Saturday, December 12, 2009

Lutheran Church in Korea

The Lutheran Church in Korea (LCK) was established more than 50 years ago and has been growing and reaching out the Korean people ever since. As the partner church body of the LCK, members of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod in the United States have the unique opportunity to work along side the LCK—including short-term mission opportunities.


Bizzare foods in Beijing




One of the days we were in Beijing, Josh and I set out to try some new food. Earlier during our trip we had cow lungs with our lunch, a recommendation from our tour guide Hannah. They were not bad, pretty chewy, but the sauce made them edible.

After talking to some of the English students we decided that we should go out to an area famous for street foods. The students told us we could eat scorpions and crickets, plus a lot of other types of meat.

We ended up buying both scorpions and crickets, plus snake all deep-fried and covered in salt. Basically the scorpions and crickets were crunchy and tasted like fried salt, but the snake was an interesting texture. It was very chewy and reminded me of octopus tentacles. After our more adventurous food purchases, we finished the night with pumpkin cakes, yogurt and bubble tea.

Although there were many more types of food at the vendors, we decided that we had enough since we did not want to be ill on our 24 hour train ride back to Hong Kong.

December Newsletter

A New Day in Beijing

After a busy week of traveling around Hong Kong and finally being approved for my work visa (after only three attempts), I was able to take a vacation to Beijing.

My coworker Josh has five siblings, and three of them came on a short-term team to teach English in one of the Lutheran schools in Hong Kong. After their week of teaching his brother Dave and two of Dave's friends from the team organized a trip to Beijing. Dave's friends, Josh and Mary-Susan, graduated from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa and through a friend at ORU they know about New Day Creations in Beijing.

New Day is a multifaceted business with a factory, foster home and an education center. In the factory they produce Christian and traditional Chinese poly-resin figurines and other trinkets. The village where the factory is located (just south of Beijing city limits), is poor and the average wage is just over 2 RMB per hour below the minimum wage of about 4.5o RMB per hour. New Day Creations pays nearly twice the minimum wage and they are never short on people wanting jobs. New Day Creations is also constantly striving to improve work flows and find more cost effective, environmentally friendly ways to produce all of their products. With the profits from the products made at the factory, New Day started the foster home.

The foster home has 20 children living on-site in Beijing, but through a program some of the children live with families in the community. In the last few years, New Day has been able to open additional homes and in all about 90 children are served. Most of the children have some sort of physical or mental disability and their families cannot afford medical care so they are either given up or abandoned. New Day takes in these children and pays for the necessary surgeries. Sadly, the New Day Foster Home is always at capacity and some children die before they are able to get a bed in the foster home.

The education center is the newest part of New Day. After only opening a few years ago, the center is already drawing in students from all over China. The center is an English center with all native English teachers. Some of the students are in university, others just graduated and some are elderly people. I was able to talk with many of the students and I was amazed at how well they could speak English after only studying for a few months. I know that I would not be able to speak Mandarin that well in such a short time!

New Day also has tours for their visitors to all of the sites around Beijing. Our tour guide was Hannah, a former student in the education center, and she gave us an amazing tour of the city. In the course of two days we were able to see the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Temple of Heaven, the Great Wall and the Summer Palaces. Hannah also took us to two great restaurants, a famous Beijing noodle shop and to a Peking duck restaurant.

I had a wonderful time at New Day and traveling around Beijing. The Christian products made at the New Day Creations factory can be purchased at Christian bookstores that carry Lighthouse Christian Products.