The Many Looks of Elizabeth Sophie

Making mooncakes at our church.  This one is in the shape of a pig

First day of Grade 5

Spirit Week, by Aimee

Two weeks ago our school had Spirit Week.  Spirit Week is put on by StuCo, a student-run organization that plans many events.  Spirit Week is a week where there are theme days and you dress up to match that theme.  The first day was Color Day (each grade dresses up in a different color), the second day was Swap Day when students dress to show the career they want to eventually do, or if you are teacher then you would dress up like a student. The third day was Crazy Day which included crazy clothes and / or crazy hair, and the last day was Blue and Gold Day when you dress up to cheer on the Dalat teams (you wear blue and yellow, our school colours).  The Grade Eights (my grade) were very excited because our color for Color Day was black!  We all felt bad for the grade that had to wear orange because either no one owns orange clothes, or orange looks bad on you.

Kate - Crazy Day (back view)

Kate dressed for Crazy Day (front view)

Mom dressed up as an elementary student on Swap Day

Kate during Career Day (a teacher)

Some of Hannah's friends and classmates dressed for Crazy Day (Hannah had "disappeared")

Mom's students who dressed up for Crazy Day

History-Making Day at Dalat - Monday, October 5, by Hannah, Garth, and Eileen

Hannah's Write-up:

"No school today.  It is a snow day!" I know that many of my friends long to hear these words occasionally, for without snow and other treacherous weather conditions we always have school in Canada. The beauty of a snow day is truly missed here in Malaysia, where it is always nice and sunny . . . well, almost always.

We do not have school today. The Head of School, Mr. Steinkamp, has cancelled this school day for everyone. The spontaneous day off was not caused by a bad storm nor was it caused by snow. Haze and smog has caused this day off. 

Every year in Indonesia, the farmers burn their fields so that they can become fertile and fresh for another year of farming. Every year the smog floats over from Indonesia to poor Malaysia, where Malaysians groan and crank up their air conditioning. People are seen wearing masks. This year has been particularly bad. School in Singapore was canceled a few days ago, when it got past 200 on the smog index.

There is a rating system that everyone goes by.  The local university measures the smog index.  So every day, our Head of School checks the ratings.  This weekend it got particularly bad.  The rating was at 180. That high of a rating can cause health problems for healthy people.  The smog is really sad, but it installs in me how important it is to have clear and clean air to breathe in.

So please pray for us in Southeast Asia.  The haze may seem bad for us here but there are places in Indonesia where the haze has been at 700 for more than two weeks and in other parts of Malaysia it has been as high as 900.  It is hazardous for a person's health to be exposed to unhealthy air.  Please pray for rain and wind to clear away the haze.

We could not see the mountains that are nearby our house.  Below is a picture of the mountains with our house in the foreground.

Eileen's View:

This was the first time ever in the history of Dalat that the doors of the school are closed due to air quality.  It was contemplated in 2005 and again in 2013 when those were particularly bad seasons for haze, but the school doors stayed open then.  There was pressure this week from the Malaysia Ministry of Education which did, in fact, call for all schools to be closed in Malaysia for 2 days (Dalat decided to go against that and only close for one day) especially as the public schools have no air conditioning or even sometimes windows.  Air conditioning makes a huge difference in filtering the air.  From what I've heard, the ironic thing is that while this burning is happening in Indonesia and the Indonesians are being blamed (and arrested), the land is actually owned by Malaysians and Singaporians.

Garth's View:

For the past few weeks they have been burning rain forests in Sumatra to make way for palm oil plantations. It has severely affected the air quality in Penang. It has become so bad that school is cancelled for this Monday.

Here are some pictures showing the air quality:

View of the water and a fishing boat

Visibility is limited

View of downtown Georgetown (the closest city to where we live) from Penang Hill 

View from Penang Hill without smog

Aimee Grace And Her Many Looks

Looking down on the building program at the school (one part will be Garth's new office and classroom)

Logos Hope Ship

This week Elizabeth (with her class) and I with my class (and some other classes from Dalat) visited the Logos Hope ship that is here for part of the month of September.   This ship, with its volunteers from over 50 nations, travels around the world with its bookstore (which has many Christian books).  The volunteers also do ministry, for example in a different part of Malaysia before they arrived here in Penang, they did some agricultural work and also visited a school for children with intellectual disabilities.

This is my class and a temporary teaching assistant for my class (in the red) on the dock by the ship

Going up the gangplank

Some Dalat students (none from my class) playing a song with an Indonesian instrument, alongside the Logos Hope mascot

Aimee's New Look

Last Monday, Aimee got braces.  She said they were quite painful for the first day or so, and her diet has had to change, for example no more carrots, apples, and corn.  As her mom, I lament the loss of veggie and fruit choices but the payoff will be straighter teeth :)  Here are before and after pictures.

 

Unusual Signs Around Town

Why are these women on a sign that advertises "boys"?

