Three Months in Korea

Wow, it's been three months already. We have taught at two Winter English camps and started our regular school session. We only had six elementary students, one middle school student and one high school student when we started. Now we have seven elementary students with another one starting in April. We have one middle school student and two high school student. We also have 2 other high school students and one parent in an ESL program. All of the high school students and the one parent are planning on going to the US in August. So, the school is growing little by little. We still don't have enough students to pay everyone involved. The Korean teacher was told that they couldn't retain him anymore, but he decided to donate his time to the school and get a job teaching at an institute nearby. He is only going to be teaching two classes in Korean and 2nd grade math. This means that Pamela is moving up to teach 2nd grade. She was already teaching some of the classes, but now she will be teaching them everything except math. The pastor's wife will be teaching Elijah's kindergarten class and watching Elizabeth. She will also teach one class of Korean to our children. This has put more stress on Pamela. She already was under stress, but this has added to it. Please keep her in your prayers. She has several new classes she has to prepare for each day. One good thing though is that the pastor offered to make copies of our curriculum for us, so we don't have to make copies every day. The pastor is now teaching my social studies class and is teaching some of the ESL classes.

With all of the preparation for teaching at the school, we had to give up our extra activities on the weekend. We were spending most of our Saturday's cleaning the house, doing laundry and preparing for our three lessons on Sunday. We know that some of what we were doing on Sunday was very good, but we can't do everything that is good. One thing we learned from our previous church work and especially from our church (Western Hills) is that there are many good things you can do, but you have to focus on what is the best thing you can do. We feel that our family is one of our top priorities and it was suffering from everything we were doing.

We had a good weekend last week. We went to the nearest large city as a family along with the pastor's daughter, Carol, and the other high school student, Brianna. We rode the bus there and went shopping and ate lunch at Kentucky Fried Chicken. It wasn't quite the same as in the states, and it was more expensive than there. We have found a local place that sells fried chicken that we think tastes better and is less expensive. It is called Aloha Chicken. They have a program that for every box of chicken you buy you get a circular magnet to collect. When you get 11 of them the 12th box of chicken is free.

Pray for:

* our wisdom as we teach.
* our wisdom as we make decisions.
* parents to see the need for Christian education.
* more students.
* the school's financial situation.
* our finances. (We still haven't been paid for any of our services.)
* God's direction if we can't remain teaching here because of no salaries being paid. (We don't want to leave Korea, but we can't stay at this school if they can't pay us. We just don't have the ability to live on no income.)
* transition times. (These are many as our schedule at school changes and we have had to adjust our weekend activities.)