Page 12 - Clearwater Christian College 2005

hinashockmissiontrip

N A STEAMY July afternoon last summer, 60 members of

Team Dragon and Team Panda met at the Los Angeles airport to

board the plane for a destination some 4,000 miles on the other side of the

world. Twenty-four hours later they touched down in Chengdu, China, a

2300-year-old city, approximately 1000 miles inland from the coast for

what most have called the “experience of a life time.”

1 hree weeks later, 28 members of Team Tiger replaced the Team

Dragon group on a similar odyssey, an experi­

ence they also described in superlatives.

Soon after school began almost a year earlier,

88 members of the college family responded

to a call for workers to teach in a summer pro­

gram at two Chinese educational facilities:

Sichuan University and Mt. Royal Business

Institute. The experience required each group

member to raise $2,000 and to spend three to

E six weeks in Chengdu. The offer was open to students and faculty. By July,
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over a dozen faculty and staff members, along with 75 students had raised

o

o $200,000 and had plans in place.

(U
c Once in Chengdu, the group divided into two sections, each hav­
o

E ing as its primary task teaching English to a group of Chinese students from

ages 8 to 48. For Mr. and Mrs. Ken Hess, theirs was the task of teaching a

(/) methods class, in addition to enhancing the vocabulary of 38 students, in­

S cluding two members of the Communist party. Although the language was

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particularly difficult for several of the students, most of them from outside

o

o Chengdu, each had been assigned by the government to teach in Chinas

• H i
E educational system, and they needed the remediation the “foreign teachers”

could provide.

“We quickly began to love our class,” said Mrs. Hess. Putting bits

of their own teaching philosophy to work, the Hess’s took their class on

field trips for vocabulary development and to eating establishments such as

McDonald’s so they could enjoy a “taste of Americana.” (continued p. 10)

"I noticed three

things about Chi­

nese culture: 1)

Tai Chi requires

super power and

punching the air

is harder than it j

looks. 2) Appar­

ently, there are no driving laws.

Though we screamed and

I ~ I
flinched at many close calls, the

taxi driver appeared unfazed

while he talked on his cell phone
W M

I
and drank tea. 3) The Chinese

play Christmas music year round."

-Mallory Alexander