Chapter 1: Where Did You Come From, Where Did You Go?

Oh my!! This update has been so long in coming! It’s been a long time since the last update in March, so pick which version you want to read – bulleted or very long :). As a recap, when we wrote last, I (Leigha) had just started long-term subbing in Math 7 and Math 8 for our high school alma mater, RVA, and we were still unsure about potential returning to China plans for the spring semester. Lots has happened since then!

Short version, based around places:

• KENYA – living at RVA
  • Around January 9 to mid-June
  • Working at RVA, teaching online (Leigha: Jr. High Math, Christian: Computer 9), hanging out with my (Leigha’s) family
• VIRGINIA – Christian’s family home
  • Mid-June through end of August, we lived with a rotating crew of family, mostly Buckshefi (Christian’s) and my two youngest sisters, who came back from Kenya with us.
• VIRGINIA pt 2 – sheltering in place
  • Because of our (thought-to-be) imminent return to China, we moved into another open space in Harrisonburg to basically quarantine and begin teaching online for CDIS, our school this year. (Reasoning: We have to ‘pass’ at least 4 COVID tests to get back into China… We love seeing family, but we’ve been stuck out for almost a year now, we want to get back!)
• Now! 🙂
  • On September 22nd we (finally!!) received our valid Chinese visas, which allowed us to book flights to return!
  • We begin traveling on Wednesday evening October 7, and arrive in Guangzhou, China, on Saturday evening October 10th:
    • Harrisonburg – Dulles – Chicago – San Francisco – Vancouver – Guangzhou.

Long version:

KENYA – living at RVA

This stint started when we arrived as a surprise back in January, supposedly for 3 weeks or so. However, close to the end of that first stay, we heard some distant news about a virus in Wuhan, China – relatively far away from our province and school. We laughed, and joked that it would be kinda nice if we ended up getting an extra week of vacation because of it. Then flights started getting cancelled. Our flight back to China got cancelled, and our school told us to delay coming back by a week. After that week, they delayed us again. And again. This went on for almost a month (February into March) – are we going back? How do we know which flights are actually running? China was responding very drastically to this virus, but there were only 200 cases or so at the time in Chengdu (a city of 12+ million people, the capital of our province).

Finally, on a Tuesday in mid-March (soon after I started long-term subbing for a math teacher on medical leave), we decided that we would talk to RVA administration and volunteer there for the rest of the school year. At that point, we weren’t confident that our university in China would be opening at all, and even if it did, there was maybe 1 out of our 5 colleagues who might’ve returned with us. Also, since we were the handful of foreigners, we were not set up in their online system and were not teaching for them at all. So we headed up to administration and volunteered. The superintendent was grateful, but was also in the middle of other decisions. Sure enough, the day after we volunteered, RVA announced that they were ending 2nd term early and sending all the students home that weekend – a logistical nightmare when we have students from all over Africa! This was pretty unexpected (at the time the decision was made, on a Wednesday, there were no confirmed cases in Kenya), but by the time we got most kids out of the country, the first case was confirmed and other countries started closing their borders. So the timing was beautifully timed and God was very present, even in the hard sudden transition. It was very quick, and since after that they decided to have all of the 3^rd (and last) term online, there was not much closure at all, especially for the seniors who didn’t get a chance to have many of their ‘lasts’.

That decision sprung us into our month-long break between semesters, most of which we spent planning for launching online school at the end of April. Christian was asked/volunteered to teach Computer for 9^th grade, and I was still prepping my two Junior High math classes. During this time we also moved out of my parents’ guest room into a neighboring house, although we still saw my family quite a bit! We had hoped to get up to Ethiopia to visit Christian’s family again and then go to the States a couple months early, but Kenya’s borders closed just around then as well, leaving that not an option.

Teaching online for RVA was an adventure!! While we did have much more time to prepare than most teachers elsewhere, the learning curve and unique situations of RVA students made things a bit tricky. Because some of our students live in remote places with limited access to internet, I as a junior high teacher couldn’t require my students to watch any videos (too much bandwidth required), and I had to have my course set up in 2-week ‘packets’ so that families could mass-download everything for two weeks, then come back and upload everything two weeks later. A face-to-face zoom lesson was completely out of the question. So it was interesting for me to figure out how to best support these students in math, provide resources, and hope that they are learning how to best teach themselves and ask questions.

Christian enjoyed the challenge of coming up with lectures and half-designing an online curriculum for his class, and exploring how to teach high schoolers about necessary computer skills. But this was not something that he had done before, so there was quite a bit of exploration involved! Especially when there was no specific curriculum for what he was doing.

VIRGINIA – Christian’s family home (“the Summit house”)

Kenya’s borders closed in late March to international travel, and there had been a few embassy flights leaving the country, about every 2 weeks or so. At the beginning, we hoped that Kenya would open quickly, so we brushed aside the idea of taking these (much more expensive) flights back. As time passed and Kenya only extended restrictions on air and domestic travel (including a nationwide curfew from 7pm to 5am and other strict measures of containment), we knew that we might have to take one of these flights. Our ideal timeframe, we thought, was to get a flight around June 10 to Virginia, then quarantine for the 2 weeks, have around 2 weeks in the states, then head to China mid-July.

