End of term 5, beginning of Term 6- LAST ONE!

This post is long overdue, but here it is nonetheless.  Term 5 was HOT. REALLY HOT.  Apparently, we complained about it enough that we had students offering us their air conditioned homes while they were on vacation, students suggesting we sleep at the institute, and students taking us swimming in the nearby river valley.  Too bad it wasn't closer or we would've gone more often.  The trip to the river was fun; two of our high level students took us, and on the way we found out that they were engaged and they invited us to their wedding at the end of October!  We were joking about how SDA is a great dating service, since these two met at SDA.  Not only were the temperatures high, but also the number of cicadas were.  They were so loud and numerous we thought the buzzing noise they were making was coming from the power lines and we started to get worried. 

Hello Mr. Cicada. No, you were not invited.

Later at the end of term, one of those same students graduated from our institute!  It was our first official graduation ceremony to attend and plan, and we were pretty proud of Bobby.  Jon gave a speech as his teacher, and we all got to wear robes :)

For midterms, I took my level four class out to coffee.  This was a fun class.  It was five university age students and one middle aged woman who was really sweet and acted like a mother to all of us.  And two of them, the two girls pictured on the right, I taught way back in January.  It was fun to teach them again, and they really crack me up in class. 

Finally for party and pre-party day, we had lots of dinners and coffee dates, and lunch dates and hanging out time with our students.  One of my students was actually about to leave for Michigan to be a nurse there, so we were pretty sad to see her go, but excited for her.  We also said goodbye to Leland at the end of this last term.  He was only here for one term, and then it was back to his life on the farm. 

All our 7:00AM students

My dedicated level 2 Class

We anxiously awaited the arrival of our new teacher to replace him, hoping it would be an experienced teacher since we would be leaving soon.  Unfortunately, he did not come soon and he was not experienced.  Due to some visa delays, he actually only just arrived tonight, one week into the term, with absolutely no training.  He came to Suncheon with Jon after the coordinator's meeting, and Jon gave him a crash course, but having gotten in at 6:00AM this morning, he's pretty jet-lagged and I'm not sure how much is really sticking....



So, we've obviously had a long and rough first week.  It's always a shock to the system coming back to classes after break and sorting out the schedule, but this time was extra stressful because we had to cover all of Joel's classes as well.  So I was teaching an extra hour and a half this week, Jon was teaching an extra hour and a half plus doing a split adult class, Nev taught an extra hour, and a Korean teacher did as well.  We were all greatly anticipating his arrival and hope he settles into things soon.  We'll still be covering most things for a day or two so he can have some shadowing time, but hopefully after that the schedule should be quite nice.  Right now I'm a bit stressed because I managed to go 10 months without doing Mission Day, but now, the last term we're here, it's finally all on me.  I'm sure it'll be fine, but still. Lots of pressure. For most of these students, they'll never come to weekend programs and this is our one chance to show them that we're more missionaries than teachers.  My topic is comparing and contrasting Chuseok (a Korean holiday coming up) and Thanksgiving, and concluding by pointing out that we all have things to be thankful for and a God to be thankful to, who gave us all those things.  So I'll speak to all those students for about 15 minutes at 7:00AM, 10:00AM and 7:30PM.  Teaching extra classes, planning last weekend's vespers, and today planning Mission Day hasn't given me much time to plan religion class, which starts Tuesday, but I know I'm going to try to make it through the book of Acts in the class.  Well I think that about covers the end of last term and the beginning of this one.  I can't believe this is our last term here!! 50 days till we are Stateside again; here's hoping and praying that one of the three conferences Jon skype interviewed with will hire him so we can have a job when we get home!!
Stayed tuned later this week for some posts about our recent trip to Borneo Malaysia!