This hair cutting studio needs to check the spelling of their sign

At first glance it looked to me that this dress shop has a terrible name

What kind of person needs to be reminded to take their child?

Baby Dedication at Church

Today there was a baby dedication at our church - Baby Ezra.  Here is a picture of the family and of the cake that we shared as a church.

The boy in the red shirt is not in their family; he just wanted to be in the picture

It's a chocolate cake with green tea and coconut icing.  Cakes here are not as sweet as they are in Canada.  If you look closely you can see that the sheep on top as a bib with the baby's name on it.  The cake was really good, made by a lady at the church named TP!

When the baby is one month old, hard boiled eggs that are dyed red are given out.  Eggs mean fertility in the Chinese culture and red is the colour of good fortune and happiness.  (Though we live in Malaysia, our area has a very large Chinese population; our church is mostly made up of Chinese people)

My Favourite Dessert

This is cendol [pronounced 'chendull'], my (Eileen's) favourite Malaysian dessert.  It has shaved ice and sweetened condensed milk and these green things on top that have a taste like pudding but a texture like jello.  It costs about RM 2.60 (about 85 cents Canadian).  Sometimes I will have it for dinner.

This is the stall where I usually buy it from, about a 15 minute walk from our house.  It is run by a man (in the white shirt) and his wife

Shopping Just Outside the "Wet Market" (for ladies only)

The "wet market" is where we buy our fruits, veggies, eggs, and usually meat (chicken and pork).  This is the main entrance to the wet market that everyone passes by.  Just outside the entrance to the wet market some vendors set up various things for sale, for example shoes, used clothes, kitchenware, and special foods near holiday times.  In this first picture, can you tell what the lady in red (left side) is selling?

Take a closer look in this second picture:

Ah hah!  You guessed it:  Lingerie!  How would you like to shop for your "unmentionables" here?!

My First Day of Middle School, by Elizabeth

My first day of middle school was kind of boring because everything was an introduction so we did not really learn anything.  We just learned how to cover books. We need to cover our textbooks because if we spill something on it then we have the cover to protect the textbook.  We cover them with brown paper. When we go into middle school we get expandables and an agenda.  We got everything organized for our expandables and our agenda.  In middle school you get your own locker so it is a lot better but sadly, we have a lot of really heavy textbooks and we have to carry our expandables everywhere.  We have a 5 minute break between every class so that is nice but the lunch is not until 1:00.  Middle school is fun but scary.

Some things coming up are middle school activities.  They happen at the end of the school day every Friday. Some of the things we do in middle school activities are dodgeball, tag, and gross food eating challenges. Twice every school year the middle school goes on retreats. This past year they went to a water park and to a beach called Turtle Beach.  I have been to Turtle Beach with my family but I haven't been to the water park, which happens the first week of school.  The thing that is different than elementary school is that we get to go to the middle school / high school library and we get ping pong tables by our lockers.

Bottom Floor of our Townhouse

We have shown the other floors of our townhouse so now these are pictures of part of the bottom floor (ground level) of our main living area.  I forgot to take pictures of the dining room and living room and will try to do that soon.

Looking into the kitchen from the doorway of our eating area.  The kitchen used to be a forest green when we moved in but about a year later we changed it to this mustardy type of yellow - much better.  Our dining room and living room have a lot of red so the red and green was just a bit too much.  I probably wouldn't ever choose this kind of yellow in Canada but here, stronger colours are more suited for some reason

The rest of the kitchen, looking into our laundry room and out the back door.  We have a water filter on our tap.  We don't change the filter all that often so we're probably drinking straight tap water anyway, but the filter gives some peace of mind to some in our family for whom it matters

To the left of this picture is the entry to our dining room 

Laundry room with stacking washer and dryer.  We are very fortunate to have a dryer; most people don't, but we were able to purchase it from the people who used to live in our house.  Out our back door is an alley

Our gas cookstove

We call this our "oven room" because it has our oven in it and not much else.  No rooms have closets in our house so we have lots of wardrobes like this.  There is also a clothes line in this room because we hang up most things to dry, even though we do have a dryer (most things dry quickly because it is so hot all the time).  This small room is actually an "amah" room.  An amah is a housekeeper and / or a person who takes care of children and they would have this room off the kitchen to live in.  It would be very tight to fit a bed and wardrobe in here


The back of our townhouse - laundry room to the right and oven room to the left on the bottom floor.  Second floor has Aimee and Kate's bedroom window on the right and Hannah and Elizabeth's window and tiny balcony on the left.  Upper floor has the master ensuite tiny window on the right and guest bedroom and tiny balcony on the left.  The balconies are so small they would not even fit a lawn chair.  To get onto the balcony you have to climb out the window


The back alley.  Our townhouse is almost halfway up on the left.  I am not sure where the water comes from that flows in the gutters down both sides of the alley; I don't actually want to know (it might be sink water or laundry water) but at least with these gutters it doesn't smell (unlike some other ones in our neighbourhood)