I know it’s been a little while since you last heard from me. Let me give you a recap of what has been going on in the last month or so.
On September 15 we moved into our apartment in Ma On Shan. As I mentioned before, it is a good size for our family and quite convenient for us. Our container also arrived and so we began the process of unpacking and sorting out our stuff. It seems that no matter how ruthless you are with getting rid of things before you go, there always seem to be thing that you wonder why you brought.
On September 20 we got our phone and internet connected.
On September 21 we found out that we were able to receive visas to stay in Hong Kong (That’s for Karl and the kids – Amy’s a citizen and can stay regardless!)
On September 23 we had a day-trip to Macau to validate our visas.
On September 24 our computer crashed. It turned out to be the hard drive that crashed, which began a lengthy procedure of figuring what was wrong and then trying to recover the data off the hard drive. The good news is that we recovered all of our data apart from Karl’s emails., and it wasn’t as expensive as it could have been.
On September 26 we went to Disneyland for the day as a family to celebrate Zac’s birthday. It was a wonderful day. We didn’t quite know what to expect from Disneyland as we’d heard mixed reports of the quality of Hong Kong’s Disneyland. Hong Kong’s Disneyland is quite a lot smaller than ones at LA or Orlando, but what is there is great, and one day is about perfect to see everything.
On October 5 I (Karl) had my first day on campus. I went along to Chinese University of Hong Kong (CU) for their weekly student meeting. There I met Lincoln, who I had discipled for a semester at Waikato University when he was dong an exchange year there. It was great to see his face again. I also met a student called Tim, who is a Canadian Chinese student who has just returned to Hong Kong with his family. Culturally he feels more Western than Chinese and so he was quite excited when he heard that there was going to be another outsider around. He is very keen to reach out to his fellow international students, and we are probably going to do a few things together this year.
On October 6 we celebrated Mid-Autumn festival (otherwise known as the Mooncake Festival because it usually involves eating lots of mooncake!) with a family get-together with both sets of grandparents.
These last couple of weeks have been particularly hectic with health converns for the kids. Vienna’s kindy teacher was concerned at the amount of bruises that Vienna had and recommended we take her to a doctor. Amy took her to a doctor who said that she might have leukemia and said we needed to check her into a hospital for three days for them to do tests. We thought that that was rather drastic action and decided to get a second opinion. The second doctor we took her to said that he didn’t think there was anything wrong but we could get a blood test at the doctor’s clinic and if that showed any problems then we could go to the hospital (A much more sensible line of thinking). The blood test came up with no problems. The first doctor, as it turns out was affiliated to a certain hospital and probably would have got a commission from sending us there! It’s all a bit different from the NZ health system.
Well, just a day after that drama, Lukas started vomitting and diarrhoea and couldn’t hold any food down. And since it was a Sunday, we didn’t have any alternative but to go to hospital (a different hospital, mind you). He ended up spending three days in hospital, and in the end it seems like he just caught a nasty tummy bug. He’s at the age where he’s starting to explore and he likes to put everything in his mouth, so it’s kind of hard to insulate him from germs around the house. Anyhow, he has made a full recovery and is back to normal.
And so that brings us up to now. And now that thngs are a bit more settled down I should be able to keep things up to date on our website (www.hongkongudy.com/wordpress) so please do visit.
I recently had a few meetings with the CCC leadership in Hong Kong and my weekly schedule is probably going to look something like:
1 day a week on Chinese University
1 day a week on University of Science and technology
1 day a week language learning
2 days a week helping facilitate and develop training, resources and strategies for evangelism.
Please pray for:
- Health for all our family (especially Lukas)
- Our landlord. We have had a few difficulties getting her to fix things around the house (like toilets, air conditioners, etc). Sometimes getting her to do things feels like pushing water uphill.
Thanks again for all your prayers and support.
In Christ,
Karl, Amy, Zac, Vienna, and Lukas