Minsk class

Class

I have got to get rid of the pen! I didn't have a stroke.

Class

Irina


Class


Class

Mykola

Minsk 2008
I was my first day of class in Minsk and I have a great group of students. I have 10 in the class and 7 of them are going for a degree so Irena I have 7 students papers to read. With each student having to have written 5 papers each being several pages in length, that’s a lot of reading and interpreting. After dinner tonight Irena and I put our mind to it and we finished 4 students’ papers. Each one read out loud to me and then we discussed each of them to make sure I did understand what we written. That’s a lot of papers! I’m just glad I don’t have 25 in the class.
It was very warm here for the past two days, which is okay, but it’s a warmth that comes from being in a city not just being in the sun. And it’s a bit on the humid side also. The first night here I have to stay in a hotel so they can register me with the local authorities. I was on the eight floor and I could still here the street noise with the window open. Last night besides being on the hot side the mosquitoes had a feast on me, but I finally did manage to get some rest.
As I mentioned before I have a great group of students. They all come from Belarus except for Mykola, he comes from Ukraine, Kherson. I was in Kherson last year teaching this class, but he couldn’t make it then, but he was able to come up here this year and take it.
Okay, so as the week progresses and I get to know the students better, I will start writing about them and not about me!
We were able to get a good rapport right away. The first couple of class hours are always the hardest for me. The students are seeing if I really know my subject matter and I’m looking at who looks like they really understand what’s going on, and how looks lost. Everyone in this class was right there with me from the very beginning.

Irina is very good at translating. She went to college in the states in MO. I told her that Pam came from MO and asked if she ever had been to Hannibal while she was there. She said she had and even went home with one of her friends to a little town named Bethel. That happened to be the town that Pam came from. The town only has about 100 people in it and if the family has been there for awhile, everyone knows everyone. She couldn’t remember her friend’s last name, but I’m guessing if the family’s been there for awhile, Pam knows of them.

Several in the class understand English well enough to help in the translations when questions come up in between class. It’s a lot for the translator to not only translate the class material but then also be there for all the questions during the class breaks. So that’s been good for Irina.

As you can see by the pictures it’s a nice size class to teach. I really feel like I can get to know the students well. We eat breakfast, lunch and dinner together. But since some of the students live close by, the only time we are all

One of the assignments asks them to write about a Christian discipline they have done. Most of the students write about either giving money to someone who is impoverished or helping a family out by do something for them that the family badly needs done. I am always amazed at some of the stories that the students write about in this assignment. They have so little and yet they give, they give to help others who have even less. The result is almost always the same, by giving they are blessed. One student wrote about helping a family and then this family turns around and said some bad things about this person. After the first response of being mad this student realized that he must help them anyway. It was wrong to be angry, but it was very right to give and help and serve.

John