A Day in the Life of the Teachers of Conversational English
When we arrived in Hanoi, my roommate Adam and I were assigned Room 501 in the Golden Wings II Hotel. The hotel is about 20ft wide but it has seven floors. As you travel down most of the residential streets you will notice that most of the ground floors of the buildings are filled with businesses like clothing stores, fruit stores, restaurants, iphone shops, sporting goods shops etc.
Many people live in narrow little apartments above the businesses. They are often several stories high. The city stories and streets are teeming with people until 10 or 11 o’clock. There are a lot of cars and buses but the majority of the people appear to be traveling to work or to school on motor bikes. There seems to be few rules that are followed on the streets but I haven’t seen an accident yet.
It is to this city that the Lord has called us to work for Him this week. I will relate to you a typical day in our lives over here. Adam had to leave the hotel about 7:15 today to go to the language center where he and his team are putting on a VBS for the younger children. After eating breakfast, our English Language Learning team got together for a couple of hours to go over the lesson plans for the day. We have learned to be flexible because we were planning to teach three classes but when we got to the language center we would only be teaching 2.
I was able to attend the third class which was taught by a professional teacher. I was able to observe the class and contribute. She spoke with a British accent and she pointed out some of the differences between our accents to the students.
Since we were in a professional environment we were not able to share our faith with the students. So our goal has been to build relationships with the students in the classes and to help them build up their language skills and to invite other students to the classes who want to develop their skills through conversational English. There are others here who can follow-up with these students and share the gospel with them.
As I have thought about our experiences here, I am reminded of our Lord “when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion on them, because they fainted and were scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd (Matt. 9:36). This verse clearly applies to Hanoi. This is a city of 8-9 million people most of them are young people and there are only about 3,000 evangelical Christians in the city. How will all of these people be able to hear the gospel when there are so few believers here and there are even fewer shepherds who will lead them in the way of the Lord?
-LeRoy
