-2010) I tri...

Memories--from 2017

  Finished our laundry for the first time in China (2017-2019). In Panama (2010-2016)I had to go to the back of building OUTSIDE to do my laundry. Here I have a machine right in my itty bitty kitchen....with only HOT running water??? After one is done washing, then you go out onto the balcony and hang your clothes on hangers to let them dry. This is different from Taipei (1988-1995). There we had bamboo poles levitating 4 stories up at our apartment. You strung your clothes on these poles. Until I learned how to "string" rather than just flop the clothes over the poles, I kept losing my underwear to the balcony below. I then had to go down to the apartment below with a corresponding piece of underwear and mime asking for it back. Maybe I can at least say the words now.