Training Day 2. I went in there not real sure how well this was going to go with hard words for our translator to translate and hard words for caregivers to understand.
All morning long, Erin taught through body language and our Chinese team member. The caregivers listened, taking copious notes and pulling their phones out to snap pictures of words on slides or Erin’s physical demonstrations. They interrupted her to ask questions to understand it all better or ask why things were true or why different stretches or treatments helped.
And, I pretty much sat stunned…and took a few pictures myself.
When we had gathered as a team early that morning, we prayed all about the training, praying specifically among lots of things that when specific children were brought into the training for Erin to model specific stretches and positioning, the child would be honored and somehow blessed by it. We didn’t know what that might look like, but we asked specifically for it. We knew that bringing a little treasure onto a mat in the center of the room with lots of people all around was a risky thing. When the little one’s ayi brought her in and laid her down with everyone gathered around the mat, the woman in charge got down too. In her good clothes, she got down on her knees and lowered her chest all the way down to the ground, prostrate on the floor. With her face only inches from the cheeks of the little one, she smiled and then started whispering “Yēsū ài nǐ. Yēsū ài nǐ. Yēsū ài nǐ. Yēsū ài nǐ” until that little girl inside a broken body smiled back. Honored and blessed. In front of everyone.
The planned 2-hour training ended up to be more like a 4-hour one which ended with us having a hard time even remembering our team time together that morning when someone had said she was worried about how this was all going to go.
