Amazing Speed

Internet: We've been in Orlando for about a week now and I've been newly amazed at the speed of US internet access - a 53 minute "Car Talk" podcast that would have taken at least 10 minutes to download on SE Asian "ADSL" took about 90 seconds!

Summer Break: It's scary how fast this is going by already.

Cars: They really can go faster than 50 km/hr!

School Year Ends

The school year ends for us, anyway. Freshmen still have a couple more weeks but they've finished their classes with the foreign teachers. As I write, our team has already begun to head off in different directions: one to the USA, one to Africa to visit a friend, and the other three traveling around SE Asia before heading home or to new responsibilities in Hanoi. Our plane takes off in less than eight hours.

Our summer is short, compared to those in the University Teaching Program (UTP), but it's enough to visit family for a few weeks. In July we'll be back in Hanoi to welcome a new group of teachers and begin their training. This year's training will look a lot different than last year when we trained with the China teachers. Because of the heavy Olympic traffic, teachers in China have been asked to delay their arrival till September. That's too late for the Vietnam school year, so VTF will join the UTP teachers for their training. It will mean more work and more expense for the VTFers, but they'll be a lot more confident at the beginning of their teaching year after the extensive training. And they'll get their TEFL certificate (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) from Wheaton College after successfully completing the coursework.

Part of my summer will involve getting ready for VTF's training and helping to revise some of the university's curriculum, but now it's time to start my summer vacation.

Cookout

Last Saturday night our team had an end-of-the-year cookout for the English department at our school. Melia and Scott delivered about 15-20 invitations, but we weren't sure who was going to come or whether anyone would be bringing guests. We planned for the max; 40 kebobs, 40 pieces of chicken, huge pans of baked beans and potato salad, cookies.... We had lots of leftovers!


Finding a small grill and some charcoal wasn't nearly as difficult as getting damp charcoal lighted with no lighter fluid. Paper didn't work. Twigs off a dead branch weren't much more effective. Then I remembered that a worker had left a few strips of dry wood upstairs. Josh was able to get things going with that and we ended up with a good fire. Like most times I try to barbecue, I should have started about 1/2 hour earlier.

But anyway, everything got cooked and our friends seemed to enjoy the American food. It was nice to be able to get together outside of work.

The Earthquake

You know that feeling you get when you lay down at night after having been out in a canoe all day? That feeling that you're still bobbing around on the water?

About 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon I felt that kind of thing, but like I was bobbing forward and back. "That was weird," I thought. Then I heard about the devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, China.

Although word at this point is that all of our organization's teachers in China are OK (we didn't have any in the immediate area of the quake), thousands of Chinese aren't so fortunate. Please keep them in your thoughts!

Remember too, the people of Myanmar who are being victimized twice -- once by the cyclone and again by those who are preventing aid from reaching them. Twelve days after more than 62,000 people were killed by the storm, bodies remain unburied and food and drinking water are scarce. Today the EU's humanitarian aid commissioner said that, because the rice stocks in the country's main farming area have been destroyed, there is a risk of famine.

Best Book This Year

I saw the ads for Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller when it first came out about 5 years ago but I had a lot of other books on my reading list back then so I never really tracked it down. This year I finally got around to reading it when I borrowed it from my friend, Melia. She's been the source of a lot of my good reading material this year, including her blog.

To be honest, Miller's writing style is not my favorite, but the value is in the way he presents his beliefs as something that makes sense even in the western postmodern world. In fact, I thought it was kind of like a combination of C. S. Lewis's little apologetic book that came out of his radio broadcasts and Rick Warren's how-to book, all translated into postmodern language.

Miller does seem to have the "love everybody and it'll all turn out OK" mentality that many writers and speakers subscribe to these days. I can't imagine how they can reconcile that with the bulk of ancient writings (old or new parts) that include discipline and expectations as well as love. It's a good push of the pendulum, but it's unbalanced and unworkable by itself.

Still, it's the best book I've read so far this year and it's a good bridge for us old "moderns" into the postmodern scene (or I guess you could say, "pms."). I've not had time to list it on my favorites on this page -- we're in the middle of giving and grading finals -- but you can search Amazon below and find it.