Happy Easter! Spring is here and the yellow dust is blowing. We get some “yellow dust days” from time to time, where sand from the Gobi desert blows in, and covers our car front to back. (Not-so-fun-fact: The amount of dust has increased over the years due to deforestation in China and Mongolia) On these days it’s wise not to go outside, or you should wear a mask. Another sign of spring is babies, and no, I don’t mean mine, as I still have 6 months to go, but a baby bunny.

Herb
Our newest addition to the family is a bunny! No, it wasn’t my motherly instincts kicking in too early. You’re probably wondering why on earth we would buy a pet with a baby on the way. Well, we didn’t buy it. It’s quite a funny story. One of my 10 year old V-School students randomly brought a rabbit to class. Confused, I asked why he would bring a rabbit to my class, when the focus is learning English. I put it in a cardboard box and tried to teach my class, at times in vain, as there was a much more interesting distraction for the kids. Through their broken English and my broken Korean, I managed to decipher that the boy bought the rabbit on a whim from a store, and brought it home without asking his parents’ permission. His mother said no, of course, and probably that he needed to get rid of it. Since none of the other children’s parents would let them take it, he offered it to me as a last resort, I guess. I later found out that his mom did let him keep it for a little while, but he didn’t take care of it, at all. I saw evidence of that in how poorly he handled it, picking him up wrong so he squirmed and fidgeted, or putting him on his shoulder and letting him fall off, etc. It made me sick to see how poorly he handled the baby rabbit. So, I like to think I rescued the bunny…..and I certainly didn’t mind taking on a pet. I love animals, and had a pet of some kind my entire life until getting married, so I missed it.

Herb is a pleasant distraction for ALL my students now, so I had resorted to closing the curtains to where his room is, but that didn’t work. The students just opened the curtain, tapped on the glass, or stepped over the gate to play with him. I realize I will just have to put his cage in another room with a closed door. Will thinks we will also need a diversion, like a sign on a room that says “Do not come in-Rabbit inside”, but it would be the wrong room. Ha ha.

Easter Weekend
Will and I were put in charge of the Good Friday service, and the Easter Sunday service. YIKES! That made me a little stressed, but now it’s over and I can talk about it in a relaxed manner. For Good Friday, we planned a service that would be similar to how the final evening with Jesus would have been. Following the reading of text in John about foot washing, we all washed each other’s feet. Then following the reading of text in Luke about the Last Supper, we shared communion. For this I made chapatis, mimicking the flat bread that would have been eaten in those times. The service seemed to be meaningful to others, as I saw some wiping of tears. Easter Sunday also went well, as Will had written some skits, and he had made a cross specifically for the service. We invited people to write down a sin or burden in their life, and to nail it to the cross, symbolic of Jesus taking on our sins and being nailed to the cross, and during the choir song, we had the pieces of paper removed from the cross, replaced by some decorative fabric, to signify the resurrection. What was most meaningful was that many church members thanked us afterwards for a good service, and one even hugged me with appreciation. Even if the services didn’t go well, that made up for it.

Sunday School
So, I’ve been teaching the youth Sunday School class since January, and to be honest, I have mixed feelings about it. I’m struggling with a few different dynamics, and not sure which dynamic to address. The first dynamic is that they are youth, so, just like NA’can youth, they are “too cool for Sunday school”, and don’t really participate. Then there’s the question of me being younger than past teachers, and not intimidating enough to make some of the chatters stop chatting out of respect for me, as the teacher. The most obvious dynamic is the language barrier. Those that do know English don’t feel confident enough to translate, and even though I have asked repeatedly for a translator, I haven’t gotten one. I don’t know why, but I suspect it’s because all the eligible translators want to be in their own Sunday school classes. This causes my biggest frustration, cause I have carefully thought out lessons, with much to say, and no ears to hear it, and no willing mouths to make discussions possible. Sigh. I will bring up the question of a translator at the next meeting (again!) otherwise I will pose the question, “Should I be doing this?”

Pregnancy Pros and other things
One thing I love about being pregnant, is everyone has become so understanding of my quirky behavior. When I yawned in church one Sunday, the man sitting beside me said, “It’s okay. You’re pregnant.” Over potluck, when I asked for a little more rice, the server said in Korean, “Of course. You’re eating for two!” When I sang a high note in choir, all the ladies said, “Ooh, how is the baby now?!” One evening, some friends had us over for supper, and it was an entirely NA’can meal. The woman understood that I might be craving food from home, and she was right, and it was the most heavenly meal I’ve had; creamy pasta, garlice bread, salad with fruit, even CINNABONS to finish. We have such wonderful friends here.

I forgot to mention that when we first told Brother Cha that we were pregnant, we wanted to impress him by saying it in Korean. I should have practiced saying it a little more, cause I ended up telling him this: “나는 은행해요” which I think means “I am banking.” He was understandably confused, so Will gave it a stab, saying “재 아내 임신해요”, which at least uses the correct word, but we were still corrected, because in Korean, they say “we have gotten pregnant” or “we have conceived”, so the expression is past tense.

At my most recent appointment, I was able to see a fully limbed bean through the ultrasound, and when the heartbeat was played, in amplified sound, the baby started moving around like crazy! I had to ask the doctor if that was normal. He said the heartbeat was probably bothering the fetus. It was amazing; it waved it’s arms and legs around independently, and looked like it was head banging. I may be giving birth to a punk rocker. I then went to get a special ultrasound to test for Down Syndrome, and suddenly our bean didn’t want to move anymore, just when its movement was needed the most. The woman proceeded to jiggle the probe on my belly, very quickly, to try to get the baby to move. After 10 minutes of this jiggling, I was relieved to see our bean finally give her some movement.

T-Shirt Idea
So, there’s this website about t-shirts designed by “Weh-gooks” (foreigners in Korea) for “Weh-gooks”, and Will had a silly idea for a T-shirt: “Mind your own grocery cart”. This is funny for us, because we have noticed that whenever we go grocery shopping, people tend to be overly interested in what is in our grocery cart, doing a long, obvious scan of the cart’s contents. Why is it so interesting?

V-School Shenanigans
Will played a trick on his students one class, saying he could solve a Rubix cube behind his back. Little did they know that Will happened to have 2 Rubix cubes, one solved, one not. He put the unsolved cube behind his back, and within seconds pulled out the solved one. All the kids, including the parents were astonished. So astonished, the lesson would not have been able to continue, so Will had to give away his secret.

One of our day school students is a character. We think he’s testing us to see how much we’ll take before snapping. The examples are too great to list, but here’s one. Since he was told not to write directly in his text book (where there are exercises to be filled out), he proceeded to write the answers in pencil, then erase them RIGHT after. I told him to just write the answers in his binder, where he had PAPER. No, he insisted on his system of writing in the book, then erasing it right after, creating a nice big pile of eraser mess on the table. WHY??

Knitting and now Cooking Club
The knitting club is still meeting, to my happiness, and at the request of the ladies, they want me to teach them how to cook some NA’can style things, like chicken noodle soup. So, after we showed each other our projects (I am now working on a baby sweater, another member finished off 4 hats and is starting a vest, 2 others are working on prayer shawls still), I showed them how to make chicken broth. They were pleased with how easy it was, but not so pleased, I think, with my different ways of handling the kitchen. They were sure to tell me just how to wash the table and peel vegetables properly. But hey, we can all be teachers and students.

And that concludes this lengthy letter, this extravagant epistle, this prolonged prose.