November Newsletter

October Newsletter

August/September newsletter!

July 2010 Newsletter

June 2010 Newsletter

International Education

Before I left for my trip to Mainland in April, I spent a week with two Lutheran educators from the Chicago area visiting the Lutheran schools in Hong Kong. They also had the opportunity to visit Concordia International School in Shanghai. Here is the link to the blog I designed for their trip: http://steinbrennersinasia.wordpress.com/

India Schools Video

The India Evangelical Lutheran Church runs schools throughout Southern India. Some of these schools serve blind students, students with cognitive disabilities or deaf students. Here is the video I made after visiting these schools: India Schools Video

May Newsletter

April!

April has been a very busy month.

The first week we had Lutheran teachers visiting Hong Kong to see Hong Kong International School. I helped to lead them around the city and visited the schools with them. I learned a lot about HKIS and international schools in general. During their time in Hong Kong I kept a blog for them. You can visit it at: http://steinbrennersinasia.wordpress.com/

On Easter Monday, I took the teachers to the airport so they could fly to Shanghai and I flew to Chengdu in Sichuan Province with a service team from Hong Kong. We visited Nan Ba, a very small village about 5 hours outside of Chengdu.

The Nan Ba area was devastated by the earthquake two years ago, and CWEF has helped to build cisterns and donated many books, computers and table for the library at the secondary school.

My team was comprised of mostly teachers, which was helpful as we were teaching English for two days. It was a really interesting experience and CWEF has been asked to send people to do a summer training program for the English teachers in Nan Ba!

After I finished my time in Sichuan, I flew down to Kunming in Yunnan province. I spent the weekend with my roommate (who lives with me in Hong Kong) and my friend who lives in Kunming. We had a great weekend with massages and lots of delicious food.

On Sunday evening we were invited to a BBQ at another friends home. He actually owns four restaurants in the Kunming area, so we were very exited to have a BBQ at his house.

We had a variety of different grilled vegetables and a chicken along with many types of tea. He taught us about each of the different teas he served. It was a great night with good food and good friends.

The following week my friend led a service team from Southern California to dig cisterns and teach hygiene lessons at two schools in very southern Yunnan.

On the way to Jing Pin county we stopped at Yuan Yang which is famous for beautiful rice terraces. Not only was it a beautiful place to stop, but it made the 11 hour bus ride much more bearable.

We had a great week, even though our time in the village had to be cut short due to poor road conditions after a big rain storm.

Even though we were all disappointed to have to leave earlier than planned from the village, the rain was needed. Southwestern China is in the worst drought in over 100 years. In an area where agriculture is the main industry, a major drought makes life even more difficult.

Overall, my time in Mainland was a great learning experience and I glad that I had the opportunity to serve with CWEF.

March newsletter

India Schools Project

India became the first foreign mission field of the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod (LCMS) in 1895. Many LCMS missionaries served in India from 1895-1960 many mission compounds were built. The mission compounds are still used today by the India Evangelical Lutheran Church (IELC) as schools and boarding homes. Many of the buildings are falling into disrepair. The IELC and school administrators are requesting the support of the LCMS to help repair these buildings so they can continue to serve over 18,000 students and their families. If you would like to support the schools and boarding homes in India, please visit: http://www.lcms.org/?6450.

February Newsletter

Trinity Lutheran Church and School

Trinity Lutheran Church and School in Battambang, Cambodia is the only LCMS supported church and school in Cambodia. Seth and Shannon Hoeppner serve as Globally Engaged in Outreach missionaries teaching English classes and sharing the Gospel at Trinity.

January Newsletter

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.

November newsletter

Here is my newsletter for November. Enjoy!

Hiking!

It has been quite a while since my last post. I have finally started exploring Hong Kong more. Being one of the most densely populated cities in the world I have been surprised at some of the beautiful nature hikes.

So far, I have hiked on Hong Kong Island, Lantau Island and this weekend includes a hike on Lamma Island.

All of the islands are slightly different. I was very surprised on my hike last week on Lantau when I saw cows walking along the path. One cow did not get out of the way as we hiked by, and even let me touch it.

I have more photos on my picasa account.