Sister Good Does What with a Cow?

Me: Guess what! I’m going to Macau this Friday!
My sister: You’re doing what with a cow?
Me: I’m not doing anything with a cow. I’m going to MACAU. M-A-C-A-U.
My sister: Oh, I see. That’s neat… What’s Macau?

Exactly. What is Macau? Macau is a Special Administrative Region like Hong Kong—it used to be under Portuguese control, but now it’s under the People’s Republic of China and has a few special privileges as an SAR. Margaret and I had the opportunity to visit Macau on Friday with Uncle Norman and his wife. It was quite a day. We took the ferry in the morning and spent the day exploring before coming back that night. Macau is a lovely blend of European and Asian styles, and I really enjoyed our visit. We ate loads of local specialties (including, but not limited to, crab congee [rice soup with an entire crab floating in it…surprisingly good], pork burgers, fish balls, egg custard tarts, and almond cookies), looked at cathedral ruins from the 1500s, and even stepped inside the largest casino in Asia (don’t worry, we didn’t gamble). The Venetian Casino is one of the most opulent places I have ever visited, complete with gambling tables on the main level and luxury stores on the upper levels. You either lose your money at the tables or spend it your earnings in the ridiculously priced stores—either way you are leaving penniless.

Macau is the only place in China with legalized gambling, so many tourists from mainland China come to Macau to gamble. It became such a problem that the Chinese government made a law stating that residents of mainland China could only come to Macau once every two months. Lest you think the Chinese government is benevolently protecting its citizens, let me clarify: the Chinese government instated this law because too many government officials were going to Macau and gambling away the government’s money. This law is actually the Chinese government’s attempt to protect its assets and not lose so much money at the hand of corrupt officials. Corruption runs rampant in China; that’s the nature of a capitalist economy under a communist government. (I actually listened in my capstone class at Jewell—my professors should be proud!) Regardless of the means, China is becoming a giant in the global economy, and it is still rising in prominence. At least half of the goods in your house probably say “made in China” on them. Now let’s put the pieces of the puzzle together. You buy the product; the Chinese company gets a percentage of the profit; the Chinese company uses a part of their profit to pay bribes to government officials so they can remain in business; and the government officials illegally gamble away the already illegal (technically, but not in practice) money in Macau. The casinos make a killer profit, waste money building even more casinos even more opulently, so more people come and gamble. You are paying for government officials to illegally gamble the Chinese government’s money in Macau. I’m not making any statement of moral approbation or disapprobation regarding buying things from China—half of my stuff comes from China too, and when I visit there in a week, I’ll leave laden down with souvenirs. My point is this: you buy your Christmas gifts at superstores in the US and indirectly support Chinese corruption, but the problem is bigger than China’s corruption. The problem is us too. It’s supposedly a small world, but we spend most of our time making it smaller by being caught up in the bubble of our surroundings. Do you know about the social unrest in Thailand? Have you heard about the Christians being slaughtered in India? Do you realize how many people have had their lives upturned by the economic crisis in Hong Kong? Maybe the problem is not just that China is corrupt, but, rather, that we don’t know about it. The problem is not limited to social unrest, poverty, famine, civil strife, or other global ills; the problem is our ignorance too. There are advertisements all over Hong Kong which say “Don’t turn a blind eye to corruption,” but I think that is what we do sometimes when we choose not to involve ourselves in our world. We turn a blind eye to the wrongs occurring around us, to the wrongs occurring in our world, because we do not even know they exist and we may not want to know.

Christmas is the season for giving, which also means that Christmas is the season for spending. Where will you spend your money? Where will I spend my money? I encourage you this season to find something other than Chinese corruption to support. In addition to your gift buying, send a couple of boxes to Samaritan’s purse. Buy a goat for a starving family in Africa, or support a clean water initiative. Give money to a missions offering. The causes are as endless as the need. Stay informed—watch the global news—find something to support. We may not be able to stop corruption in China, but we can give hope to someone who has none by spending our money on something new this year, and we can certainly lift up our world together in prayer. I didn’t have to go to Macau to figure this out; Macau helped crystallize many months (both in Hong Kong and beyond!) of my thought processes and figure out how to share my thoughts with all of you.

Thank you for allowing me to use my blog as my social soap box; next week we should be back to our regularly scheduled program. :-)

Grace and peace!
Sister Good

Sister Good Keeps it Brief

Greetings, faithful readers! Although I am not known for my brevity when blogging, today I will make a grand attempt so I can work on my upcoming exegesis paper. I’ve put a few lists below for your perusal!

