chinachristens: Does anyone speak english?

Well, we made it through our first week in China. So far things have been pretty good. A lot of changes in our lives that's for sure. After a couple of days of not being able to get around at all without calling a taxi, John decided to buy an electric bike. This can at least get us from our house to Shepherd's Field (the orphanage), and it can also get us to a local Chinese restaurant. If we want to go into Langfang (which is about 15 minutes away) we still have to take a taxi though. The kids were pretty excited about it-they love for Daddy to take them on a ride on the electric scooter as they call it.

Our first trip to Wal-Mart was quite the experience. When we speak little Chinese and they speak no English it certainly makes for quite the adventure. It took about 20 minutes and about 20 chinese wal-mart employees to try and figure out if we were buying shampoo or conditioner. And we still didnt' know which it was until we got home and tried it ourselves. We will both be getting a tutor beginning next week so hopefully that will help us out a little bit. Our children are famous everywhere we go. Chinese people love little blond haired kids and they just follow us around trying to look at Alyson and Austin. Some even take pictures of them. The good news is they will never get lost because everybody knows who they belong to. Alyson and Austin seem to be oblivious to the fact that we are surrounded by a completely different culture-they just go with the flow.

For all of you who are wondering what the Chinese man in our garage is doing-we found out he works for PHF and he does maintenance work as well as builds and fixes things. He uses our

garage as his workshop. Nobody told us this at first so we weren't sure what was going on. He is a very friendly man and we have already had him in our house trying to fix a few things that were broken.

Alyson and Austin started pre-school this week. They did great the first 3 days and by day 4 they were a little tired of going. It is MUCH different then schools in the USA so I can't say I blame them. We are going to try and send them only 3 days a week next week and see if that helps at all. After the first day of pre-school Austin says to me "Mommy, there is only one other person that talks like we do." It is pretty much all chinese, but one teacher does speak some English. The picture is Alyson and Austin on their first day of Pre-school, and also Alyson with her pre-school teacher.

We have met many of our neighbors-the ones right across the street from us are from Iowa, which is pretty neat. The US Doctors at the orphanage live two houses down. They have been such a blessing to us as they have helped us get settled in and taken us to different places that we have needed to go.

This week a team came in from San Fransico and hosted a VBS for the kids. There are a few pictures posted from the VBS that you can see. Alyson and Austin went as well and had a fun time.

John started his work at the orphanage on Monday, and things seem to be going well so far. He has various projects he will be working on at PHF, and will also be leading our fellowship time on Thursday nights with the staff. Desiray will be working on Child sponsorship. Which means taking pictures of all the children who are sponsored by individuals and finding out the progress of the child and then writing a report to be sent to their sponsor. This is updated every 3 months. She hopes to start working on that in the next couple of weeks.

We had our first trip to the McDonalds in China today. The food was great-tasted just like the USA McDonalds. There were a group of boys that were following us into McDonalds (staring at our children) so we got a picture with them by Ronald McDonald.

Here are a few other pictures we took as we were going through some of the rooms at Shepherds field that we thought you might like to see. The sweet little girl next to Alyson was fascinated by Alyson's light up shoes.