Haiti and Pancakes..

I have been keeping my kids updated on Haiti. I recently blogged about my student Yuichi and how he wanted to give his birthday money, I forgot to mention another incident that highlighted the innocence and generous heart of a child. Before I share this little story with you, let me explain what we have been doing for Haiti over here. Our school started “Haiti boxes”. The idea was for each elementary class to create a box and fill it with as much donation money as possible. My kids immediately got into it, we are going on about our third week of fundraising and we have a little over $200. I am so proud of them! We will collect the money from all the classes at the end of this week and I am really excited. Also last weekend we held a Movie Night for the elementary kids in our chapel. It cost them $2 to get in and we showed the movie Bolt (awesome movie by the way!) on a big projector. Also we had a bakesale going on the whole time. It went great, we raised over $300 for Haiti that night! I was very happy with how it turned out. Ok, so now that I have caught you up on our Haiti fundraising events here’s the story…So the day my class started our Haiti box my girl Loriann came up to me. It was the end of the day so everyone was leaving and running around, and she says “Miss! Miss! I’m going to bring pancakes tomorrow ok?” I was like…what? Definitely not following her I said, “Um..ok, why sweetie?” she responded saying “For Haeitee Miss. For Haeitee.” I still wasn’t following her…she clearly read my clueless expression and continued, “I’m going to have my mom make pancakes for the people in Haiti, then we can mail them and they won’t be hungry anymore.” Once again my heart just about melted as realization hit me. I stifled laughter as I looked at her and replied, “Hmm that’s a really good idea, but do you think that the pancakes would last in the mail? Hati is really far away..” She paused in deep thought for a moment (it is still taking a large amount of self-control to not laugh at how adorable this situation is..). I somehow managed to keep my very serious face on as she finally came up with her answer that was accompanied by a pout, “No.” I leaned down to her and encouraged her, “Well maybe we can send them money so they can make their own pancakes. What do you think?” The pout disappeared from her face, “Ok Miss. I think that’s a good idea.” With that she bounced off with her little backpack. I went home feeling so full that day. Once again the heart of a child, it amazed me..

$10

The selflessness of a child truly amazes me. This past week I have been talking to my children about Haiti. Although normally during worship they struggle to pay attention, I had all eyes glued to me. Every day I try to update them, and they never fail to bring up Haiti multiple times during prayer requests. I asked my children if they would be interested in starting a “Haiti Box” to help raise money. Then we could think of people to ask to donate, and maybe even have a few fundraisers. The kids were 100% for it. Later that day one of my younger boys came up to me, concern all over his face and said, “Miss, Miss I don’t know if I can bring $10” I was not quite following him and so he continued, “Well I thought I could bring $10 for Haiti because I am going to get $10 for my birthday, but my birthday is two months away…” my heart just about melted. It was such a precious moment. The concern in his eyes and the way his little forehead was all twisted. Not because he was contemplating whether or not to give his birthday money, oh no that decision was already made, but because he wouldn’t get his birthday money in time to give it away to the people of Haiti. In that moment I learned more from my 8 year old student than I could have taught him in weeks. Yuichi reminded me of the strength and simplicity of selflessness. As we grow in age and journey through our lives we strive to be great at something, to gain wisdom, to have security, but to have the selflessness of a child, now that is something to aspire to…

A memory both simple and profound.

This is a story I wrote for Walla Walla about my mission experience! I think its going to be in a mission story book or something... anyway! sorry I haven't blogged in eight hundred years :)

A Memory Both Simple and Profound

Yesterday I returned from my two week Christmas vacation in Hawaii, only to be met by 24 screaming fourth graders who all decided to jump into my arms at once. Next thing I new my two chubby twin boys were smooshing letters into my hand they had written me while I was gone, welcoming me back and telling me how much they had missed me.

The next morning there were two more letters waiting for me on my desk, my heart just about melted as I read the beautiful broken grammar of one of the letters, “Miss Breann is the best and great teacher on the Earth. Dear Miss Breann you are the greatest teacher. And you’re the best friend ever. Thank you for being my friend. And thank you for being my teacher. We love you so so much Miss Breann.”