Highlights from this week:
1) Michelle took us out to Hong Kong Baptist Theological Seminary on Tuesday so that we could pick up some books for the aforementioned paper. She gave us a tour of the campus and we were able to get a short glimpse into seminary life in Hong Kong. The seminary is set in a beautiful location by the coast in the New Territories and has a very peaceful atmosphere; I enjoyed the brief respite from an otherwise ordinary Tuesday.
2) On Thursday we joined the form seven girls at Pooi To (equivalent to high school seniors) on a school trip to a small island. I can’t remember the name of the island, but it had a YMCA campground on it. We ate lunch, played games, and were able to participate in activities set up on the campground, such as the ropes course, shooting pistols, or archery. Margaret and I both went to the ropes course. Despite my experience as a ropes course facilitator at Jewell, I got a rather unfortunate (and painful) rope burn on my right hand in the process. I’m not sure which stung more—my pride or my hand.
3) I randomly decided to get a haircut on Friday. The haircut itself barely rates as average as far as haircuts go, but the ten minutes it took to shampoo my hair and massage my head made it absolutely worth it.
4) The Thai English class is a highlight every week, so it is certainly worth mentioning. This week Margaret taught the ladies about colors and foods, and, as always, we had a blast.

As we draw towards the end of our time in Hong Kong (only two weeks left in the internship), I’ve begun thinking about some of the things I will miss about Hong Kong. This is what I’ve come up with so far:
1) The openness of Hong Kong people about things that Americans are typically tight-lipped (bodily functions, illnesses, monetary/salary questions, etc.). For example, I would love to be able to give you all the gory details about my hand, but that just wouldn’t be appropriate in this venue. I would also love to tell you about my finances so that some wealthy patron would feel compelled to sponsor me in a trip around the world, but money is also a largely taboo topic in polite American society, so it looks like I'll be doing things the old-fashioned way and getting a job.
2) The thrill of living in a big, international city. While my hometown of Higginsville is a lovely place, it is not exactly a bustling metropolis; it will probably be a bit of an adjustment to re-enter the quietness of rural living while I figure out what comes next.
3) The shopping. There are few things that thrill my parsimonious soul better than finding a trendy garment at a bargain price. Finding a garment at a bargain price that actually fits me (the clothing is rather small here) is much more difficult, but I will still miss the hunt!
4) The people. I’ve met a lot of really great people while in Hong Kong, and I think I am just now coming to truly appreciate them. Just about the time we've started to really get to know people it’s time to leave!

Here are some prayer requests for this week:
· Please pray that we would be a positive Christian witness for the girls at Pooi To during our last two weeks. I was able to offer some Christian encouragement to one of the form seven girls on Thursday’s outing, and Margaret and I continue to lunch with students. Pray that we would seek ways to be a blessing to these girls before we go.
· Pray for my hand. This is a selfish request, but things like writing, typing, cooking, eating, or basically anything that requires the use of my right hand have become increasingly more difficult since Thursday’s incident. It’s not serious, just annoying, and I would appreciate your prayers for a speedy healing.
· Please pray for Margaret and I as we make plans for our leisure travel during the first two weeks of December. Because we will be traveling during the last weeks of our semester at Central, the month of November is proving to be a bit manic as we try to get ahead of our work.

Sister Good Stops Sweating

After experiencing the hottest October on record in Hong Kong since they started keeping track in 1884, the temperatures in Hong Kong have finally started to cool off. Just Friday I was wearing a sleeveless shirt and shorts and was still dripping in sweat as I walked around the largest, outdoor, bronze, seated Buddha statue in the world on Lantau Island during Margaret’s and my “Adventure Day” (aka “day off”). Granted, I sweat like a guilty man before the jury any time it gets above 80, but nonetheless, it was hot. The cooler temperatures (mid-70s) on Saturday and Sunday felt almost like winter after essentially five months of summer for us, and the cool breeze put me in the holiday mood. This is admittedly not difficult to do, considering that I have been listening to Christmas music since October (well, possibly a bit in September too, but I would never admit to that outright; don’t worry, I do this every year); the Christmas decorations that have recently starting popping up around the city don’t help.

Margaret and I have continued to present on American holidays during our Wednesday substituting, which keeps visions of sugarplums dancing in my head as we share about some of our favorite American holidays. During our most recent round of classes, Margaret and I had the students write a paragraph about their favorite holidays after we gave the presentation, and I thought you might enjoy hearing a few of their responses:

· My favorite holiday is Thanksgiving Day. I can say Thank you since I’m shy. If that day comes I want to thank my friends, teachers, and my parents.
· My favorite holiday is Valentines Day. I like it because it’s a very romantic Festival. We will give the chocolate to our friends. Because we didn’t have boy friends, but we still can give our friends. We will play with our friends all day because our father and mother was go a way to eat the romantic dinner.
· My favorite holiday is Christmas because it is celebrate Christ’s birthday. And also, at that day, we will exchange the Christmas presents, it is really exciting. I have an experience of it, when we exchanged the Christmas present, I got a newspaper. I felt angry! But never mind, I forgive her. So, I am really really love Christmas!
· My favorite holiday is Christmas holidays because Christmas gives me a feeling that it is romantic and warm in my heart. Also, we can sing songs and hymns to praise Jesus and we can admire the lights decorates…Thus, there is a other reason that makes me love Christmas a lot. I love winter very much and Christmas is in winter! If I can have a Christmas hope, I hope it can snow everywhere in the world during Christmas. Snow is very, very beautiful and graceful (I think). I think everyone has this feeling, too.

