The Annual English Club Christmas Party

Kids prepare welcome signs

7:25pm:  We sit prepared for a party.  The food is ready, the room is arranged.  The kids are washed and dressed.  Everything is ready, except that we sit in complete darkness.  No power.  Oh, and it’s raining...a lot...the first big rain of the season.  Islanders don’t like to go out in the rain.  So in the next five minutes we need to decide.  Do we cancel the party?

7:30pm: Decision time.  The rain is still coming down pretty hard.  No power...do we cancel?  Just then the lights come on.  Maybe the rains letting up...a little….we’ll decide to go for it.  The party is on!

We have a confession to make.  We are not the best party planners.  Neither of us gets terribly excited about figuring out all the details to make a party happen.  Sure we like a good party, we don’t even mind having the party at our house, but planning it...

Every Christmas we’ve spent on the islands we have hosted and organized a small Christmas party for our English students.  This year was no different.  So as the day approached we felt the pressure mounting.  What will we eat?  What kind of games will we play?  What songs will we teach them?  What will we talk about?

She fed him answers to win some of the games! :)

Remember, people on the islands know next to nothing about Christmas.  This huge holiday with all its different traditions both secular and religious, is a vast ocean of cultural knowledge that islanders are, for the most part, completely unaware of.  What do we share?  What do we teach them?  Opportunities like this come rarely.  We want to make the most of it.

One of the cultural ideas we come back to every year is the distinction between secular and sacred. Where we (from the West) easily and clearly have these boxes for things: (i.e. Santa-secular; wisemen-sacred) this is an idea quite foreign to our island friends.  The sacred and secular are not distinguished.  Everything they do is defined as representing the majority faith.  They apply this to us as well, so that everything out of the west--everything from sexy music videos to Santa’s elves--is a reflection of our majority faith.  So we find it helpful to teach this distinction to highlight the difference between true faith and cultural traditions.  And what better time than Christmas!

Go Christmas Club!

So this year we decided to teach “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” for the secular side of things this year and explained the angel’s message to the shepherds for the sacred: “Good news of great joy that will be for people everywhere.”  We sang “Angels We Have Heard On High.” In between we played games and made snowflakes. And then we just generally enjoyed one another’s company. 

The rain kept many people away, but we prayed that the right people would come and hear. The time was good.  And just maybe, some of them went home with a spark of the Christmas story in their hearts.

PRAYERS ANSWERED
The Christmas party was a success despite the rain.  The special swim went well--more on that next week.  The rains mean a bit of relief from the terrible heat!  Our teammates with the new baby are adjusting back well.  Megan’s new class is going well too.


PRAYERS REQUESTED
Other teammates will be having their own Christmas parties, and gatherings, and opportunities to share.  Pray that all of us would be able to share about Christmas in meaningful ways.  Our teammates with the new baby are getting a visit from their family.  Pray for all their travel and for a good visit.  We still have much to do before we go on vacation.  Pray for our sanity amidst the busyness (and we don’t even have to look for parking spaces in busy malls!) It has been miserably hot- pray for cool nights so we can sleep and for relief from heat rash.