Gan En Jie

 Mandi and I celebrating the one-year anniversary of our first date

 A Chinese magazine that obviously has some in-depth analysis of the presidential election

Mandi with some of her students at a hot pot restaurant

Hello everyone!  Hope you are all doing well during this holiday season!  Here's a quick update on our past few weeks in Jingzhou.

- We celebrated Thanksgiving (感恩节 pronounced Gan En Jie) with some foreigners who are teachers at a nearby college.  We've gotten to know Adam, Jamie, Walker, and Elizebeth all a little bit, and it's been good to hang out with some other Americans once in awhile to talk sports and life in China....but especially sports!

- Mandi and I also had a small Thanksgiving party for our boss (Linda), her assistant (Sara), and their families.  They've been really helpful this year, so we wanted to have them over for some American food.  Mandi did a really good job cooking as much Thanksgiving food as she could here in our city. We had stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato pie, and rolls.  There's no turkey arond Jingzhou though, so we settled for duck.  They seemed to really like the food, and we all had a great time that night.  We're really happy to be working with such great people.

- We've been continuing to build relationships with students, co-workers, and other locals around the city.  Mandi has even been meeting with a few of her students who are interested in learning about the Book!

- For the past week or so, we've been working on a dance with some of the younger Chinese teachers.  We're going to be performing it in front of the school a few days before Christmas!  I'll try to record and post it on here next update.  It should be very interesting....

- We're getting ready to start our Christmas lessons for students.  You can be "thinking" of them as they hear about the birth of JC and how important He is to us.

That's all for now.  Have a great Christmas!

Romans 12:2