The birthday gift

Sarah’s newsletter came in this morning from Bethel (along with pictures, and a recent picture of Hope) and we just had to share. 😉

  
“I must say it does a lot for the ego to have your birthday on the celebration of the Chinese New Year! When the hundreds and hundreds of colorful explosions filled the air and shook the ground on my birthday, I just pretended it was all in honor of my birth! 🙂 It was amazing. The Chinese maybe don’t have the same safety laws, but boy, they know how to put on a show! It was breathtaking. When I am sleeping there are still explosions going off around my apartment and waking me up. I am not sure when they stop celebrating, but I guess it’s still firework time!

I stayed at Bethel most of the week because Dong Qiang (Dong Cheong) and Xin Ai (Sin Eye), both boys with seizures and multiple health issues, were pretty sick with high fevers and coughs which ended up with some breathing difficulty. I have them both on albuterol nebulizer treatments to help with their breathing (thanks to Dr. Wai’s wonderful supply that got here just in time!). I ended up getting sick myself with some kind of stomach thing. That knocked me out for a couple days, so I went home on Friday to recuperate. I was worried about the boys over the weekend but came back to Bethel today and both are doing great! They were making me nervous but pulled through without a hospitalization, so I was soooo happy!

On my birthday I received some very special presents. Delphine brought in an amazingly wonderful chocolate cake she had baked. The little preschool kids kept handing me candies from the New Year Celebration as their gifts.  I even had Zhi Wei (Jer Way) and Xia Lu (Sha Lu) each come to me at different points and give me kisses-a first for both of them who have been a little more cautious in showing their affection. It was a sweet day, but one gift in particular caught me by surprise.

Wen Jun (When June) has been in love with me since I can remember. She has matured a lot now that she is a grown up thirteen year old, so she isn’t as clingy and calling me “mommy” as she did a year and a half ago. But she is still totally my shadow. She is always talking about wishing Tom and I would get married so she could be our daughter (since I’ve explained some of the Chinese adoption laws), or saying how she wishes I could take her home with me and she could be my sister instead. 🙂 When I was sick at Bethel, I had gone to lay down upstairs on my bunk. Wen Jun was in the bathroom taking a shower.  She didn’t know I was up there, but I could hear her singing away, “I love Sarah, I love Sarah so much” and variations of the same theme. It made me smile. She was also a very good nurse and kept running into my room to check on me, give me apples, or a kiss on the cheek.

The morning of my birthday Wen Jun pulled me to her classroom to talk to me. She then took my hands and said, “I do not have much I can give you. But I hope you will like this.” She then handed me a picture of herself when she was little. Immediately my eyes filled with tears. The kids at Bethel treasure their photos. They have so few of when they were little and each one is so special to them. Even the kids that can’t see at all love to share their photos and have you describe what is happening, what they are wearing, or what they are doing in the photo-even though they remember every detail from the last time someone told them. They love to hear how cute they were when they were little and what they looked like. What Wen Jun was handing me was one of the most priceless things she had to give me. She told me it was when she was watering flowers when she first came to Bethel. I didn’t want to take it, but I knew that she wanted me to have it so badly. It is a beautiful treasure for sure. She is such a beautiful treasure!

I had kind of a couple funny, cultural experiences yesterday that I felt inclined to share. They were two things where I thought, “I wonder how long I would have to live here before I would feel like this was normal.” The first incident happened when I was looking for a taxi in Beijing to head to church. As I approached the car I realized something “awful” was occurring. The taxi driving was sitting in the drivers seat waiting for a passenger…and peeing in a water bottle. I didn’t know what to do. I kind of paused and waited for him to finish the job and zip up his pants before I got in. I tried to act like I didn’t see what had happened, but as we drove all I could do was make myself stop thinking about the pee bottle rolling around on the floor by his feet. The second incident was when I was at McDonalds. It is one place I can find relatively familiar tasting ice cream. As I was sitting there eating my spicy chicken wings and ice cream there was a woman sitting at the table across from me looking at me but not smiling (not so strange). But then she started picking her nose. And not just picking it, but digging and then taking the treasures she was finding and flicking them off her fingers right in front of me. Again, I had to force myself to concentrate on eating, keeping my focus on my food, and not looking at what was happening across from me.

So, on that lovely note, we have a couple months open where we need volunteers to come teach English and music. 🙂 If you know of anyone interested, let me know. Right now we have a blank spot between the end of April through the middle of July. Katie Nicklas will be coming this Friday to join in the adventure for a couple months. I am beyond thrilled to have a roommate. I have decided living alone…especially in a far away country, is NOT for me! I have already prepared her that I will be dragging her on the adventures I have been to timid to try on my own. Yeah! With Katie here taking over on some of the English stuff, I am going to try and get the kids going on some “Do You See Him” curriculum that I brought back from church.

All for now! Hope you are having a wonderful year of the rat!

Love, Sarah”