Oregon Team

The past two days we've had the blessing of having about 15 American high school kids from Oregon on spring break. They've been in country for a little while now but spent their last two days with us. It was very refreshing to see all these Americans (that we didn't know) come and be so willingly cheerful and helpful and anxious to do whatever manual labor we could find for them. A few of the girls spent their time on the mammoth and highly impossible task of making our community kitchen shine, even going so far as to put butcher paper on the walls in the "splatter zone." That idea was from the sweet little girl who spent her entire time on this campus trying to scrub down and remove the ancient mold and grease stains, some of which were older than her. All three of them who cleaned the kitchen did so with such smiles and singing, they were like three Cinderellas.
Other Oregon team members took on the most unenviable job of counting all our hand-outs and papers that we give to the students. In one session alone, it's a couple of thousand sheets of paper that we give out, all that need to be counted and sorted and clipped into piles of twenty. We used to do it ourselves, but the job grew to be so dreaded and so hated that we just ordered several thousand more copies than we needed, to make sure we never ran out. Over time, this got to be very disorganized and it required something slightly less than a full archaeological dig to find the hand-outs you needed. Not good when it's 7:45 and you've got class at 8.
The Oregon team happily accomplished the time consuming task of cleaning the supply room, which is where supplies went to die. For a while, we had a theory that there was a real life black hole in one corner sucking up objects stored in there. In two days, they had it cleaned, sorted and systematically organized, destroying the hopes of the black theorists.
After doing all this, then in the afternoons some of the guys would play basketball (mostly for the students entertainment, as four of the guys were well over six feet and no Chinese was brave enough to play against that) and everyone would have lively conversations at dinner with the students. They head back to America tomorrow, and we're sad to see them go. Some of them have expressed interest in coming back to be short term staff. We certainly hope so.