Summer Activities
To give a quick update on Crystal (Song Ao Zhen), who is pictured above trying to ride a bike with Debbie. She is doing very well and fitting in well with the other children. It’s such a blessing to have such great children to be at our gate welcoming in our new children. As soon as Crystal arrived at our gate, all of our other girls ran out to meet her to show her around. Crystal is our youngest daughter and we don’t believe her feet hit the ground that first day. Everyone wanted a turn to hold her:)
Our children are off school from July 1st to September 1st for the summer holiday. This is our busiest time of the year trying to make sure we have enough activities for everyone to be entertained and to enjoy. This year we have been very blessed with a lot of volunteers. They are helping with the extra activities. Some volunteers are from America and some are local Chinese people.
From Monday through Saturday, our children are in class from 8:45am-11:30am at our home. They start the school day off doing an hour of summer homework that their school teachers were so nice to bless them with. We split the children up into small groups so once Chinese class is over, they can learn other activities such as dance, art, music, English and sports.
(left) Walker (one of our volunteers) and Nicky teaching our kindergarten aged boys English. They also teach all of our older kids too!(right) Tresa (another volunteer)teaching Noah how to play the piano.
(left) Michelle teaching our girls how to dance. (right)Ben and Jack (one of our Chinese volunteers) teaching the boys how to play basketball.
Mary teaching art class.
On Sunday we have rest day and try to let the kids just kick back and relax and not do ANY studying. We also try to do something fun, like going to the park!
One of the things we needed to do for the construction work was to dig a well. The construction work is mostly concrete work and brick work of which uses A LOT of water. 
Our new basketball court being poured!
Our water system before was also a well system, but we shared the same water line with the 4 floors of apartments above us. It’s not metered, so each month we split the cost of the electricity it takes to run the pump. Since we share a water bill with our neighbors, we have tried to be as conservative as possible. As we wait for more funds to come in to do more construction work, we decided to put our new well to some really good use; by cooling the kids down!
The game we played was that the children had to get their buckets, and if they wanted water…they had to let us spray their heads and whatever water they could catch, was theirs for the taking. It was a blast, even when they dumped most of the catchings on us:)
This year we will be celebrating our 6th annual summer camp at the Gongyi Home of Hope location. The camp is 3 1/2 days filled full of fun activities like swimming, basketball, ping pong, crafts, English classes, and many fun games and snacks. All three Home of Hope children that are between the ages of 7-18 are involved giving us around 60 children, not including the older Gongyi children who are in college or have graduated college who will come back to help. Its a time for our children to see other kids their age that are going through the same thing they might be going through or have gone through. For our children to realize they are not alone and hoping they are encouraged by seeing all the successes of the older children in Gongyi and Xuzhou. If you are interested in helping cover the costs please click here and tag it summer camp!
We thank you for all that you do for lives well worth the cost and time! If you are interested in giving to our building funds please click here and tag it Building funds.
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Posted: July 19th, 2012 under Uncategorized.
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