GongYi Home of Hope

All the Home of Hope Children – Chinese New Years – 2010

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NEW BEDS FOR THE CHILDREN

Some time ago we realized the children’s beds were in dire need of replacement. Some more than others, as you can probably imagine. After ten years of use, all the beds at the Gongyi Home of Hope have started to deteriorate in various degrees of wear. Fortunately, a church in California along with a kind lady in Mississippi provided the funds for new beds.

Interestingly enough, providing beds for over fifty children is not something that is easily accomplished. There are no wholesale houses where one can go order fifty or sixty beds and to achieve any kind of quality (greatly needed due to being used by a lot of energetic children) one has to make sure the materials being used are good enough to provide long term use.

This was not the first time we have had to replace beds. The end of 2008 we had to replace quite a few of our beds which had already deteriorated beyond use. The funding for that project came from a church in Texas and was greatly appreciated. This time however, all the remaining beds needed to be replaced.

To insure the quality of materials, we first had to go to the lumber mill and order the milling of the wood to our specifications. One thing neat about this is, we see the actual log the material is going to come out of before the milling process starts.




Once the timber is milled, we go through it, one piece at a time, selecting the wood we can use and rejecting that which has large knots or splits or pockets of sap. We then pay for what we take based on a pricing schedule similar to that calculated on “board feet”. Of course here they use the metric system.

Once the wood is selected, it is loaded on carts pulled by donkeys and hauled several killometers to the wood working factory where it will be processed into the final beds.

This takes quite a few trips by donkey carts. No matter how long we are here, we never get used to seeing the contrast of heavy laden donkey carts going down the State highway along side modern busses, trucks and cars.

We always have quite a bit of sympathy for the donkeys because we know their fate! Once they are old and can’t work any longer they are then butchered and used for meat dishes. Quite tasty actually! (Grin)

HOME OF HOPE PING PONG TOURNAMENT

In China, the main time of celebration is the Chinese New Years, often referred to as “Spring Festival”. This celebration/holiday is scheduled based on the Lunar calendar, so as far as the Western calendar is concerned, it never comes on the same date. This year it actually starts on the 14th of February (Valentines Day).

During this time, everything shuts down (we mean everything except emergency services) for a minimum of five days starting with the first day of the holiday. The schools also shut down for at least a month so right now, all the Home of Hope children are home including all the college kids.

This allows us to have many activities with all the children which is somewhat difficult to do during the school year. A typical day during the normal school year, the high school and middle school students get home after 6:30 PM (leaving for school between 5:30 and 6:00 AM) and of course the college kids only come home on special occasions.

Shortly after Christmas, we decided to have a Ping Pong tournament, open to all the children and based on a handicap system to make it as fair as possible for each child. Almost all the boys and several of the girls signed up for the tournament. Nathan was the judge and Ben Godard (the director of the Home of Hope #3 in PingYu) helped with the score keeper chores, as we had two tables going at the same time. We want to do this again during this New Years break!

Those children not actually playing in the tournament came to watch, so we had a large gallery of ‘observers’ cheering on the participants.

Above right, are the three finalists, (left to right) Wayne Li Meng Di, John Yao Shu Xing and Adam Zhang Lang. We were all quite impressed with their skills at the game. John has grown so tall over the last year and it seemed as if he had no equal with his ability to reach all areas of the playing surface.

Wayne is a different type of player. Nothing fancy but with a serious and steady defense. Adam is a very aggressive player using a lot of English and slams. This made for a very interesting series of play-off games.

In the end it came down to a final play-off game between John and Wayne.
Initially, we were a little worried that no matter how hard we tried, the hanidicap system we were using wouldn’t give each child an equal shot a victory, but it really worked out well.

The final series of games between John and Wayne were very close with the point spread of the scores being just a few points seperating the two.

John came out on top as the winner of the tournament and all the children said they wanted us to do it again very soon with many of the girls saying they would join in the fun the next time..

We hope you enjoyed this update. We will be bringing you more stories and information during and after the Chinese New Years Holidays. (Spring Festival) Blessings!