Today, like most days, has ended with me collapsing on my dirty couch exhausted. However unlike previous days, as I collapse on this disgusting couch I reflect on my day in a new light. In a light that could only be provided by the One who brought me to this very couch, this tiny island most people have never heard of, and to a classroom of twenty four hyperactive children. For when I look back on today I no longer think of the frustrating math class where my children looked at me like I was speaking French, the aching feeling in my swollen feet from standing for so long, the seemingly never ending papers that still need grading, or the permanent sweat layer that drenched my skin. I remember Him. I remember the random salsa dance lesson I had with my kids during lunch time, the back massage that two of my boys gave me just to show me they love me, the game of tag during recess that ended in uncontrollable giggles and me being attacked and tickled by seven of my students, the piggy back race to the classroom that I lost, having my boys all pick me up and tell me they were going to kidnap me so we could all go camping together, the scribbled message at the bottom of a math assignment that simply said, “Thank you so much Miss Breann”, the hilarious Michael Jackson impersonation performed by two of my boys, and the long embrace of a child at the end of the day as he said, “Miss I’m never letting you go, we love you so so much!”.

In Jesus’ divine light, twenty four rambunctious children have taught me something more valuable than I
could ever teach them, something that I could have never learned sitting in a classroom finishing up my college degree. Through fits of giggles, little bear hugs, secret hidden notes, and pictures colored with the utmost care, I have learned how to be loved. And because of this, every day I have learned a little more of how to truly love in return.

Thanksgiving is over..

And Thanksgiving is OVER! Oh my. Oh my! I don’t know what Joy and I were thinking with the entire thanksgiving feast day, it was soo much work!! But our kids absolutely loved it, so it was worth it. :) haha they were fascinated by cranberry sauce. They kept saying, “Miss? Miss? Is this cranberry?” haha it was really cute. Oh, and the Indian and and pilgrim thing went great! The kids looked so adorable sitting with their little Indian and pilgrim hats around a table eating together! To start the day the pilgrims traveled to “America” (our classroom) and Squanto was the only one who could talk to them (duh! Everyone else could obviously only speak in Indian gibberish). Then we played thanksgiving games, such as Indian Indian pilgrim (instead of duck, duck goose), I read them an indian legend, my class performed their indian rain dance, we had a pilgrim and indian skit, my indians showed everyone their indian names and explained what it meant in English (they drew their names and decorated them on colored paper), then the pilgrims sang a thankful song and the feast began! Joy and I put the desks in my room together to make two long big tables, we decorated them with table settings the pilgrims made, got out all of our cookings and were finally ready! It was literally like a week worth of work in one day haha but worth it..

Now it’s Christmas time! We started decorating my classroom today! I’ll definitely be taking pictures soon! :) I have been CRAZY busy this last week and a half there is SO much I want to blog about from running a 5 k, to directing a christmas play, to having a spa day with my kids lol hopefully I will be able to soon! But as for now I must go, there is always something that needs to be done! Miss all my family and friends. Xoxo.  

A thought on the death of a fellow missionary..

I have began this blog about six times, and some how my fingers have found the back space bar each time. I honestly do not know where to begin. The array of emotions myself and so many others have experienced throughout this past week is remarkable…

Satan is working SO hard right now, I know however, that my God is working harder. The murder of Kirsten Wolcott has been something extremely hard to grasp, accept, and understand. I am assuming that most of you have heard the horrific news, but if not I regret to inform you of the incident.. A fellow student missionary, from Southern Adventist University, who was teaching on the island of Yap (an island that is also part of the FSM just like Pohnpei) was murdered last week. I have heard varying details, but what I do know for sure is that they found her body, and it is unbelievably terrible.  To be perfectly honest, I don’t think this sunk in nearly as much as it should have at first. I think I was in shock, so life continued on in a normal fashion for a couple days.

Then yesterday it hit me. I was entirely upset. This girl had been living a life ridiculously similar to mine these last three months. Dealing with the same struggles I faced as a new teacher, going to the island grocery store for the first time, receiving her first package from home, going running, experiencing exotic island fruits for the first time, falling in love with her students, having her fist wave of homesickness, discovering God in a new way, facing some bug or insect invasion, being overwhelmed with lesson plans, having her breath taken away from the beauty that surrounds us at these islands, and so much more. And to have her life taken in such a horrific way?

