Into the Wardrobe: Adventures in Narnia

Advances in Transporation make for something magical... they allow us to be in two completely different worlds within a day... This reality hit me as I waited for the plane in New York... I panic when I am at the airport on my way to Chn.  One of the ways that I deal with this panic is to raid the snack shop.  I take large amounts of time looking at the selection and thinking "What will I miss most in the next ___ months?"  Then I buy it for the plane ride.  It's always interesting to see what snacks make the cut...cheese-its are normally in the running as are Reeses Cups and Gummy Bears.   Coffee of some sort ALWAYS wins in the drink selection although I meant to also buy chocolate milk this time.  

This trip back my routine got messed up because I was frantically trying to send out my newsletter.   I realized how much I love food as a wave of sorrow struck me when the plane doors closed... "Open those doors... I need my last bag of Cheese-Its" I wanted to cry out.   Its funny how airlines announce the closing of the airplane doors.  When I'm going anywhere else I hear the words "Ladies and Gentlemen, the pilot has now closed the cabin doors."  When I'm on my way to Chn, I hear "You are now leaving the real world and venturing into Narnia."  The airport is like the wardrobe with the snack shop being like the coats that the kids pcik up before entering into Narnia.  They know that they're entering Narnia where it is winter so they must grab coats... I know that I am entering a land devoid of beef, dairly and coffee and so I shop accordingly.  

Although the plane ride is long, the transition feels abrupt.  One day you are sleeping in a soft bed, taking bubble baths, speaking a language that you understand in a culture that makes sense... then you enter the wardrobe and step into Narnia.  In Narnia you are sleeping in a rock hard bed, trying to figure out how to successfully shower using a showerhead but no shower curtain and not get the toilet paper or your clean clothes soaked, you are eating only G0d knows what, using toliets that can be horrifying and to top it off you don't understand what anyone is saying, let alone thinking.  On the 13 hour plane ride I went over the rules for re-entry... DON'T DRINK THE WATER, remember to carry toilet paper but try to use public toilets as infrequently as possible, don't eat unpeeled fruits or vegetables or you will be using the public toilets frequently, spitting is completely socially acceptable so don't get annoyed but do look around when you hear someone hawking or you may get hit with a piece of phlemn that defies reality, remember to speak in Chns even though you don't speak chns, remember that people don't tell you what they are thinking or expecting of you so be sure to read their minds, don't step off of the bus without looking or you will get hit by a motorcycle, don't believe the "walk" sign-it lies... All of these rules for a place that is only a plane ride away!  Despite the craziness of the transition and the troubles encountered... Like Lucy, Edmond, Peter and Susan... I just can't help venturing back into Narnia : ) 

A Baby, a Good Bye and a Ring

An emotional rollercoaster... That was the 36 hour period between noon on March 30th and midnight on March 31st.  Let me go back for a second... A couple of weeks ago, my mom emailed me and told me that my grandpap (my dad's dad) had gone into hospice care at his home.  He was having heart failure and it was unclear how much longer he was going to hold on.  My older brother came to my sad, homesick heart's rescue (awww) and offered to use his air miles to fly me home to say good-bye to Grandpap.  All signs pointed to "go home for a visit"... I was at a site that I love but they had just informed me that they had a ten day vacation starting the following week.  That meant that either I would sit around and do nothing (which I hate) or I would go back to kmg and see if there are any kids to evaluate... this would have been ok but since I was not scheduled to be there and many of the families come from the villages, they may not have had much for me to do given the late notice.   I also needed to make one more visa run.  My plan was to take the night bus to Vietnam because it's cheap but I had just read some blogs about it and I was nervous.  Apparently, most people get mugged.  Also, I have heard that it is true that people get sliced up for their internal organs.  There is a black market for kidneys and livers so the gangs tend to target young women... I was told that my organs are too old but it still sounds terrifying!  Buses within Chn seem to be safe but the ones going into bordering counties sound scary.  Sooo that left me with a decision... do I risk the night bus and forever regret it if I get a kidney stolen or spend the extra cash on a flight?  Luckily, my brother's offer to fly me home came before my cheapness got the best of my internal organs : ).  John and I talked and decided that I would come home for two weeks and that I would surprise the rest of my family...  Now you are caught up to March 30th.  

