One of my biggest highlights of my spring at For the Nations has been Thursday afternoons at Kids' Club, when twelve to fifteen 4- to 12-year-olds come sprinting from the van to greet us. Four or five of us volunteers and staff members help the older kids with their homework assignments and direct the younger ones to work on coloring and activity sheets. As you might imagine, it's an interesting challenge trying to communicate the significance of Texas history names and dates to a bunch of Afghan and Ethiopian refugee kids who can barely pronounce them! But it is always rewarding to watch these scholars make connections once someone has taken the time to explain their social studies or math concepts on an individual level.
When it's time for the Bible lesson, one of the staff shares a short Bible story and reviews the creation-fall-redemption narrative. It always makes me smile to hear these kids (from different religious backgrounds) enthusiastically filling in aspects of the gospel story they have learned this year. Some of them ask excellent and thought-provoking questions. One particularly bright 6th-grader, Hassan, asked just the other week, "Why did Jesus have to be baptized, since he didn't have any sin?" Last week I was able to follow up with him and explain more about Jesus' identity and how He fulfilled everything written about Him. Such an awesome privilege to be able to talk freely with the youth from some of the most "restricted" nations in the world!
The opportunities also come with obstacles. These kids have no problems learning and reciting biblical truths, as they belong to a culture that values religion and even shares the same Bible characters. But one-on-one, they often share things their parents have told them about God and eternity that are simply truth twisted. They love to discuss spiritual things, but it is a challenge to help them understand the personal implications of God's truth.
Pray for these children, that Jesus will reach into their lives and that they will realize their need for a Savior. Pray that they will read the gospel books and watch the Jesus films they received for Easter, and that their families will find salvation in Christ. And please pray for wisdom & boldness for us tutors; next Thursday is our last Kids' Club of the school year. Pray that we'll take advantage of opportunities to share the Truth with these children through VBS this summer!
*Names changed for privacy reasons. To respect the privacy of individuals mentioned in this post, please do not share this information in a public setting or on social media.*
In my Level 1 adult ESL class, I
typically sit between whichever two students need the most assistance and guide
them through the lesson at their own pace, while the teacher instructs the rest of the class. This is Htwa Meh (right). She is from Myanmar (Burma), a country in Southeast Asia where minority ethnic groups, such as the Karenni, suffer from internal ethnic conflicts. Several of the students in my class, including Htwa Meh, are Karenni, and most have no background in English. Htwa Meh came to America about three years ago, but this was her first year to enroll in English classes here at FTNRO. What is most remarkable about Htwa Meh's success in English this year is the fact that she is deaf. That's right, she's trying to learn a written language for the first time, with unique phonetics that she can't even hear, at the pace of a roomful of hearing students! So back in February when I was asked to sit with her each Thursday during class, I gulped, prayed, and wondered how to teach a deaf person in a class that includes listening/repeating exercises and pronunciation. But God knew what He was doing. Htwa Meh was determined to learn, and she surprised me with her ability at lip-reading. Even better, one of the teachers had already taught her the American Sign Language alphabet, and because I had taken ASL in my last semester of college, I was able to teach her basic ASL vocabulary to go along with each English lesson. Once she finally realized that ASL is a legitimate language, we started having a lot of fun with it and bonding. She has made incredible progress in both English and ASL, and was one of the fastest learners in the class! Trying to interpret for her during the Bible lessons with our limited vocabulary was a challenge, however. Even though her background is strongly Catholic, I sense that she has very little concept of what is in the Bible. It is my prayer that she will someday be able to watch the Deaf Bible in ASL (www.deafbiblesociety.com) and understand its message of salvation!
Oo Meh (to the left of me) is another Karenni woman from the same ESL class as Htwa Meh. When she started class this year, she knew zero English and was entirely illiterate, even in her own language. She was shy and wanted to blend in with the group, constantly repeating under her breath whatever the teacher said without comprehending the meaning. When I tried to help her with the alphabet, she struggled a lot just learning to hold the pencil and tracing the letter "A." But gradually she began to pronounce simple words and associate them with pictures, and can now even write her name and copy words from the whiteboard! In recent weeks, some students from the Graduate Institute for Applied Linguistics (GIAL) in Dallas have been creating simple vocabulary sheets with pictures and corresponding words in her native language, but written with the Latin (English) alphabet. This provides a bridge between the two languages and gives phonetic meaning to letters on a page. It has helped Oo Meh immensely with adjusting to written language, and as this tool develops it will hopefully be useful for many similar Burmese students in the future. Even in this last week of class, I noticed how much confidence Oo Meh has gained. I'll never forget the smile on her face when she was the first to recognize and call out the "kitchen" flashcard! It has been very eye-opening and humbling
to be the “teacher” for this dear woman who has so much she should be teaching me! She inspires me by her perseverance to
learn new and hard things at her age.
The opportunities also come with obstacles. These kids have no problems learning and reciting biblical truths, as they belong to a culture that values religion and even shares the same Bible characters. But one-on-one, they often share things their parents have told them about God and eternity that are simply truth twisted. They love to discuss spiritual things, but it is a challenge to help them understand the personal implications of God's truth.
