My life in a bag….
I’d like to give you a little taste of what my life has been like over the past 4 years. My life, as it were, is in this bag. Let me show you what is inside.
I’d like to give you a little taste of what my life has been like over the past 4 years. My life, as it were, is in this bag. Let me show you what is inside.
Susan’s ‘Bag of Life’
Family
Since the beginning, I made sure that my priority was my role as a wife and Mum. For example, I didn’t have language lessons when the girls were home from school..
Language study
There are many discouragements in learning an eastern language. It’s hard to remember 32 consonants and 23 x 2 vowels. Even up until the last Sunday I would have trouble finding the right number in the song book.
Mistakes are easy to make. For example
‘Lydia chops up old people’ is very similar to ‘Lydia cares for old people’!! And
‘you have a nice box in your hair’ is similar to ‘you have a nice smelling flower in your hair’! (see picture at the top of this page).
However there are encouragements at the end. I understood a lot of the last service before we left. The last 2 months of language study were encouraging: after over a year of no formal lessons I hadn’t forgotten everything during my illness. J
School:
What a relief to do something I was good at last. I taught 2 days a week, year 7 & 10. I didn’t do more because I was still learning Khmer and I made being a wife and a mum my priority – whenever E & C were home I was their mum. Also Darren had a very busy full time job – 8am – 6 or 7pm Monday to Friday, so I wanted to be there for him too.
The high school is growing – 10 subjects to equivalent of Standard Grade – but we need more teachers with experience to start new departments to allow teenagers to stay with their families and not be sent home to study….or even more drastic, the whole family returns home….
The high school is growing – 10 subjects to equivalent of Standard Grade – but we need more teachers with experience to start new departments to allow teenagers to stay with their families and not be sent home to study….or even more drastic, the whole family returns home….
….I gradually added a few other responsibilities..
GLU club
OMF Kids come from all over the world,16 nationalities in all including Scotland, England, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, USA, Singapore and Germany. I quickly realised that these kids, like E&C, had heard Bible stories since they were tiny tots and what they needed, more than a Sunday School style meeting, was a sense of belonging to the OMF team in their own right, of ‘owning’ the team and the team centre where their
parents went to study language, pray and attend meetings. So we had lots of fun, time to chat, outings. We even had a ‘Special Celebrity’ each week. A different OMFer would come and everyone would ask a question- it was quite funny – from their favourite colour to more serious topics.