On Sunday, I went over and surprised my grandma and grandpap : ).  Gram was happy to see me : )  My grandpap had dementia during the last two years (?) of his life so while he didn't really remember who I was, he was happy to chat me up anyway!  He was up and talking and looked about how he looked when I left for Chn.  This is also when I met my handsome nephew for the first time.  It was neat to be sitting with the youngest and oldest person that I know in the same room!  After seeing gram and grandpap I went to surprise my immediate family...It just so happened that Sunday evening my family was having a birthday party for my dad and younger sister.  Bill had the genius idea that I skype them (I have skyped into other family functions) and while Im talking to them on skype, run into the house.  So that's what I did and it was hysterical : ).

NOW TO THE GOOD STUFF... THE ENGAGEMENT!

Bill took off of work on Monday so we could spend the day together.  We decided to go up to Ligonier to see the location that we are going to get married at.  Bill has seen the venue, but since I have been in China, I haven't.   There, at the site of our wedding in 193 days Bill asked me to marry him.  I'm crying as I type this because it was the sweetest moment of my life : )  The proposal was so Bill and I... He had the ring in his pocket and was trying to find the right moment to pop the question... I was running around planning and he couldn't get me to stand still long enough to get the words out of his mouth.  Finally, as I was running around talking out tealights, Bill told me to stop moving around and stand with him for a minute.  The next part also makes me smile... as we were talking about the wedding ceremony, he asked which hand he would someday put a ring on and I gave him the wrong hand... Anyone that has know me for a long time knows that I have ALWAYS had a hard time with knowing my left from my right : )  After getting the correct hand, he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him and I screamed!  I've had a good life and have so many things to be joyful about, but that was the most joyful moment I've ever had : )  Although I knew that the formal proposal was coming at some point, I was still really surprised!  Looking back I see that on Sunday and Monday, Bill was extra smirky and I kept asking him what he was smirking about, he claimed that he was just happy to see me.  Well I guess the ring in his pocket was the true reason for his extra smirkyness : )   After spending some time together in Ligonier, Bill and I stopped by my older brother and sister-in-laws house to show off the ring (it's amazing ;) ).  

After talking to them for awhile we heard that grandpap wasn't doing well so we drove to grams.  I said good-bye to grandpap that night.  He didn't pass aways until early Tuesday morning but that was the last time I saw him and he wasn't doing well.  People probably wonder if that put a cloud over the day and while I would have liked to never have grandpap pass away, I feel like I saw something sweet that maybe wouldn't have resignated as much with me if it weren't the day of my engagement... I watched my grandma love her husband of 71 years until the very end.   Grandpap went straight from grandma's arm's to J3sus.  I don't even want to think about ever losing Bill, but when that day comes, i want to be the kind of wife that sticks with him until he breaths his last breath.   

Could more life moments happen within a shorter period of time?  That day I witnessed life's bests loves... I saw the parental love that my brother and sister- in-law have for their new son, the seasoned love that my grandparents have after years of marriage and the joyful young love that Bill and I have for each other.  Within minutes of one another I was holding my one month old nephew followed by holding the hand of my 96 year old dying grandpap followed by holding the hand of my future husband.  It was a day where joy and grief mixed but somehow the grief didn't steal the joy.  And more miraculously still, I was able to see that even in death there is joy because it gives us the chance to celebrate my grandpap's long life and look forward to seeing him Heaven side.

I love you grandpap... You will be missed : (. 

I love you Bill and pray that we get AT LEAST 71 years of marital bliss  ; )

Practicing What I Preach : )

It's always strange when you share something that you learned in the past with someone only to find that you need to hold onto that same truth yourself.  For me this happened this week.  I was doing a training on speech pathology and I felt that I needed to be sure to address the Biblical aspect of working with special needs kids (my version) before diving into the specific treatment techniques.
 
