It is just amazing what a group of Americans in China can come up with as carnival games using basketball hoops from the Dollar Store back home, Frisbees, a Nerf football, UNO cards, a wooden paddle and ball and a bunch of plastic trashcans from our rooms in China! The children waited in line to play our silly carnival games many times over and they loved receiving red tickets when they performed well at the games. They shopped for prizes worth 5 tickets, 3 tickets and one ticket. The UNO cards, baseball caps and athletic t-shirts were especially popular at the 5 ticket table. By the end of the night we had given away at least 500 pieces of candy at the one ticket table! We had about ten different carnival games at different places in the huge cafeteria where they had cleared out tables for us for the birthday party and we played music so it was quite a fun evening!

After this evening activity several of the women attended a birthday party for one of the girls in the dorm. Liz helped the Chinese girls to decorate the dorm room for the party. We shouted surprise, played charades and Debbie gave Jane a hand-made beautifully decorated birthday card that all the girls really liked! Later Joe and Javan and the boys from class 7 joined the party on the roof top of the dorm and had a wild time taking pictures in the dark and throwing the birthday cake at one another!

The weather has been hot and hotter this year in Shanghai! We had rain just one night - Saturday - when a tropical storm blew through Shanghai overnight. It is not as humid, overcast and rainy with thunderstorms as it was last year in Shanghai. It is just hot! Tonight, on one of our hottest nights, we had outdoor (and some indoor) games as our evening activity! We started early at 6:00 PM since the sun goes down about 7:30 PM here and mercifully there was a nice breeze blowing as it was about 96 degrees with a heat index surely above 100 degrees when we started to play all of the games. We ran 5 basketball games, 2 volleyball games, one soccer game, 5 badminton games and several ping-pong games all at the same time. It was a good evening to relax and play sports with our Chinese friends all over the campus! One interesting thing is that one man with one 21-inch gas powered lawn mower has spent three days mowing the soccer field and since he has still not finished it looked like the soccer players avoided the tall grass in the middle of the field as they played!

Tomorrow our outstanding teachers who have done such a great job in presenting their lessons will teach their last lessons. (This will occur on Thursday morning as our Closing Program will be Friday morning. Since our teachers taught both Sundays they actually taught 11 days while we were here!) We especially appreciate the teaching of the head teachers Mabel, Bonnie, Laura Jean, Mary, Nathan, Susan, Joe, Buddy and Doug (Groups 1-9 in order) who have all worked very hard to plan their lessons well, prepare student workbooks and enthusiastically, creatively and diligently teach during our camp this summer. They were assisted in the classrooms by Andy, MJ and Rebecca, Brian and Deborah, Lane, Maria, Michael, Javan and Liz, Peyton and Stacey, and Emilee (Groups 1-9 in order) who all used their many gifts to help their classroom teachers in every way possible. We are so very thankful for each member of this team who contributed so much to our team’s success in Shanghai this summer!!!

Please think of us, our Chinese assistant teachers and our students as we will give some of them very special parting gifts tomorrow and Friday. It is our desire that these gifts will continue to be used in the lives of our Chinese friends to help them to learn and grow. We have grown to love them very much and we hope to see them again one day…

More greetings from team members!

Hey everyone! I miss you a lot. Things are going great, and I have an awesome class. Can’t wait to see you! –Mary

Hello Everyone, Being in China is great! I ate an entire fish yesterday for dinner. Happy Birthday Mom. See you soon!