Some of the other holiday favorites included Halloween, Chinese New Year, Summer Holiday, and individual’s birthdays; it was quite fun to read all of the responses and see what sorts of things are important to the girls with whom we work at the school.

Sister Good’s Other Activities
In the cultural club this week, I led a session on American dancing, which included everything from square dancing to swing dancing to hip hop (although no professional ballet or modern dance) with lots of short video clips to demonstrate. At the end of the class I taught the girls the Electric Slide, which was an absolute riot—American culture is at its best in the Electric Slide!

On Sunday, Margaret and I, along with all the other ministers in the church, loaded into buses for a trip with our church’s elderly to ride the cable cars on Lantau Island. I have (affectionately I’m sure) been called “grandma” by some of my friends for some of my, in my mind, prudent habits, so I felt as though I was among my own kind even though it certainly did not look that way. I believe there were approximately 100 people in our group, most of them with gray or no hair and all of them with smiles. Margaret and I have got the smile part down, but we are still working on the gray hair; suffice it to say that we stood out a bit in our tour group of elderly Asian men and women, but it was a blast. We rode the cable cars through the mountains up to Ngong Ping, a “village” that is really a bunch of gift shops and restaurants. We spent about an hour at the refreshingly breezy mountaintop tourist village before riding the cable cars back down. On the ride back down, Margaret and I found ourselves in a car with 8 other people from our group, who, aside from one middle-aged man escorting his mother, did not speak any English. They were laughing a lot and looking at us; although I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I suspect it was something along the lines of “These two girls can’t understand a word we are saying!” It was pretty funny for all of us, and I had a great day with our church’s elderly.

Prayer requests: Although it seems like we just arrived, we are also aware that our time is drawing to a close. Please pray that we will be able to make the most of our last few weeks at Pooi To Middle and Swatow Baptist Church as we experience life with the people here.

Sister Good Loses Her Identity

Because I suspect that my primary readers are my parents and grandparents, I'm going to go ahead and clear something up about the title of this blog entry: I did not lose any of my travel or identification documents. Don't worry—I'm very travel savvy. I have, however, lost my identity. This is how: When two people get married, there is a certain amount of merging of persons that occurs as they begin their life together. When two people do an internship together in Hong Kong, they actually become completely indistinguishable from one another. Not only do Margaret and I live together, but we share the exact same work schedule, same friends, same homework assignments—in short, same everything. I can count the number of times on one hand that we have done things independently, and half of those incidents were out of necessity because Margaret was sick. Despite the fact that we essentially share one life, for a long time I still prided myself on my individual identity as Sister Good, but not any more! I now answer to both Miss Street and Miss Fine because people simply cannot tell us apart and I no longer have the willpower to correct them (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, anyone?). When I say people cannot tell us apart, I do not mean they experience momentary confusion and forget who is who; I mean they really cannot seem to distinguish a difference between us, and these are people with whom we have regular interaction. If I correct someone and tell them I am Miss Fine, when that person sees me again in an hour, she or he will probably call me Miss Street again. Even though Margaret and I can immediately rattle off the list of differences between us, for the people around us we are pretty much the same person in two bodies, so either name will do. Any sense of personal identity I once had is completely lost. A name, after all, is only a title, right? Miss Street? Miss Fine? I think I'm both; there can't be one without the other, at least not in Hong Kong.

 

Despite my identity crisis, this past week has managed to continue in its usual fashion but with a decisively American theme. Margaret and I practiced responsible citizenship on Monday and dropped off our absentee ballots at the American Embassy.  To reward ourselves for being good citizens, we managed a quick trip to Starbucks for a sugar fix before a homework night. Thursday after school, Margaret led the cultural club in learning about American leisure activities, specifically sports and board games. I played some riveting games of Guess Who with some of the girls, and I must say that after all of these years that game is still a personal favorite. Thursday night we had an American night at the apartment with one of Margaret's friends from Hong Kong who was an exchange student in Margaret's high school. Chef Boyar-E (yours truly) cooked up some American-style pasta for dinner to make Margaret's friend feel welcome, we baked chocolate chunk cookies, and we watched a movie together. On Saturday in our Thai English class we taught about families, and I was able to share some pictures of my family with the class. I couldn't tell if my class thought my family members and I looked similar or different, but I think it is safe to say they enjoyed the pictures.

 

On a side note, I attended a portion of a drama seminar at the church yesterday afternoon, and it proved to be an opportunity for cultural learning. I discovered, first of all, that Hong Kong has monkeys, and second of all, that there is a certain park where monkeys are known to steal people's food. You can imagine my confusion as I watched this improvisation unfold. While there are many things that transcend cultures, there are also many things that do not. I appreciate your continued prayers as we work with the cultural club and meet with the girls over lunch at Pooi To and as we lead the Thai English class and Sunday School Class at church.

 

Blessings, everyone!

 

Sister Street. . . wait a second, I think I meant Sister Good!

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