-Our belief about people: First, in all that we do we must remember what we believe about our kids.  We believe that as humans we are made in the image of God and that when he made us he declared that his creation was good.  As we work with people (and nature) we must remember that disrespect of the creation is disrespect of the creator.  When we look at kids with disgust or treat them with contempt, we are insulting what G0d created and declare good.  Dumb example, but I think of the movie "The Little Women."  I hate the scene where Amy throws Jo's manuscript into the fire.  You can feel the anguish in the pit of your stomach... Jo had put her creative juices into that manuscript and Amy disrespected her creativity and her heart but tossing it into a fire.  People were created by G)d, who are we to question their beauty, dignity or value?
  
-Be teachable:  The second point was to let the kids that we work with teach us.  Working in special education will change you.  It will soften your heart, it will reorient your priorities and it will make you appreciate the simple gifts in life.  Enjoy it!  We have a child at the center that loves to sing and dance, its generally at inappropriate times, but there is a time for you to enjoy her joy.  

-Give up your need for control or lose your sanity!   This is the biggest for me!   Basically I feel like we need to do what we do as an act of obedience to G0d and not obsess about measurable results.  This is hard because we work hard with these kids and we want to see them succeed.  We also want their success to show the people around them their abilities.  However, we don't have total control over the outcomes... we have control over the amount of effort that we put into our work, and shame on us if we don't give these kids our all, but we don't have total control over the outcome.  When we take on the total burden of "fixing" our kids we not only fail to respect them in whatever place they are in, but we also open the door for burnout, frustration, guilt and resentment.  We are burnt out and frustrated because we need results to keep us motivated and we're not getting them.  We feel guilty because we know that we're not as skilled as we could be and we become resentful of others (parents, caregivers, the kids) because we need someone else to blame for the "failure."  This can be avoided (or at least mitigated) when we see our job as something that we do out of obedience to G0d and we have to trust that He has the outcomes in His hands.  I'm a results person and my profession has made me even worse.  We are obsessed with data and research and being efficient and effective have become our God.  People that are in higher education for seven long years have to be intense on some level, I needed to get certain grades to stay in my masters program and I think it made me a little overly goal oriented.  But people aren't multiple choice tests, they have certain limitations and they have free will.  This is tough because it means that there are factors outside of our control.  I feel like I first started to understand this concept when I started mentoring with LAMP.  Sometimes when I was mentoring I wondered if I was only painting pumpkins with a ten year old and I wanted to know what good that would do in the long run (just to clarify... I LOVED painting pumpkins with this ten year old!).  I think I almost needed to see the outcome to feel like the effort was worth it, but that's not the right mentality.  When we feel that G0d has called us into whatever we are doing then our responsibility is to Him.  I wasn't only painting pumpkins... I was doing what I felt G0d called me to do at that time.  I  don't know what the long-term outcome will be, and maybe I don't always get to see how G0d works in every situation, but that doesn't mean that I'm not responsible to do what He has put on my heart.  For me, this idea has freed me... It's hard to carry the burden of "fixing" everyone.  There are times when kids don't make much progress and we continue to work with them, but in the mean time we don't have the weight of feeling like we've failed them.  

-Influencing change the Biblical way: The other point is that we must be careful to love kids the way that they are and not withhold our love from them until they make the results that we want.  In this we have a perfect example from J3sus.  The Bible says that while we were still sinners Chrst died for us.  He takes us in when we are still messy and loves us as He changes our hearts.  He doesn't withhold His love from us until we're perfect because change is hard and we need His help.  The kids that we work with are like that... they need our love and affection now and it needs to be unconditional.  We want good things for them, but we don't love them less if they don't make it to where we want them to be.  

