Preparing For Our Guest

First things first! We have been praying about this adventure since the opportunity arose, and we continue to pray daily for the student who will join us in exactly one week! We don't know his name yet, so to make it a little easier in the interim we are fondly calling him "Fes", which is short for "foreign exchange student" (as in: "I wonder if Fes drinks milk?" or "I wonder if Fes plays sports or a musical instrument?" :). Evidently, there is a chance he will be assigned an English name when he arrives and hopefully we won't have any trouble making the switch!
All we know at this point is that he is an 8th grade boy who attends a Christian boarding school just outside Seoul, South Korea. His family might live in an apartment in the city, or they may be from a little farm out in the country. We'll soon find out! He will be joined by 28 other junior high students from his school (19 boys and 9 girls), and will attend an English Immersion program at Melissa and Kevin's school, Tri-City Christian, where Kevin is also in 8th grade, and Melissa is a senior. Korean students ultimately have to pass a rigorous test in their homeland to be admitted into college, so families sometimes sacrifice to give their children an edge by sending them overseas to programs like ours. If they don't pass the test, they don't go to college! So, we pray for God's hand to be on his entire visit and that it will be a positive educational experience for him as well as a great cross-cultural experience for all of us.
Since this is a family blog, I hope each of us will post our own observations and/or photos, etc., but it may be mostly me (Sue). That said, even though it will always say "Posted by Kevin", we will try to identify ourselves with our initials at the end of each entry. I hope John will share some of the interesting things we've been learning about Korea through library books and the internet in the next few days, and I'm sure the photojournalists in the house will have lots of fun, too!
Thanks for reading!
SM :)