May 5 - 12 I received 2 packages of books this week that makes five packages of very expensive books in the library here. The children are excited about the books and the teachers are using the resource books,
so hopefully all is well, even though the cost of mailing heavy books is horrendous. The messages and the goodies packaged in with the books have been very special treats. I can’t thank you enough. I shall always be indebted to you. Thanks to all of you who keep me in touch with home. Modern technology is wonderful, but it remains a love hate relationship with me at my age. It’s the only thing that really makes me dislike my age! I remain constantly thankful that I have been placed to live these past few months with my “adopted granddaughters, Jessi and Rhona”, who are busy helping me with the I- pods, the internet, the camera and my cell phone which I use mostly for texting!!

This is Saturday and I have spent the day at school. puting children’s work on the bulletin boards and washing with a brush the rug (one of those foam rubber alphabet puzzle things) in the book center. The rug was filthy because of the rainy season which has just ended. I was at school to meet with Linken, the carpenter who I depend on to make and repair many things. This is the third Saturday I have tried to meet with him. Maybe it will really happen next Saturday. While I was waiting on Linken I cut open the dirty covering of a bean bag seat which was in the book center. I removed the stuffing to make 3 pillows to use in the center. The large bag was just a place for some active children to pile up on and wrestle, and one little girl always wants to take all the books off the shelf and sit on them on the bean bag seat. She just doesn’t like the idea of taking one book and looking at it and then returning it and choosing another. She really wants to be in charge! There are times in preschool when you just have to work with not only the child but also with the environment! Jessie is buying me a large piece of skirt material that hangs on a line at the local market and will have the seamstress to cut out six pillow linings. I will stuff the pillows and have the seamstress to make pillow covers with zippers so we can wash them.

Talking about the rainy season, you cannot imagine what our children’s shoes looked like every time they entered our classroom during those days. There was up to ½ inch black mud on the bottoms of the shoes. No one could scrape it off on the edge of a 90 degree angle of concrete!!! You needed something like a screw driver to stab into the mud and straw like mixture to pry it off the shoes. And I used to think like most preschool teachers that it was a tuff job just to keep all the shoestrings tied!

Since some of you have asked about how you could support the school here, I would like to share with you that all the students are given a 50% scholarship and some are given up to 100%. The tuition is
$120.00 for a half year scholarship and $240.00 for a year scholarship. It would be wonderful if you or your church group would like to make a donation. You could send a check to the Ebenezer School Fund at Presbytery of Western North Carolina, 114 Silver Creek Road, Morganton, NC 28655. A few scholarsips are still needed for this year. If peope want to sponsor particular children those scholarship funds are to be paid by August 1st so that Willeke Ter Haar can assign each sponsor a child with information about the child.

Nkhoma is not a city, it is a mission station with a village. The Synod office here runs the public schools. They set the school calendar and Ebenezer goes by it. We have holiday May 13, Ascension Day and May 14, National Holiday, similar to 4th of July. So I am out of school until Monday, May 17. On the 14th I am going on a field trip with Seon Hee (Korean missionary here) to take some elderly village people who have never been far outside their village to visit the Capital City, Lilongue (60 miles north of here). Hopefully they will enjoy the festivities of the day. I will be going to help push wheel chairs and to give aid wherever needed. I look forward to being a part of that experience.