Week 7 in Asia

A family of ten travels through Asia and experiences the culture, language and food!

Ronald McDonald House

We volunteered another week for the Ronald McDonald House. This time it was at a movie theater. I think you can tell a lot about a culture by how generous they are. We surpassed our money amount from last week by $600 HK. It was good for the kids to get out of their comfort zone again. Rejection is a good thing to feel and learn to get over if you want to succeed in life! I think almost half of all the people we asked said yes! Some even before they knew what we were collecting for!

Chartered Boat

We’ve made some friends here in HK. A wonderful family is here for their 11 year old to go to a great camp for physics. It looks wonderful. It’s sponsored by John Hopkins for gifted and talented kids from 2 grade-11 grade! It’s an intense physics camp for three weeks in Hong Kong. So much to love about that. His younger sister attended the Mandarin School where we studied. They invited us to join them on a chartered “junk” boat which is a tradition here for thousands of years. It’s so weird to say something has been around for 6,000 years… In Asia, you can say things like that!

Steph is a hit here too! World Wide Phenomenon

Pokemon Go opened for the first time Monday. We went out as a family for Family Home Evening. We took turns walking around Victoria Park and catching the cute little guys. We even got Pikachu! We were not alone! I bet there were hundreds of Pokemon Go players in the park. Everywhere we look!

We even found one in my bedroom!

The first week we were here in Hong Kong, we accidentally went to the singles ward for our church. We changed the dynamic of the sacrament meeting. It was so spiritual and quiet when we arrived. It was a congregation made up almost entirely of domestic servants. Ten percent of Hong Kong’s population is Philippine. They come here with a work permit. They work 12 hour days, 6 days a week and have to sign a two year contract. The Government charges a family extra if they keep them for over two years and so they are often out of work. Once they are “let go” they don’t have anywhere to live and no money. They have to find employment within two weeks or go home. During that two weeks, they have to live in a homeless shelter and find food where they can. They make $200 a week in a place where it’s $8 for a small can of peanut butter. It’s hard for them. The bishop has about two women a week in this situation in his ward. Jacqueline and Alexis decided to make care packages to give the bishop with canned meat and various other things so he has something to give these ladies to help them get by. We added canned tuna, canned chicken, canned ham, canned soup, rice, oats, 2 types of crackers, jam, chocolates, and canned milk. We asked our church congregation back in Palo Alto for donations. In total, we were able to buy $650 American worth of food for these ladies. We’ll deliver them to the bishop this Sunday. Until then, my living room is a mess!

We’re writing letters to these ladies and then folding them into origami. They’ll like that!

Trash

We went to deep water beach to swim. The view reminded us of Hawaii! The water is almost bath water warm! There is no initial reaction of discomfort at all! Perfectly refreshing for even Olivia! The beach is impeccably clean and well kept. A bar sells cold water and the bathrooms are close by.

Here’s the problem. Every square foot of ocean has at least one piece of trash in it. I’m talking big pieces of trash. Like Costco sized bags, 12x12 pieces of plastic, There is tons of this trash. Alexis started pulling it up onto the beach to clear out a spot for her to swim but quickly got discouraged and gave up. The children started playing with the trash. Others were pulling it out of the ocean and putting large pieces on the beach but, it continued to float in. I know there are efforts through a non-profit here to clean up the beaches. I’ve e-mailed them to see what we can do. It’s just nauseating. I made all the kids take a shower as soon as we got home. All the writing was in Chinese. I guess it could be Japanese but, the rumor is that mainland China just dumps all this waste into the ocean and then it floats to the other countries. I understand the global community struggle a lot better now. What do you do when a neighbor throws trash over the fence into your yard?