Friday, September 26, 2008

Joyce in Community

Joyce has one big advantage over all the other missionaries. She is both a student and teacher at PIBC and is part of both communities. She is working to finish up her BA (she took a 25+ year break to raise three kids). She has completed her minor and her general education but still needs several Bible and Theology courses to finish. As a student she spends a lot of time with the other students doing homework and projects together and participating in classroom, on-line and other discussions as a student. Because she is one of them and is a very open, accepting person the students like to confide in her. She really enjoys the times when she can just be "one of the students." Here is Joyce with the Palauan students - since we spent so much time in Palau, Joyce is an honorary Palauan student.

Joyce also is teaching the community ESL class (in addition to her English teaching at the Japanese school), team teaching the class with Kent Boydston. Last week they had a birthday party in the class for one of the Chinese students. I guess, you could say that Joyce is also part of the staff as she works with Tim Plaxton doing building maintenance and helps out in the office. In the picture here the "girls" (Joyce, Evelyn Suda, Melissa Heck and Hollie Schuab) are celebrating Hollie's birthday.



Many of our students struggle financially. One of the ways we help them out is to employ them to do different jobs. A couple days ago Joyce brought over Rambo and TJ (students from Chuuk) to work with her to trim some tree branches in our yard. Now, Joyce is a pretty good tree climber herself, but she was amazed at how these guys could move through the trees - amazing balance! (Here is Rambo in the tree with TJ in front of it). We were also amazed that they could stand and work on limbs that look so small they could barely hold a bird. These times away from school are great times to get to know the students better and give them a chance to earn some spending money. Joyce was also happy to get a lot of yard work done.

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