We did end up taking an embassy flight out of Kenya in mid-June, taking my two youngest sisters with us, and meeting Christian’s two youngest brothers when we got to Virginia. After a couple close brushes with COVID, we tested negative and took a super quick road trip to Wisconsin to drop off my sisters with grandparents. When we got back, Christian’s parents had also come back from Ethiopia for the summer, so we spend about a month with them, seeing other various family in the area, and preparing to begin this school year with a different organization, at an international school in Chengdu (check it out at cdischina.com!)

For the month of August, our school pushed back the beginning of school and extended our orientation weeks, which was a blessing!! We adjusted our schedule so that we were online from 8pm-midnight every day (to line up with the morning China time), then less scheduled work during the day. During this time we got to zoom with many of our future coworkers and get a feel for how things would work, and prepare our classes. Also in mid-August, our crew living in the Summit house began to dwindle again – two of Christian’s brothers went back to college, and his parents returned to Ethiopia.

All of these 2.5 months were also full of wondering and waiting. We were in the middle of the process for obtaining normal work visas for China (or at least the middle of the first process, that of getting many documents authenticated) when China introduced a new piece that we needed. This switched the route that we had been taking to a different path, and put us alongside all the other returning staff stuck outside of China. We all needed to get official letters from Sichuan provincial leaders inviting us to apply for a visa and come back. From there, we could apply for a special M visa instead of a work visa, then apply for a year-long work visa once we get there. Lots of paperwork!!

VIRGINIA pt 2 – sheltering in place

We received our official invitation letters the last weekend of August! Because of our (assumed) imminent return to China, we moved into another open space in Harrisonburg to basically quarantine and begin teaching online for CDIS. We have to ‘pass’ at least 4 COVID tests to get back into China, and we would love to not have any more hiccups in this process!

School began on September 1st, which really was the evening of August 31st for us. School has been great, but challenging. Most of our classes are in the Middle School, for which we do not teach live via zoom. Instead, we prepare all of the content and lesson plans, then hand them off to a teacher who is on the ground in China to teach, so that the students have a teacher present with them. This is a good system, if more time consuming, and it has also forced us to work much more closely with several other teachers on the ground, which has been a great learning experience. We then grade as much as we can online. I have one high school class, Pre-Calculus, that I am teaching via zoom, which has been unique! All of my students are at CDIS physically, so as the teacher I am the only person zooming in, although there is a teacher in the classroom for classroom management and supervision. Big learning curve here, with technology and trying to connect with a classroom full of students that I can’t really see or hear well. We are both looking forward to getting back to Chengdu and being able to teach our classes in person!

Now and looking forward! 🙂

On September 22nd we received our valid Chinese visas! We had submitted all the paperwork the first week of September, and weren’t exactly sure how long it would take. But sure enough, the weekend of the 22nd four different family groups from our school all got our visas, and our school booked our flights back! So here’s what the next couple weeks look like:

Beginning of this week: get 2 separate COVID tests (the logistics of this are a nightmare! We have to have our negative test results dated within 3 days of our international leg of our journey (Friday at 3:15 West Coast time), but COVID testing turnaround times are not incredibly specific. Hence our 2 tests, praying that at least one of them comes back on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Wednesday night: drive to Washington DC and stay overnight

Thursday morning: catch a super early flight to Chicago, then to San Francisco

Thursday afternoon (or Wednesday if we have them): receive our COVID test results, and forward them and a couple other forms to the Chinese Embassy in DC for approval. Print out the original test results and the stamped health declaration form we get back from the embassy.

Friday morning: catch another very early flight to Vancouver, then to Guangzhou, China.

Saturday evening(China time): land in Guangzhou, get processed at the airport and transported to our quarantine hotel, where we’ll be for 2 weeks. Hopefully, we’ll be able to be in the same hotel room, since once you go in, you can’t come out for the full two weeks. They will serve us food and take our temperatures 2 or 3 times a day. After these two weeks, we’ll arrange our travel back to Chengdu!

Once we finally make it to Chengdu, we will probably have another week of home-quarantine in our school-provided apartment. After this, we will receive a “green code” of health and can begin school in person! We anticipate it will be the beginning of November by this time.

So that’s where we’re at now, and where we’ve come from! Again, our apologies for having an update so late in coming!! At each point in this process it felt like if we waited just a bit longer we’d have more to report – and sure enough, that was true! But generating the activation energy to stop and write it all down is difficult in the moment.

We appreciate your prayers for our travel and all of the details and logistics that go into that this month. We are also very grateful to have a 2-year contract with CDIS and flights booked to return to China! What we thought was going to be a month and half vacation turned into nearly 10 months of living out of suitcases and switching beds frequently. But even in all the chaos and uncertainty of living in the global context in the middle of a pandemic, we are so grateful for the time we’ve been able to have with family and friends that we otherwise would not have seen at all this summer! God has been faithful and good, and has provided us with all that we need in His timing. We trust that He is leading us and increasing our dependence on Him through it all.

Pictures!

Here are some random pictures from the last 6 months! We could comment on all of them, but that’s a lot of work… let us know if you have questions about a picture and we can help :). Most are from Kenya.

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Editor’s note: Thus begins a third era of life in China (Round 1: SST, Round 2: MPC). Hence I have decreed that there shall now be a third category for posts – China: Round 3 – for this year and the rest of our time with CDIS, however long that may be.