Hello, everyone! This is Timmy here to tell you an update on what we’ve done today, April 16, 2012. In the morning, we got on the bus to travel to a preschool in a village. On the way there, we saw a whole lot of sugar cane fields. The setting was like the movie, The House On The Prairie. We got to see oxen pulling wagons of harvested sugar cane. Of course, almost everyone took pictures of the beautiful sight. The roads felt a bit unsecure along the paths of getting to the village. We even passed a bridge that floods normally…
As we traveled to the village, Jason, the founder of a missions school organization we went to work with today, told about almost every kid that attended the preschool. Every kid had their own personality. I was pretty excited about choosing a kid to do activities with. We all received a picture of the kid we chose. Jason told us about the kid I chose. Her name was Nika. There has been a tradition of calling each person in the family by their features. Nika was a very skinny and small child, so her family decided to call her Nika-feo, which feo means ugly. When we got to the preschool, we saw many curious little children. ☺ I was trying to see which one of the little kids were chosen to be with me for the morning. I unfortunately guessed wrong… Hahaha. When I called Nika name, I was kind of nervous at that point. I don’t really know why. Anyway, we all found the child we were paired with, and we performed the Jonah skit we prepared for them. We also taught the alphabet and numbers in both English and Español. During snack time, I passed out alphabet cookies to all the little kids. We got to construct hand puppets with the kids we were paired with. We used little brown paper bags that kids usually bring to school to hold lunches, googley eyes, glue sticks, markers, and safe scissors for kids. I don’t know about every kid, but Nika got marker all over the seat. Hahaha. I said woops every time. I couldn’t really communicate with Nika, because of the lack of Spanish… Because of that, I couldn’t get the point across to Nika that she was putting the backside hair on the front side of the puppet, which I felt so bad when she received it back along with the other kids… ☹ We did one outdoor activity, which was a race of the pairs binded by being stringed on the ankles together. Lexie and the girl she was paired with kind of cheated by hopping instead of walking during the race, but oh well. ☺ Nika didn’t want to do the race of me. I think she was quite scared of me since my size compared to hers was significant… I’d probably have the same reaction if I were in her shoes, I thought throughout the day. We were all kind of sad that we had to go to the next village when preschool was over.
We went to the next village to see the older kids and minister to them as well. Surprisingly, some of the kids from the preschool lived in that village including Nika! We showed the puppet show, played games, and interacted with the kids of the village. The biggest activity was playing parachute with a whole bunch of kids. It was really fun for everyone. Jason had a bag of sports equipment in hand, so kids played baseball and football, too.
After the village, we went back to the school area, which we found a whole bunch of other kids. We first showed our puppet show. My group thought we’ve been getting better since we’ve shown many kids the show already. It’s probably true. Anyway, Jason called the kids to play in the field, which was probably the most tiring part of the day. There were basically kids everywhere in the field asking each of my classmates to do something breathtaking like giving them a piggyback ride while running. In the previous village, many kids already asked for some piggyback “running.” It was all tiring, but everyone enjoyed every second of that time.
What happened to me during that time? I had to sit in the bus while the kids were in the field. Why, you ask? I’ve had some kind of sun rash on my arms and legs… I hope to get rid of this terribly itchy “disease”. I’m just kidding. It’s not a disease, but it’s terribly itchy to the max. I used some itch medicine that didn’t work, but it didn’t work at all. If I get better, I’m sure I’ll tell the next person who updates to tell all of you of what I had and that it went away, but for the rest of the day, I’ll wait for the doctor so he can prescribe me with something better and figure out what I’ve been having. Please pray for me today. I also ask for you to pray for each kid that was paired with my classmates. We will miss them very much.
As we drove to get to the SCORE “base”, the bus stopped at a sugar cane work station, or whatever it was called. Andrew, Mark, and I stayed in the bus while the rest of our group went out to see all the harvest sugar cane that was there. It was impressive stuff. There was a large crane (much smaller than the cranes we have for constructing buildings in the Chicago) that lifted off the sugar cane from the carts that the oxen transferred. Once lifted, the crane moved the sugar cane to the train cars. I saw many pictures being taken. There was a boy named Junior who was sitting on one of the train cars. He came up to us to cut us some sugar cane. It was truly a treat. He cut the sugar cane with a semi-dull machete. Even though it was partly dull, he cut the cane like a pro and handed it out to those who wanted the sweet treat. Our driver went up to an uncut sugar cane and ripped the skin off. It was funny because he was telling us that we really didn’t need the machete to clean the skin off.
When we arrived at SCORE, we got in the line for food first. It was the first time our group was first in line for food at SCORE. It was really tasty food, which was a treat for all the hard work that was done for the day. We only had sandwiches and chips for lunch, but don’t get me wrong, we were thankful for every meal we’ve had.
For the rest of the night, we got back to the villa to have our group discussion and worship. I led the worship with no music prepared, so I was quite nervous, but it turned out well. Of all those years I’ve played worship music at church, I memorized SOME songs. I was picked to write this update because I was the last one to have breakfast this morning… Oh well. It was fun to write this update.
Thank you for reading this update, God bless all of you back at home. Thank you for your prayers. We love you all and wish you all a great rest of the week in school. I will post this on my blog, so check out tfblog.tk (it stands for Timmy faith blog). My blog hasn’t been active because I haven’t had time to blog during the school year. I will start up my blog again, so if anyone wants to read it, go right ahead. ☺ Adios amigos!
Signing out,
Stephen Timothy Yeung

Tags: dominican_republic