PingYu Home of Hope

Easter

This Easter was a lot colder than the past 3 Easters we have celebrated here in Pingyu. Our tree just started blooming and everyone wanted to get a picture under it. Pictured below with Michelle and I are (left to right) Mark, Sarah and Dana

Nicky (left) came over and helped Michelle get all the baskets ready for our Easter basket hunt. Each basket was filled with chocolate suckers, plastic eggs filled with jelly beans and colored eggs that they colored earlier that week and which you can see some of the pictures below.

Wendy and Gene coloring their eggs.

Abby and Danny coloring their eggs.

Frank(left) and Lester(right) coloring their eggs.

Eddy showing off his eggs that he colored.

Before letting the kids find their baskets Tony(pictured below right) and I explained why we celebrate Easter by using a childrens story book and resurrection eggs.

Then afterwards we let the children loose to find their basket, but did it grade by grade.

Emma and Eli running to find their basket.

Gabe’s expression on his face and his hair standing on end shows you how much fun they all had!

Besides the Christians in China, Easter is not celebrated here. But they do have a holiday that just happened to fall on the same time period; grave sweeping day. It’s a day where the Chinese pay their respects to the dead. Our home is across the street from the only registered cemetery in our city. All the schools bring kids class by class to the cemetery to celebrate the holiday. We have had a parade of children walking up and down the street for a week. Some of the classes asked if they could stop in to say hi and do a little community work. The picture above is of 3 different classes from one high school taking their picture with our kids.

Preparation
As we wait so patiently for our building construction to start (we will be having the ground breaking ceremony on April 5th!!!), we have been trying to get as much preparation work finished as possible.

The building will take up a lot of our play area so one thing we wanted to do is remove the 3 mushrooms in our yard to give the children a big field to play in; which they are more excited about than getting the building built…the mushrooms were more of a decoration thing.

As soon as we get some dirt to level off the ground we will be planting some grass!

We had to dig up several of our bushes and replant them to make room for our building.

We will be moving our entrance to our home from the east side of our yard to the south side. We just love this picture of Danny and Tyler (pictured above left to right) because we have talked about this building extension for so long to our children and they have been so patient and are so excited about it that they could hardly stay away when some of the preparation work has been going on.

All the kids were watching the workers knock down the mushrooms.

While the construction is going on, we need to make a safe way for our children to get into our dining hall without going near the construction work so we knocked out the end of our hallway.
Again all the children are so ready for this building that they are so excited to help with as much as they can. While Tony(our translator), Javier(one of our volunteers) and I were building a wall, some of the kids were passing us nails. They all wanted to be a part of helping and at one point I asked for 1 nail and had about 15 kids trying to hand me a nail asking me to choose their nail…so much pressure:)

We thank you for your continued support in spreading love, peace and joy into our family. We are excited to start our building and will soon be posting a new page with the start of the construction work. We are still a bit short of hitting our goal so if you are interested in making a donation towards our building please click HERE and make a note that it’s to go towards the building funding.

There were too many smiling faces on Easter to over look, so please enjoy the pictures below!
Blessings