Saturday, April 19, 2008

Photo of children


This is me(Pieter) and the smallest children I teach.
The Grade 1 and 2 class at Yong Bong Primary, they are such darlings and cannot wait to be spoken to or even to be hugged. The kids like all children love attention and where ever I walk, I hear: "Mr Pieter, Mr Pieter!" All they want to do, is to say the only word they know, i.e. "hello" and get a hug. A truly wonderful and rewarding experience.

Part of the reason we are here, is we believe that God want to use us in the community. We have a passion to spread the love of Jesus. We would like people to stand with us in prayer and trust that we'll see this happen.

Friday, April 18, 2008

After our taxi ride from Seosan, we arrived in Hong Seong. This is a large town and our apartment
is only 5 minutes walk to Rykie's one school, Hong Ju Elementary School. The other school is 20 minutes out of town, surrounded by farms, and is Jong Ho Elementary School. Pieter also teaches at two schools, about 15 minutes out of town and he takes the bus every morning. The one is called Jong Bong and the other is Hong Buk Elementary School.
We are very happy there and enjoy the classes, now that we have the curriculum sorted out. We prepare and is an assistant teacher in the morning and in the afternoon, we do extra curricular English classes.

The weather has changed from very cold, to warmer, as it is now Spring. The cherry blossoms are
out and we eat a lot of strawberries. The rest of the food takes some getting used to! We have been invited to a traditional Korean Restaurant or two. That means you sit on the floor on a cushion, at a very low table. There are about 40 small dishes between the people around the table. Some dishes are very hot and spice and we now know to avoid it. We stick to the one or two dishes we like.

Our apartment is really very comfortable. We have quite a large bedroom, a small study, a larger kitchen area and a bathroom with a toilet. It is fully furnished and have underfloor heating and aircon. We are on the first floor. Around the corner is a very nice supermarket. They even deliver your goods if you buy more than a certain amount. It really is very safe here and we feel O K to take a walk down town - another 15 minutes down the road. On a Friday night we enjoy going to a "sort of Mc Donalds". This gives us a taste of Western food again.

The Korean children take music as a subject and all play recorders, small desk keyboards, violins, drums and even saxophones. They are taught to read music. They love singing.
The people are very friendly and helpful. Although no one speaks English, they often try and understand us - with many hand signs from our side.

Later we'll tell more about the Church we go to now. We started an English Bible Fellowship and will share our wonderful experience with you.

Arrival in Korea

Hi Welcome to our BLOG journal.

Hope you will visit us often and enjoy your time with us!!!


ARRIVAL:
Well we arrived here on Monday 3rd March 2008.
Honestly we could have been led anywhere on Earth!
We arrived in Seoul, from Singapore where we spent 2 days to try and focus, late the afternoon at 17:30. All we had was the name of a Mr Lee and his cell no. [In Korea it is called a hand phone].

He met us, put us on a bus to Seosan and said something in Korean to the driver whom spoke zilch English. Well there we went, after 30 minutes it got dark so we could only see a freeway and car lights. The bus ride with all our baggage, took about 2+1/2 hours. There we waited on the bus until we were stuffed into a taxi who took us for another 1/2 hour. Stopped in a dark street and were met by 4 Koreans some spoke English while the others could hardly speak. We then walked up a little incline and into a building where we found our apartment on the 1st floor. It looked very comfortable but we had no bedding and it was about 3 degrees outside.

It was very interesting as we spent our first night in a Spa(their version of a motel).
The central heating was so hot that we first cooled the room off with the air-con. The next morning we were picked up for our first day at school at )8:10, so there we went.
watch for next blog