Update from Christina: Teaching and Gunsan Ward

Liji has been so great with the kids. He is crazy with them. They just love it. His class is so loud. They are just across the hall from me and I can hear them all the time.
Our part of the teaching job at the school is to mostly get the students comfortable with speaking English and getting their pronunciation accurate. The Korean teachers mostly deal with the grammer part of it. A big thing that they want the students to be able to do is form sentences. If you ask them something they almost always just give one word answers. So I ask them a lot of questions during class. I have them answer first with their one word answers and then I demonstrate how to properly answers with a complete sentence and then I have them repeat me. It has seemed to work pretty well. They are gradually catching on and I will sometimes get a proper answer. When that happens it is so exciting. They also want us doing a lot of games with the students so that it is more interactive so I have been gathering a list. If anyone has any fun classroom games to help with speaking please let me know.
I am learning so much here. It is just so different. The communication barrier has definately been a little tricky to get around. But this has given me an opportunity to take a minute to step back and think; ok what is it really that I am trying to convey. Sometimes I can be so unclear in my communication skills and also such a bad listener. This is just going to be such a great experience. I feel so grateful to be here.
At church on Sunday everybody gave us such a warm welcome. Even though most of them couldn't speak to us. They would come up and to us and just seemed to let us know how happy they were to have us. In Relief Society there were only 4 sisters and then me. One girl is my age, her name is sister O (that is shortened from her full Korean name to make it easer for us to say) she just was baptized a couple years ago but as been inactive until this year. The other three sister were like in their 30's or early 40's. Nobody gave a lesson they just had a testimony meeting and they asked me to bare my testimony first because they said they really wanted to hear me speak. So I bore my testimony to them and told them how grateful I was to them for their kindness and love towards me and that I knew this was where I was supposed to be. As I testified of this the Spirit entered and they felt it also. It was just a real neat experience. I already feel so much love for them. The missionaries told us that all of the members in the ward are first generation converts, and there are many inactive. I have never been in a ward with so many that new to the gospel. It is going to be so great. I feel like there is so much I can do and it is driving me to learn the language sooner so I can communicate better. Liji and I are studying the language every morning but it seems slow going. Pray for us.