Earlier that day my kids made cards for the Wolcott family. It was absolutely adorable and heart warming. I had to fight tears from coming to my eyes in class. These fourth graders who had never met “Miss Wolcott” or any one of her family members were writing things like, “Dear Mr. and  Mrs. Wolcott, we love your family so so much and will be praying for you every day.” or  one girl who just lost a sister a few weeks ago said, “I hope Miss Wolcott is with my sister in heaven, we love you.”  I told my kids that I would write some comforting bible texts on the board, and if they wanted to they could add one to their card. There was one verse however that I could not bring myself to write up on my dusty chalkboard. Hebrews 13:5 “Never will I leave you, Never will I forsake you.”  How could I send that text to the parents of a missionary child who was just murdered? Where was God for Kirsten huh? It was simply appalling to me.

I decided to take my frustrations out on the track, questioning God with each stride. I just couldn’t grasp my mind around it. I felt like yelling, “GOD! SHE GAVE HER LIFE COMPLETELY TO YOU FOR A YEAR! WHERE WERE YOU?!?!”  I replayed Hebrews 13:5 over in my mind again and again, and then it occurred to me. He was there the ENTIRE time. He was there while everything was happening, however appalling, terrible and horrific it was. He did not leave Kirsten, He did not forsake her, because He promised her that He would not. And God cannot lie because it would be a complete contradiction of Himself, of His word. For He is truth, His word is truth, and He is His word (John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” ).

Just as my mind will never fully grasp the greatness of God until I stand before Him with a song in my heart and on my lips, my human mind cannot even come close to grasping the horrors of sin in this world. Until the time when I can understand both, I chose to follow the Truth. I chose to follow a Promise.

Yes, It is easy to be angry. Anger does not require faith. Anger does not require trust. Anger does not require love. But Hope does. This is what I pray we can all chose in this time. Jesus come soon, and until you do, guard our hearts and minds with Your peace, a peace that transcends all understanding.

 

Kisses, Karaoke, and Strange Green Substances..

So we had the school fair yesterday. It was SO fun! I was kind of worried about it because it wasn’t very organized, but it turned out great! The fourth graders made a kissing booth and it was adorable! I personally think our booth looked the best (it was covered with hearts and checkered red and pink papers the kids decorated that said things like “kiss me” on them), but then there is a huge possibility that my opinion is very biased. :) I turned into Miss Breann the make-up artist and with my oh so limited artistic and make-up abilities covered four of my boys and three girls with lipstick and hearts all over their faces. They looked soo cute! A customer would come to our booth pay fifty cents to have that special someone kissed, and then an eager 4th grade kisser covered in melting makeup would race off to find their next love victim. Haha then that person could come to our booth and pay fifty cents to find out who kissed them (we had a top secret love book with the names in it of course). It ended up being really cute. I think my favorite booth (besides ours OF COURSE) might have been the “love connection” booth. Haha you could pay to have two people handcuffed for like ten minutes. It was great. Definitely had some good laughs over that one! Then there was jail. Of course. Joy got sent to jail like eight times and I just kept laughing at her. It was great. Then at the end of the day the high school kids put like six of us sm’s in the jail. We thought this was fairly normal until suddenly water balloons started splattering everywhere. Next thing I knew an entire trashcan of water was being thrown on us innocent jailbirds. Once this happened every child felt it their responsibility to dump as much water as possible on their beloved teachers. After about the fourth bucket of water, twenty water balloons, and ten water bottles I escaped by crawling through some of the mesh and forcing the door open. This led to a jail wide prisoner escape and a huge water fight. Then to top it all off, it started raining outside. I was DRIPPING wet. I swear I had no idea who half of these children were haha I was yelling, “I don’t even KNOW you!!! Who are you?!?!? What have I ever done to you?!?!” and the kids were just laughing and spraying me more. One time I turned around just in time to see a child throw an old ice cream bucket straight at my face. Just as this was happening I thought, “that’s not water..that’s green..” During this moment I should have been thinking, “I should probably close my eyes because a liquid is being spewn in my face” unfortunately my previous inquires of the green substance ended up being true. For whatever was thrown at my face was indeed not water. This was confirmed by my eyes stinging for the next two minutes. I was in the heat of battle, however, and could not take the time to feel sorry for myself, or question what exactly this green substance was. Needless to say it was an eventful day :)
On a completely unrelated note, Asians LOVE karaoke. I’ve always known this, but not at all to this extent. Haha! A couple nights ago a group of us went to this resteraunt called coco marina that is right on the water and pretty much just a hut. There aren’t walls or anything. If that isn’t awesome enough, they had live karaoke going. Lets just say that I ROCKED some mamma mia soundtrack with the help of three back up dancers! :) I also made Andrew (another sm here) sing grease with me, and desperately missed my brother (no one rocks grease like the crook children, we’re pretty much an unstoppable team). The best part of the night however was when MJ (in previous blogs I have referred to her as Joy my favorite Filipino but since there are two Joys I’ve decided to call her MJ so no one gets confused!) started BELTING out “I will Survive” by Aretha Franklin. Oh. my word. Those Filipinos do NOT mess around when it comes to karaoke. I was laughing uncontrollably in between my soul filled back up singing and disco dance moves. It was great. :)
I absolutely love MJ and her family. I’ve been spending a lot of time with them lately and have enjoyed it so much. It’s really nice. I feel like I have some family here. Some days I just want family time, so I go hang out with them and play with Hailey, MJ’s adorable little girl. :) Well I’m going to go fry up some delicious eggplant I just bought. I have actually been cooking here. And the crazy thing is…I can actually kind of cook! I’m surprised with myself, and a little proud I’m not going to lie haha. Oh! and I received some fall decorations and leaves in the mail and was SOO excited! Hurray for seasons! Thank you for all your prayers and packages and love. :)

