So here's the latest from the Eastern edge of Asia. Most of you heard about my escape from the burning building on Monday. What we hesitated to say anything about because it was so much worse than that is that Eileen got fired the same day two hours before the big adventure began.
So if you're ever wondering labor laws don't exist here. Two weeks before her supervisor told her she was excellent in the class and that her daily plans were the most organized he has seen. She missed a few days of school because she was sick and lost her voice. Last Thursday her supervisor sat her down to say her Korean manager (who has a reputation for being nasty when she chooses) didn't like that she sits from time to time to rest her knee when she's teaching. Monday morning she came in and Tim her manager told her that she was done.
It's so bizarre that we have to say God had this planned from the beginning. We spent a week being very angry and confused never mind dealing with the tension of escaping the fire. Terry called us from home which was good timing for encouragement. Truly after only a week we feel like God is still looking after us and this is just part of the path he has us walking on. I didn't think we were even capable of getting over something like this so quickly. It was interesting that in the sermon on Sunday the pastor spoke about tests of faith and mentioned that God already knows how we will respond to trials. It is also important for us to see the growth that God has already gained inside us by how we respond to these tests.
Don't get me wrong there are still negative emotions there under the surface waiting to bust through but we feel grace to work through them and preserver.
PART II - ONE DAY LATER....
So this is the next day and Eileen left me a note at work today that she would not be home until later. When she got home she informed me that she had been teaching for 3 hours today and before she left for the day she took the job. It sounds fantastic because she teaches 3 hours per day and makes 3/4 of my 8 hour wages. They have a special teachers chair at the front of all the classrooms and they couldn't care less if she sits the whole day while teaching. At the end of Feb she could go full time but the part time pays better so we will see what she does then.
Wow, did we just learn to believe that God has plans even when its very painful in the short term. I wish all of life's lessons worked themselves out this quickly. I know so many people were praying for us so thank you all for your support from afar. We are just feeling very blessed.
One thought that Eileen and I held onto for the last 9 days is that Eileen's Korean manager doesn't have any authority that did not come from God. She may not know this but whether she decides to use her authority for good or evil her power has always rested with a higher authority.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Monday, January 7, 2008
Korean fire trap
Wow what a day! My school was destroyed by fire yesterday and so today there is no school today. Just what I always wanted as a kid but yesterday when it was happening I wasn't happy about it one bit. Wow Korean fire safety is just not like it is at home.
I was teaching my third period on the 8th floor where our school is when the class heard a fire alarm go off in another building. There was nothing happening on our floor so I spent some time trying to keep the kids focused until they saw the smoke through the door window. I turned to see a thick black smoke filling the hall. I opened the door to see where it was coming from and it seemed to be blocking our exit to the main stairs.
With the door open for two seconds the classroom filled with choking smoke and I had to tell my ten 7 and 8 year olds to get down to the floor. At this point they lost it a little bit and there was some crying. They wouldn't come to the door either so I had to spend a few precious seconds calming them down and gathering them.
This was really the scary point. I'm in the class with 10 students and I really had no idea what the safe thing to do was. I didn't know for sure where the fire was coming from. Every second that the classroom door was open so that I could try to discover what was going on, filled the class with blankets of choking smoke. Someone ran past my room away from the main stairs to the staffroom and I decided that was the safe way out. As I opened the door one of the kids Dorothy, bolted into the cloud of smoke towards the main stairs. I caught her at the last second and pointed her with the rest of the class however I became fearful that another one had run that way but I had missed them.
Down the hall in the staffroom the air was already thick with this awful tarry smoke and there were 5 other teachers who had been on their spare when the fire began. Of course the window to the fire escape which was only installed last March was bolted shut. You may not know this but double glazed windows are extremely hard to break. Two female teachers were pounding the window with a coat rack that was standing there but the window wasn't breaking. At this point several of my students I'm crouched with on the ground start to lose it again.
Finally the window breaks but they have to break away all the edges so no one gets cut. Clare, one of the teachers cut her hand pretty bad trying to get the glass out. So finally we have an opening and we started handing the 10 kids onto a metal stairway that was bolted to the side of our 10 story building. On the platform is shattered glass everywhere and lots of blood from Clare's hand. What's interesting is that our Korean builders they thought that the stairs should go at least to the 5th floor and that would probably be enough. You should stand at the fifth floor sometimes and look down. It's a long way. So at the 5th floor we reenter the burning building to get to the main stairway. Fortunately there is only smoke on this floor coming down from the 8th.
By the grace of God I was the only class on that floor that day. The really providence was that our heat was not working last week on our floor so we moved most of the classrooms to another floor. This Monday we just kept using the other floors out of habit really because it wasn't that cold at all. We are sure it would not have been easy to escape from the other side of our floor as the smoke was so toxic. So by the grace of God no one was seriously hurt except Clare at the window but it could very easily have gone the other way. It's scary how dizzy and sick that smoke makes you in just a very few seconds.
