January 2002

Hi All:

During our fall visit to the United States many of you reminded us of the importance of being in touch with all of you more often about our work here in China and Hong Kong. So one thing I’m going to try to do is write a short e-mail message after each of my trips into China—a story, reflection, bit of data, random notes, whatever—that may be of interest to you and help you better understand our work out here. This will be informal, short, but I hope more regular than my previous attempts. So, here goes:

Don’s November trip to colleges in Fujian province

One thing that struck me on this trip is how quickly educational reforms are taking place in China, especially those related to foreign language (English) teaching. A few quick examples of things recently announced by the government in China include:

Starting as soon as possible, all primary schools should begin requiring study of English from third grade on up. This means there is a need to quickly train a large number of new English teachers.

From now on, middle school teachers will be required to have a BA degree in order to get a teaching job, and those who already have jobs will also be under pressure to get a BA. (Until now, a junior college degree was sufficient.) This means that many teachers are now scrambling to get BAs through correspondence courses, and that teacher training colleges that only offer associate degrees are scrambling to raise their levels so they can offer a BA.

Graduate programs will in the future be expected to teach a percentage of their courses in English. All of this is relevant to us here at Amity for several reasons. First it underscores the importance of English language education in China and also of the need for training English teachers. Perhaps more important, it underscores the need to offer help to China’s poorer regions, lest they be left even further behind.

On another note, one of the highlights of my trip was the chance to visit the church in Nanping, a city in northern Fujian. It always encourages me when I visit this church, not only because of its size and rate of growth, but also because it is so actively working to expand the range of its ministry. In addition to a rich range of worship services, prayer meetings, and Bible studies, it already runs a kindergarten, and now they are building a home for the elderly.

That’s all for now. I’ll try to be back in touch in February after our winter conference in Kunming and visits to development projects in minority people areas.

God’s peace,

Don Snow

The 2002 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 179