Newest Update

Our October 2010 letter is now available. Click the link to check it out.

Meet the Hospitality Team!

We are glad to introduce the Congolese Hospitality Team to you. We have known them all for over a month now, but finally got a photo of all five of them together this week.

From left to right:

Nónó is married and has three children. He is a deacon at his church and is currently studying to be a doctor. He is actually right in the middle of finishing his dissertation. José is also married and has had experience teaching Sunday school and working with children at a camp. Simplicé is engaged to be married but hasn’t set a wedding date yet and her father is an elder at one of the local churches. Bébé and Mandaba are a married couple. Mandaba works for Global Fingerprints, the orphan sponsorship program here, and knows English very well. He lived in the US for a year when he was a teenager while his dad went to seminary. They have 7 children at home which keeps Bébé plenty busy when she is not in English class.

We are so grateful to have this team of people to work with. Right now their top priority is to learn English and when our first short-term team comes from the States we will begin training them to host Americans. We are also praying that at least one of the Hospitality Team members will be gifted as a teacher and begin teaching English to the widows and orphans here at the Elikya Center. We are looking forward to seeing how this team and this aspect of ministry at the Elikya Center will look at the end of our two years here.

In the Classroom

We started teaching English on September 20th and it has been going very well so far. We teach with an English curriculum called Ohana that uses a variety of DVDs for teaching phonics and dialogues. We are finding that using games and activities in the classroom is the best way to go. Our students seem to enjoy learning new games like “Pictionary”, “Charades” and “Telephone” to enhance their English. We definitely enjoy teaching this way as well.

The four of us (Sam, Sarah, Aaron and Michelle) are taking turns teaching so we all get to teach with each other and prepare lesson plans for different days. We have class on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings for two hours. This week we took some photos of one of our classes to post on our blog.

We taught the students the game “Charades” with their new vocabulary words for the day and it was hilarious to see how they each chose to act out their word

Most of the class was so enthusiastic about guessing the answer that they forgot to raise their hands. We were always reminding them to raise their hand before shouting out the answer and it caused all of us to laugh a lot.

Each student had to write their own dialogue this day using the phrases they had learned the previous week. After writing their dialogues, they performed them in front of the whole class. We are planning on having them write and perform short skits in the future when they know more English because they are so great at performing.