Marie, Matt, Crystal, Lynelle, Nina and me with some of the kids: Christina, Allen, Michael and Hannah
Nina and I didn’t have a lot of stuff to do today, so we decided to go explore the village on bike again. We’ve been doing so much bike riding lately that our butts are starting to get sore!
This afternoon, we were riding around and saw this huge cherry farm on the side of the road, so we decided to go and take a look. The family that owns the farm usually takes all the cherries to the village to sell, but we really wanted to eat some cherries, so we asked them if we could buy some there. They were so nice and let us pick them off the tree ourselves! The woman let us climb up on the ladder and showed us which ones were ripe and ready to pick.
When were were done, she weighed them and we paid for them. We hung the bag of cherries off of the handlebars of our bike and ate cherries all the way back the orphanage! Yay!
The nice farmer lady
It was a very wobbly ladder…
Cherries!
Bethel has this shack behind the goat’s pen that hasn’t really been serving much purpose. Throughout the years, it’s gathered quite a bit of junk, from old couches and tables to unwanted toys and bikes. Recently, Matt got the idea to turn the area into a petting zoo and outdoor classroom, but with all the dust and dirt in there, no one wanted to take on the impossible task of cleaning it out, not to mention almost the entire Bethel staff is female. So Matt called up the rugby team in Beijing and asked them to come help. Where better to find big strong guys than a rugby team? They agreed and in return, we had a barbecue to thank them!
About seven huge guys came in the afternoon and they had everything moved out of the shack and cleaned up in a few hours. It was pretty hard to find large slabs of raw meat for the barbecue in the village for some reason because they have to have it brought over from the bigger villages nearby. Matt considered slaughtering a chicken, but finally we were able to buy a huge half of a cow from the back of a man’s truck and some pieces of chicken from the kitchen of a restaurant that we always go to.
The guys had a really great time and now our shack is clean!
The guys on the rugby team came from England, Australia, the US, Thailand and more! Some of them have lived in China for almost a decade!