Another fun day here in Fuzhou! Today Debbie, Alice, and I spent the day in the workshop making stuffed bunnies. We took the many pieces of fabric and stitched it up, all by hand! They took a very long time! We started at about 10am and were still working on our one each at 5:30! Mine is all done except for the emblem that needs to be stitched on the foot. I made a whole bunny by hand! Hope, one of the founders adopted daughters and her husband run the workshop. It's called Hands of Hope. They do several projects like that to help fund-raise for HTH. I was planning on giving the shop my bunny to sell but, while it's pretty good, I'd feel bad giving them my less than perfect bunny. So, I'm just going to buy him and take him home with me! Debbie and I made the same rabbit and Alice helped with ours. I'm glad I decided to keep it because once I started to think about it, it's a really special project that I can keep for many years and remember this trip and everyone who helped put him together. Ross, the guy staying in the guest house with us lives here in China going to grad school, but he's originally from Missouri. He only came for a little bit so he just worked on mine for a bit. I think he did one arm and attached it to the body. Nine year old Julia, who speaks perfect English and Chinese, translated for her mom who doesn't speak any English when she helped us. So I have a few stitches in there from them. Alice did a leg and part of the face, and Hope attached the movable legs. There's a little bit of many people in that bunny.
After bunny making time, Kyler picked us up at the shop and we walked to his house. Shi Yu made an EXCELLENT dinner for us! We even had brownies and Chinese ice cream! They have been so good to us on this trip! We had a good time looking through old pictures first of the kids when they were babies and then pictures from their church and past trips. We walked a little ways from their house to the Chinese temple that sits right in the middle of the village. There were people doing Tai Chi outside the temple. Very cool cultural experience.
This whole thing of living in the village is a culturalexperience. I love walking down the streets where most tourists would never get to see. I love walking the narrow dirt roads, seeing the artistic old buildings, constantly sweating due to the 115 heat index, not flushing toilet paper, turning off the AC before leaving a room, the giant window in the bathroom that we open while showering so we don't suffocate, ... etc! 😂 Yes, it's a different lifestyle than anything we're used to but it doesn't make them any less or us any better. Different is different and that's good.
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