I said all of this and then had a meltdown a couple of days later because I feel like I'm not doing enough for the vastness of the issues here.  I don't feel qualified to deal with the complications that some of these kids have and I'm not always getting the outcomes that I dream of.  There are so many kids who need services and there are so few people to give them those services.  For some of them I feel like giving them special ed/speech services is such a small drop in the bucket that I feel frantic.  Many of them need is sooo much more than I can give them.  I LOVE what I do here.. it's the most fulfilling thing that I've ever done, but at times I feel like its not enough so I may as well pack up and go home.  The ups and downs are maddening : )   I'm still working out how to ride this roller-coaster, but the only thing that I know for sure in it all is that G0d calls us to "Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy" Proverbs 31:8-9.  
 
This is just me talking so Biblical scholars ( hi dad: ) ) may tear this apart...luckily for me, drones of Biblical scholars are not reading my meager blog : ).   I feel like in the Bible when G0d invites people to be used by Him, He tells them what to do, but doesn't hold them to outcomes that are out of their control.   When G0d called Moses, He told him what to say to Pharaoh but He didn't hold Moses accountable for changing Pharaoh's heart, that was G0d's role.   When he sent the disciples out He commanded them to preach the Good news but the results weren't their burden to bear... they were G0d's.  This is all good news for me because I'm tired and I can't take on all that there is to take on here... but luckily G0d's here and this is His work : )   

 

Homesick : (

The last two weeks have had more downs than ups.  I have been blessed to have not come to a time where I really didn't want to be here...although I still haven't hit that place, these past two weeks have been the closest.   My dislike isn't for Chna, its just that I miss home : (   The shame of it is that I am at a site that has a ton to do and I feel like I'm living under a dark cloud, I've never been less motivated to work than I have been these past two weeks.  

During this time I've had two revelations... one is that I am incredibly blessed to have a family that my hurt longs to be with.  We go into an orphng here and seeing all of those kids without families is really depressing.  There is a lot to be sad about in this world but seeing kids lonely is the hardest for me.  I can't even imagine not having a family to love me, protect me from harm, rejoice with, grieve with etc.  But that is the reality for these kids.... I hate seeing it, I can't even imagine living it.  

My second relelation was the reality of our Heavenly Father and brothers and sisters in Him.  Sometimes when life gets lonely we let the lie that we are alone feel true.  We're never without a familiy... we have a father whose love for us is perfect and eternal.  We also have brothers and sisters all over the world.  My nephew was born about two weeks ago and that week I was craving holding him.  That Sunday during a meeting there was a little baby that was fussing... the mom has nine kids so I offered to take the baby.  He fell alseep on me and I remembered that I do have family here.  I'm surrounded by foreigners who are also away from home.  They miss their parents, sisters, brothers, nieces and nephews just as I do.  While we are not blood relatives, we have all been adopted into His family and are therefore family forever : )   

Thanks G0d for not only being my comforter, but for sending my brothers and sisters in you to hold me while I'm here. 

W.S.

I am on the move again!  I moved all of my stuff out of the apartment that I was renting in kMG...moved it into K and L's and packed a suitcase to take with me to W.S. where I'll be for an undetermined amount of time.  I am already about half way through my time in Chn... WOW, it is going so fast!  

I am loving the site here in W.S., there is so much to get involved with.  They have two projects that I'll be working with.  One is a therapy program for kids with special needs.   They have about over 15 kids at the site.  Most of them have cerebral palsey and four have Autism.  They don't currently have an SLP so the kids are mostly doing PT.  One of my responsibilities will be to evaluate the kids, write goals and train therapist and parents on treatment.  Another part will be to train a local SLP to work with these kids but to also begin simple assessment and treatment around the province.  I'm sooo excited about the model here!  One thing that I LOVE about this site is their heavy focus on parent training and parent support gorups.  The encourage the parents to develop relationships outside of the therapy room and also have a parent retreat that allows them to have a break from the kids and focus on their marriages.  I LOVE that they see beyond just therapy and are working on family relationships.  Another project is working in an orphng... There are six or seven special needs kids that we are working with, again they are doing PT but I'm hoping to start up a speech/special ed group.  There are so many factors that play into a kid being institutionalized (the special needs kids don't attend school).  Kids pretty much always have severe language (very limited vocabulary) and educational delays.  I would like to start doing some small gorup activities that will expose them to vocabulary, academic skills such as counting and writing and work on social skills.  I'm REALLY excited for this next part of my time!   