So as for my students one of them cut his hand on the glass. Most had some blood splattered on their clothes from brushing the window or their friend. We spent the next hour and a half watching thick black smoke billow out of the building as the firefighters smashed out one big classroom window after another. Apparently the 8th floor is destroyed. The buses finally took the kids home. Eileen teaches across the street so those teachers finished their next class an then looked out the window to find that half the school had been on fire. I am going back to school today at 2:00 to see where I will be teaching starting tomorrow.
I realize that in the end nothing really went wrong despite the fact that there were no fire alarms, no sprinklers, no fire evacuation plans at all and the fire escape was shoddy and bolted shut. However, I still have this strange feeling of disaster. Now I might have made fun of someone else saying this before but I feel like something did go wrong even though it didn't. I guess my delicate little feelings were a little traumatized but don't worry about me I'm sure I'll get better. Well, I have to go and find out where my school is moving to tomorrow.
Here's a little video of the floor after the fire and my escape route.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbltckSqccE
Here's the building on fire. You can see the fire escape on the left.
Building after the fire. Notice where the fire escape stops. We were one floor from the top.
This is 15 feet behind the white board I was writting on.
One of our classrooms
These classes were moved to a different floor that day
This is where I was teaching class as the building was burning behind us (No smoke alarms)
I was teaching my third period on the 8th floor where our school is when the class heard a fire alarm go off in another building. There was nothing happening on our floor so I spent some time trying to keep the kids focused until they saw the smoke through the door window. I turned to see a thick black smoke filling the hall. I opened the door to see where it was coming from and it seemed to be blocking our exit to the main stairs.
With the door open for two seconds the classroom filled with choking smoke and I had to tell my ten 7 and 8 year olds to get down to the floor. At this point they lost it a little bit and there was some crying. They wouldn't come to the door either so I had to spend a few precious seconds calming them down and gathering them.
This was really the scary point. I'm in the class with 10 students and I really had no idea what the safe thing to do was. I didn't know for sure where the fire was coming from. Every second that the classroom door was open so that I could try to discover what was going on, filled the class with blankets of choking smoke. Someone ran past my room away from the main stairs to the staffroom and I decided that was the safe way out. As I opened the door one of the kids Dorothy, bolted into the cloud of smoke towards the main stairs. I caught her at the last second and pointed her with the rest of the class however I became fearful that another one had run that way but I had missed them.
Down the hall in the staffroom the air was already thick with this awful tarry smoke and there were 5 other teachers who had been on their spare when the fire began. Of course the window to the fire escape which was only installed last March was bolted shut. You may not know this but double glazed windows are extremely hard to break. Two female teachers were pounding the window with a coat rack that was standing there but the window wasn't breaking. At this point several of my students I'm crouched with on the ground start to lose it again.
Finally the window breaks but they have to break away all the edges so no one gets cut. Clare, one of the teachers cut her hand pretty bad trying to get the glass out. So finally we have an opening and we started handing the 10 kids onto a metal stairway that was bolted to the side of our 10 story building. On the platform is shattered glass everywhere and lots of blood from Clare's hand. What's interesting is that our Korean builders they thought that the stairs should go at least to the 5th floor and that would probably be enough. You should stand at the fifth floor sometimes and look down. It's a long way. So at the 5th floor we reenter the burning building to get to the main stairway. Fortunately there is only smoke on this floor coming down from the 8th.
By the grace of God I was the only class on that floor that day. The really providence was that our heat was not working last week on our floor so we moved most of the classrooms to another floor. This Monday we just kept using the other floors out of habit really because it wasn't that cold at all. We are sure it would not have been easy to escape from the other side of our floor as the smoke was so toxic. So by the grace of God no one was seriously hurt except Clare at the window but it could very easily have gone the other way. It's scary how dizzy and sick that smoke makes you in just a very few seconds.
So as for my students one of them cut his hand on the glass. Most had some blood splattered on their clothes from brushing the window or their friend. We spent the next hour and a half watching thick black smoke billow out of the building as the firefighters smashed out one big classroom window after another. Apparently the 8th floor is destroyed. The buses finally took the kids home. Eileen teaches across the street so those teachers finished their next class an then looked out the window to find that half the school had been on fire. I am going back to school today at 2:00 to see where I will be teaching starting tomorrow.
I realize that in the end nothing really went wrong despite the fact that there were no fire alarms, no sprinklers, no fire evacuation plans at all and the fire escape was shoddy and bolted shut. However, I still have this strange feeling of disaster. Now I might have made fun of someone else saying this before but I feel like something did go wrong even though it didn't. I guess my delicate little feelings were a little traumatized but don't worry about me I'm sure I'll get better. Well, I have to go and find out where my school is moving to tomorrow.
Here's a little video of the floor after the fire and my escape route.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbltckSqccE
Here's the building on fire. You can see the fire escape on the left.
Building after the fire. Notice where the fire escape stops. We were one floor from the top.
This is 15 feet behind the white board I was writting on.
One of our classrooms
These classes were moved to a different floor that day
This is where I was teaching class as the building was burning behind us (No smoke alarms)
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