A Twin Word Summary of Our Expreicne in a Debrief Meeting in Nanning, China

July, 2017

Today was our last day in the town where we taught English for the past two weeks. Our students came to our hotel to say good bye to us at 10a.m.! Our students were not the only ones; students in other classes did the same thing. There were a lot of students who came to see us off.

Our students came to say farewell to us on our last day.

I was glad that we could spend a few more moments together.

I invited them up to the dining room of the hotel.

Students from my class came to see us off at the hotel.

Eman and S.'s students came to say farewell to them.

My students were not the only ones who came. The other students also came to say good bye to their teachers. Almost the entire student body of the summer program came out for the farewell.

They were standing in the hotel lobby, on the sidewalks of the street. It created quite a scene in this small town.




I was surprised at how emotional some of the students were, even the boys.  I caught Ingram balling his eyes out quietly in a corner. This kid stole my heart.







We left the remote town in Guangxi with bittersweet feeling. We were glad that we completed our short term mission trip, and would be be going home soon. On the other hand the students and we have developed a relationship and we were sad to leave them.

A street in Nanning, China

It was a five hour bus ride and I could feel the different atmosphere on the bus. Mission completed, everyone on our team was relaxed, happy and feeling great. Passing the snacks around and sharing them among our team members, we joked and shared our memories of our two week teaching experience in Guangxi.
The sense of camaraderie was strong as we have share a unique experience.

We arrived in Nanning, the capital city of Guangxi and checked in our hotel at about 5:30pm, a different one from the previous one but much closer to the downtown district this time.

Debrief meeting of our Short Term Mission trip in Nanning

Right after our dinner, our entire team had our debrief meeting in the conference room of the hotel.
Esther, our leader for this project led us through a debrief meeting.

The volunteers' two words describing our feelings about our past 2 weeks

One of the activities I really enjoyed was when she asked each one of us to summarize our experience in two words and each of us was given a couple of minutes to share why we chose these two words, so that we could finish our meeting at a reasonable time.

What an excellent activity for a team of more than twenty people to summarize and share their experience for the past two weeks!

I took a picture of the twin words shared by our team members so that I could remember this activity.

Everyone had a different take and looked at from their angle of what the two week voluntary experience meant to them in China. Some were so touching that there was not a dry eye in the house!  This was the best short term mission debriefing meeting I have ever had!

R.T.
Nanning, Guangxi
China