Barbara Diggs at NIM

On March 1, I met Barbara Diggs at Pudong Airport in Shanghai, for her two-week volunteer adventure at Nanjing Institute of Meteorology, my old school north of the Yangzi River, outside of Nanjing. We went to church at Muen Church in Shanghai on Sunday and then went to Nanjing, in the rain. It rained much of the time she was here, though fortunately not on the middle weekend. She stayed in small hotel on campus and taught classes every day for a variety of students. The school really appreciated her generosity and enthusiasm. Barbara teaches ESL (English as a Second Language) at Carson-Newman College, a Baptist college in Jefferson City, Tennessee. She has traveled widely overseas, from Africa to Russia. This was her first trip to China. Hopefully, it won't be her last.

On the middle weekend, she came to town and we went to the Amity Printing Company, where Bibles for China are printed. A few months ago, they celebrated printing the 30 millionth Bible since the plant was established.

It's not as if we spent all our time in McDonalds, but we were in three different ones. Barbara enjoyed making friends with people wherever we went.

We did some shopping on Saturday, at the Confucius Temple area, where the largest number of shops with traditional Chinese arts and crafts are to be found. We met other Baptist friends at a western-style restaurant, and went to church on Sunday. Then, she went back out to NIM for another week of teaching.

I went out on Tuesday of the second week and took these photos in one of the classrooms. Among the activities was to look at and discuss photos, which everyone enjoyed.

On Friday, March 14, we took a bus to Shanghai. This was a hotel-to-hotel bus, leaving from downtown Nanjing and going all the way to Pudong in Shanghai. It rained all the way, which made the trip take longer than it might have. After we got off the bus, we still had to take a taxi to our hotel. We were standing in drizzling rain, with all our luggage, watching taxis go by full, when two policemen came along riding bicycles. They asked if we were waiting for a taxi and, upon learning that we were, they got off their bicycles and commandeered the next empty taxi. I wanted to take a photo of the police bicycles, painted white and black, with the word "Police" stamped on an upright bar. But, we were surely grateful for their help.

Barbara left on Saturday morning. It was a generous thing she did, to take a week of vacation and her spring break, to pay her own way to China to teach for two weeks to give Chinese college students oral practice.