Compass

A foreigner, a guest, essentially a stranger in your homeland, and yet you placed us with the royals.

Dumplings, a labor intensive process due to the prepping and chopping of the insides, hand rolling and shaping of the dough, and designing and boiling of the filled ball, are made in the home for meals with specialty guests.

You’ve served us dumplings at every home cooked meal.

At dinner, it is customary to have the host sit his two most important guests to his left and right and the second host across from him. At a large restaurant in the center of Xuzhou, you placed our professors by your side and served them Chinese specialities from the round table, yet another sign of respect. Together we all shared in the savoring of rare delicacies like crab tofu soup, peppered octopus, sautéed goose and sweet rice desserts while listening to drinking customs of your ancient city and raising a number of toasts.

The meal probably cost somewhere around 20,000 yuan or 3,636 dollars.

At the school show in Lianyungang you seated us up front, brought us on stage, cheered at the slightest attempt at Nî Haô, and took photos of us with the overseer for the entire province.

We were in t-shirts and exercise shorts.

Stepping into your personally built-up special ed schools you eagerly wait on our every word, taking it all in and applying it immediately, as if we have already established rapport with you just by showing up.

Only two of us have actually graduated from CBU.

While giving us a tour of your home town we mentioned finding a dessert place and you altered our maps to stop by some local street cuisine. When we wanted matching shirts from the fair, you haggled for us. If you see that we are thirsty you bring us water and pour our tea and leave fresh cut fruit out for a before-bed snack.

Thank you for making our team feel so welcome. Thank you for all your hospitality.

I hope you know that the Lord places us at His highest of honors, seating us next to him on his thrown.

May we welcome everyone as an honored guest. May we welcome everyone as the kingdom does.

Your grateful guest,

Riley Makenna

ps WiFi is horrible here so I can’t upload all of my photos