Summer English Language and Orientation Program

Dear family and Friends,

Hi! Katrina here! You have had many great posts from Ryan with exciting photos but I am afraid I am going to bore you a bit with this one... I am going to ask for you think of us and pray for us and we embark on an adventure right here on To Fung Shan hill: out summer program starts on Monday!

We have been planning the summer program for over half a year now, and we are both pretty nervous about how it will all go down! To explain the situation- the new international students to LTS have never had an orientation program, which surprised us a little when we arrived here last August. We had insane culture shock moving to Hong Kong, and we had been to a shopping mall before! When we thought of some of the students who had moved here from rural parts of SE Asian countries, or even from cities, I mean, nothing compares to Hong Kong! We have just returned from traveling through several countries in SE Asia, and we have seen what Cambodia looks like, and it's nothing like HK! It's the opposite!

Needless to day, a few students looked like a deer in headlights for the first couple weeks or so, and we felt their pain. In the past, students arrive just early enough to attend a couple day 'retreat' (HK style, which means you don't have any time to sleep and worship or share during a really intensive program) and then they start classes the next week.

Some students also come to LTS with little English, and others need their language skills refreshed, and so the school felt that an intensive English program during the summer before the academic term begins would benefit these international students greatly. Remember, they have to take bachelors, maters, or doctoral level classes in English for their degrees!

We are trying to address some of these issues in our summer program, as well as working on their writing skills, and Katrina's pet peeve- plagiarism issues! Sometimes I feel like a WTO member complaining about Asian plagiarism, but the students need to learn academic standards, and I am more than happy to teach them how to cite their sources and engage critically with their readings!

But please pray for us as we lead this program. We are doing 99% of the work ourselves, and the program is three and a half weeks long! We will be teaching and interacting with the students all day for 5 days a week- and there are only two of us! I still don't know how the laundry will get done, especially since our washing machine appears broken, and who will walk to all the stores and do the shopping, or the washing up, as we don't have any helpers! Holy! And all of this while the intense summer is raging- you know, I love the summer, but it seems you spend your summer in HK either soaking wet from torrential tropical rain, or because you have just sweat your entire body weight into your clothes (our commute is a 20 minute walk up the steepest hill you can imagine!)- or both at once! :)

It will be intense, to say the least, and I still have to plan for the five classes we are teaching this fall in "free time"... haha...

Thanks for your continued prayers and warm thoughts...

Love,

Katrina and Ryan