kissing booths and pumpkin pancakes..

It has officially been WAY too long since I have blogged. I am getting so used to living here! Some of the things that happen I don’t even think about blogging about now cuz they are normal to me haha. Well for one thing the school fair is tomorrow! My class is doing the kissing booth. We just set it up and it is soo cute! I’ll have to take pictures :) you pay fifty cents and one of my kids goes and gives someone a kiss for you, and then they can pay fifty cents if they want to find out who kissed them. They are all really excited about it! also the Christmas pagent is coming up and my friend joy and I volunteered to be in charge of it. We ended up deciding to write it from scratch. Lol I don’t know exactly WHAT we were thinking. But it is coming a long! I have been needing a creative outlet, and this is the perfect thing! Slightly stressful, um YES. But fun as well. We’re making it a news report, and it is going to be hilarious I’m not going to lie! Hopefully we can finish writing it this week so we can start having auditions (this is for pre-school through 12 grade by the way. Ya. I know. I’m crazy.) THEN we have to start practices and get the set going and costumes and everything. Which I won’t be working on cuz I’ll be holding the practices and directing and what not. But I still have to organize. Anyway, so we’ll see how that goes! I’ll have to find a way to record it so I can show everyone at home :)

The last few weeks I’ve had a lot of fun with my kids. We made spiders for Haloween and pumpkins, and haloween night SO many tricker treaters came to our apartment! We were raiding our pantry for ANYTHING to give them. Lol all of our candy from home was handed out, granola bars, fruit snacks, haha but it was worth it. A few weeks ago I showed up to class and my kids kept saying that I looked like a rock star. I was like What are you talking about?! Lol and they explained that it was because I had my hair down (I have it up in an ugly teacher bun like every day so this they were not used to apparently..) and because I was wearing make up (which I was not, but apparently there was the slightest trace of eyeliner from like vespers two days earlier which they detected). I found this pretty funny and so for Halloween I put my hair down and put on eyeliner and was a rockstar! :)

Besides that I am just getting closer and closer to my kids. They make me feel so loved. The other day almost my whole class made me a picture that said they loved me and all signed it. then they taped it up on the chalk board. I couldn’t help but smile the rest of the day. I also have a few boys that are what I guess you would call “trouble” boys that adore me, and I in return absolutely adore them. The sm before me wrote a letter of advice about my students and mentioned one student in particular as being very difficult and frustrating. Last week this boy drew me three happy halloween pictures repeatedly said, “Miss we love you soo much.” Or “Thank you for being our teacher” or “you are the best teacher ever, we love you soo much” . These boys melt my heart. I don’t know how I’m going to leave them. I don’t want any one to ever hurt them, I feel so protective of them. If anything ever happened to any of them I would just want to hold them until everything was ok.

I feel like God is teaching me how to love this year, and also how to be loved. I can definitely say that I am growing, and I can also say that it hasn’t been easy. But as I have needed God in different ways, He has had the opportunity to reveal himself to me in ways I had never seen Him before. THAT has been amazing. 

Speaking of amazing, my dad and gramma sent me pumpkin pancake mix and that as been quite amazing as well lol. (Miss you guys!!) My roommates and I have definitely enjoyed that! :)

This week I have particularly been missing my close girlfriends. I am so blessed to have some truly incredible woman be a part of my life and I thank God for friends like them :). Hugs to everyone back home..