A Little (because I don't know much yet) about W.S....

W.S. is a smaller city than kmg.  It is still a city and has a lot of people but it has a different feel.  For one thing there are not a lot of foreigners... I got a lot of stares when I went out today!   Also, it has a rural city feel... there are big buildings but on the side streets it almost looks like the mainstreet in a rural area.  I have seen a couple of horse drawn carts which is something the kmg wouldn't have.  There are quite a few ethnic minority groups that live here or that come from villages on the weekend to sell food.  I think that the three biggest are the Miao, the Yi and the Zhuang.  This brings up another difficult thing... they don't speak Mandarin here!  Some people do but they have a local W.S. dialect and then the minorities all have their own dialect.  I was really hoping to get much better with my Mandarin but it looks like that won't happen!  Well I don't know much more than that so that's all I have! 

Miao

Yi 

Zhuang

Stone Forest Hospital Part 2

The last week of February I headed back up to Stone Forest to work with the kids and rehab staff there.  The original plan was that I would evaluation, write goals for and begin training the staff on therapy techniques during my first visit and then just observe and tweak during my second visit.  It turned out that they had new kids arrive so I ended up completing the initial steps of the process for the newcomers.  The fact that they had new kids was great!  It seems that sometimes it is initially hard to find kids with special needs and then once you get a couple, kids start coming out of nowhere.  What was challenging is that two of the new kids had totally different needs (they are Deaf), than the kids that we already started with, so I was needing to train the staff on yet another form of therapy.  I was really glad to have those two children though... being Deaf is tough especially in the rural areas because they generally don't have access to a school for the Deaf and do not end up going to school. These kids have high cognitive skills so I hate to see them sit at home all day and not have access to education or a social life.   Because they aren't taught academic skills, when they are adults they have few vocational opportunities.  Geting these kids relatively early (they are 5-6), is a blessing.   With children who are Deaf here you have two options; sign language and literacy skills.  Sign language is tough because they have Chinese sign language but it is hard to get teaching materials and really no one in the childs environment would be able to use it so it's actually not that helpful.  Basically, we decided to encourage the family to continue to use the sign language that they had made up (the little girl points to her mouth when she is hungry etc) because it works and is understood by most people, but we also want to push reading and writing skills.  When a person can read and write their whole world gets exponentially bigger.  In Chn, cell phones are EVERYWHERE!  Even people who are very poor seem to have them, this means that if we can teach these kiddoes to write, they can text, type, write characters etc to communicate.  Chnse is acutally easier in this respect than English.  Because it is a character based system, they can learn to match characters to words (whereas in English, letters represent sounds).   Also, to some extent, characters resemble the word that they represents (for example, the character for "person" actually looks like a person).  Also, teaching them to read and write makes them seem more capable to the community... everyone was soooo impressed when we taught these kids to read the couple of characters that we taught... it was really cool!!!

It was also nice to see the therapists beginning to really grasp some of the concepts that we have gone over.  One tendency is for the therapist to grab a stack of flashcards and have the kid say the words on the flashcards.  There are multiple issues wtih this approach when not thought out... one is that some of these kids have very delayed langauge and the flashcards were very random.  One kid uses maybe 15 words and the words that they were practicing were exotic animals.  I explained the concept that since everything that we teach will take a lot of effort, we want to start with functional language... he deosn't need to know how to say "starfish" when he is living in land locked Stone Forest when he doesn't use the word for "shoes" yet.   By the end of the week I saw that they therapist was really grasping that idea and when one of the kids bought a toy into therapy she was sure to teach him the word for that toy which was great because he plays with that toy daily.  

