PingYu Home of Hope

The first week of April is a Chinese holiday to honor their ancestors. All the schools and most businesses shut down for three days. We always enjoy the holidays here because we get to spend time with some of the college students that can come back for short visits and we get to spend extra time with all the other kids. Most of the time the children spend their holiday catching up on homework, sleep, playing and laundry (this is more of the college and high school aged children). Since this holiday is also the first week of April it allows all the children to help pitch in and do some spring cleaning and chores. One of these chores is planting the tasty peanuts that all the children love to eat. With any task in life there are positives and negatives about it. Really the only negative about this task was plowing the field by hand.

(Left) Several of the children plowing the field, (Right) Luke and Tony digging away

(Left) Linda taking a turn plowing, (Right) Wayne, Tony and David working hard

Jaxin (left) and Eli (right) were so excited that they could “play” in the dirt…just dont let them know they were actually working.

After 2 hours of work, the field was ready for the seeds to be planted, and our hands were ready for a rest, all of us had calluses on our hands. After the work was done, we all had an ice cream cone to celebrate our accomplishment.

(Left) All of our callused hands, (Right) Ruthie, Jaxin, and Eli enjoying their ice cream

Here are some pictures from last year’s peanut harvest that we would like to show you.

(Left) several of the kids picking peanuts (Right) Shirley harvesting the peanuts

When we were going through last years pictures we found one of Matthew harvesting the peanuts in 2008 and we took one of him plowing the field this year, as you can see he has grown quite a lot.

Thank you very much for visiting our web site and we hope you enjoyed seeing the children.