This has, without a doubt, been the longest 13 days of my life. This was suppose to be easy! Quick! But it just turned out to be another challenge to overcome. It's been a while so let me catch you up...
Last month I had to make exams for my...450 students. Thankfully, the textbook I use has a website, and that website has a final exam! So I just send the link to my boss and she sent it to the copy guy. The final test is 3 pages, front and back, so that's technically 2700 pages of test. True to Thai form, I received these tests on the day I was planning on giving them. They weren't stapled, just put in a pile for each page. For the first class, I just made the three piles of pages on my desk at the front of the classroom and told the students to come pick up one of each sheet. Explaining to them how to put them order is another story.
First I help up my copy of their exam and pointed to the big words at the top of the page that read, "PAGE 1." Then I did the same thing for PAGE 3 and PAGE 5. I held them up in order so that one could clearly see that the order was 1, 3, 5. If that wasn't enough drew a picture of a piece of paper on the board and wrote PAGE 1 where it would appear on the actual test. Then I drew another piece of paper behind that one and wrote PAGE 3, and then another with PAGE 5. So now I had appealed to all the learning types to try to explain that you must put your test in order before you turn it in. Now you might be thinking, "how does he know who the test belongs to if they have Thai names?"
After everyone got their test I got everyone's attention and told them to write their NAME, NUMBER, and CLASS on the top of their paper. The only thing I really needed was their number, because that's what's in my grade book. Then, again, I wrote that on the board on the pieces of paper I had originally drawn to explain the page order. Simple enough, right?
To my great dismay, there were students who put page 4 on top and didn't write their number anywhere. Some even stapled their whole exam out of order with no name or number at all! Sometimes I worry about the well-being of some of these children.
After a week of doing this over and over and over, I finally had all the exams. So first things first, I went through and made sure all of them were stapled. I decided I would grade page by page, instead of test by test. So that's what I did. I put on some music without lyrics so I could pay attention, I got out my answer key if I needed to look up any answers, I lounged on my bed, and graded those bad boys. Grading is not as easy as it sounds. Especially when you're splashing red pen ink all over 2700 pages of tests. Let me break it down for you so you know how amazing I am. Each student had 6 pages of fill in the blank, matching, and short answer. You could probably take this test and make a 100 in less than 5 minutes. Each class has between 35 and 40 students. I teach grades 4-6 and each grade has 4 different classes. See, its really overwhelming when you look at it like that! Its also overwhelming when you look at a giant stack of papers on your desk knowing that you have to look at every single one of them. It is a horror I would not wish on anyone.
But that finally finished and then I just had to record them and give my records to my boss. So easy and so simple. It really was. And do you know what I did after that? I threw all those tests away. Because there is no recycling in Thailand. Just garbage. As I walked to the nearest trash can with a giant handful of papers, I thought to myself that I could probably make a good sized tree with all the paper I was about to throw away. And when I looked down at it from the rim of the trash can, it looked smaller, so I felt better.
So then the school year was over!! I got to sleep in and it was magnificent! But there arose a new problem: the flies. Now my apartment is clean, for a guy's place. There aren't piles of trash lining the walls or anything. Just my pile of plastic bags from 7/11 and FamilyMart and my tiny trash can that I lined with a garbage bag. It started out with just one little fly. And I killed it because I'm a pretty great fly-killer. But then two more arose in it's place! And when I killed those two, four more appeared! It was become a problem. To myself, I blamed it on the people who live next door. Here's the story with that.
Each couple of rooms share a drainage system. Meaning our two shower and sink and toilet drains converge somewhere in between our bathrooms and flow down into oblivion. This setup means that either side can smell whatever is happening on the other side. So these smells range from Listerine to vomit to number 2, with a mixture sometimes. Air fresheners here are extremely over priced, so I reluctantly bought some incense in hopes that it would mask these questionable bathroom smells. It did, but now my apartment smells like incense. Funny how that works.
Anyway, I was at the big store the other day and I was walking down the aisle, quickly, as I always do in a store. And out of the corner of my eye I caught a row of repellants and the likes. I perused and found one that said in English, "Kill Mosquitoes and Housefly." I thought this was perfect because my house in infected with housefly. So I bought it. It smells like a lotion my mom used to wear so that was a nice surprise. (Don't worry, mom, its a flower scented spray. Your lotion doesn't smell like housefly killer spray.) This spray doesn't have great distance, so I have to get right up in their face with it. This is not an easy task because they fly around so fast! So I lay in wait until I can see them and then PPPSSSSHHHHHH!!!! I spray them! But unlike the saying on the bottle, it does not kill housefly, only shoots them down. So then I have to kill them with my hand. Which makes their deaths all the more satisfying.
Recently I have had the opportunity to consider a number of changes over here in the land of smiles. Schools in China have been contacting me for interviews and the impending doom of another visa trip was fast approaching. I'm not sure how much money I'll be making for the one week I worked in March, and I wouldn't have a job here until May. So there was a lot to think about. Should I take these jobs in China? Should I do my visa trip and come back here and try to find a summer job? Should I go to Cambodia and see my friends from World Relief?
As an introvert, I am always thinking, and sometimes I just want the thinking to stop! So I went on a drive; that usually puts my thoughts in order. (I wish I could say it clears my head, but my head never stops working.) On this drive I took a moment to be thankful. God has blessed me immensely over the past 5 months (wow!). I can't even begin to describe how vividly He has shown himself to me since I've been in Thailand. Then I thought about how little money I have and how much I needed. But as I've said before, God isn't about to stop taking care of me. In my whole life up to now, I had never been in a situation where I had to put ALL my trust in God. There's always been a backup plan or a safety net of some kind. I couldn't put my faith in my job, because my job was over. I couldn't put my faith in my money, because it was fading away. I couldn't put my faith in my stuff, because my stuff was sold months ago! There was literally only one thing I had to put my faith in.
It made me think, how much differently would we live our lives if we put all our faith in Jesus? The thing is, Jesus is the only one who can save you from an eternity separated from God. But how much do we believe that? We put so much time and energy into these other things like work or school or money, but they can't save us! It's almost foolish of us. Actually, its totally foolish of us. When we are on the brink of death, we will not be saying to ourselves, "Wow, good thing I have all that money or I don't know if I'd be going to heaven!" or "Thank goodness I made all A's in high school!" Silly things like that. In the end, it's not our mortal "stuff" that saves us, it's our faith in God.
In situations like mine, it's easy to put my faith in God because I have no other choice. But the question is, will we choose to do it even when we think we have other options? Shouldn't it be easy to trust the Creator of the Universe with anything? It's harder than you think, but the outcome is always so much better than you think. Remember, if God is for us, who (or what) can be against us?
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