During this week, I also saw the parents of the kids start to hang out together.  This was really neat to see becuase there are no parent support groups here.  Many of these moms carry the heavy emotional weight of caring for their child on their own.  There also tends to be a lot of blame placed on the mom for the childs disability (why the dad is never to blame I don't know... if its genetic its half his genes... obviously no one should be blamed but if there is blame lets at least make it gender neutral : ) ) Anyway, I think its huge for them to support each other and to give the kids the friendships of each other since they may not have the opportunity to play with other kids.

On Thursday of this week we went to a garden party.... sooo fun!  People wore big floppy hats (someone let me borrow one) and we ate BBQ out in the garden.  There was a big vat of chicken feet which was a favorite among everyone except me.  I lucked out and since there was such a crowd around the chicken feet that no one noticed that I didnt' each one...I dont understand it, what are people even eating?  There isn't any meat on a chicken foot.  

Overall, it was a great week and I really enjoyed working with the kids, parents and staff!  

laminating without a laminator = lots of packing tape!

The garden party!

Chicken feet!

"The Joy of Cooking" with Friend!

This month my childhood best friend, Janelle (aka Friend) came to visit me in China.  We traveled around for the first couple of weeks while the rehab center that I work at was closed for Chinese New Year and then she spent a week in Kunming with me.  During her week in Kunming, she took it upon herself to domesticate me... what a task!  Next week I'll be moving to a new city in China that is less Westernized and I will not have access to Walmart.  Sooo Janelle decided that we ( I ) need to learn to cook using just the available things in the open air market.  

Herein lies the tale of two girls desperately trying to avoid becoming vegetarians in a world lacking prepackage frozen meat : ) 

Meal One:  Chicken Breast and Couscous:

Step One: Go to the market and choose a sad, dead chicken.

Step Two:  Put that dead, sad chicken in a plastic bag and walk half a mile home.

Step Three:  Take numerous pictures of this poor chicken that has given you it's life.. post some of them on facebook and harrass your friends (the chickens feet really do look like the fingers of one of my friends in her baby pictures... it was unreal!)

Step Four:  Hack the poor thing into pieces with little idea of what you are doing (at least I had little idea, Janelle seemed to know what she was doing)

Step Five: Cook and enjoy... try not to think about its sad, cold face as you sink your teeth into its flesh. 

Meal Two: Fish (not sure what kind) and Pasta:

Step One:  Go to the market and pick out a live fish (briefly consider letting all of the frogs sitting in a mesh laundry bag free... I don't get why they don't jump away, if they all modilized at the same time there would be no stopping them... Using the name of a popular children's book as their battle cry "JUMP FROG JUMP!")

Step Two: Gasp in horror as the fish seller takes the fish out of the basin, holds it over his head and throws it against the ground as hard as he can to kill it (I was not expecting this, I thought that they hit them on the head which isn't much better but at least its less dramatic)

Step Three:  let the horror continue as the seller scales the fish and puts it into a plastic bag and you take the dead fish to another store where you are stopped on the way out to practice English with a child and asked to take a picture with a child that you have never met.  During the entire encounter and photoshoot, Janelle was holding a bag with a dead fish, this may not have seemed weird to anyone else, but it seemed weird to me.

Step Four:  Watch a Youtube video on how to fillet a fish.

Step Five:  Try with no success to cut the fish apart in the way that the video said.

Step Six: Ask your friend to block the fish from falling off of the counter as you attempt to cut into it (it was much slimier than we thought it would be and slid all over the place, it was terrible!)

Step Seven:  Repent for your murderous heart as you slice into the fish trying multiple knives and eventually resort to using scissors to do the job.

Step Eight: Bread and fry the fish

Step Nine: Guiltily eat the fish and try to remember why you even like meat in the first place.  Also try to remember why you ever left a country with Giant Eagle for a country without Giant Eagle...

Step Ten:  Resolve in your heart, and try to convince the love of your life to be a vegetarian OR find a way to become the Duchess of Downton so that Daisy and Mrs. Patmore can take care of cooking from now on.  

Step Eleven:  Find out a couple of days later that the new city probably has frozen meats : ) 

But it was all worth it for THE JOY OF COOKING WITH FRIEND!!!