The ACTS-es Students
Happy Belated Mid Autumn! Well, it might be for us Chinese who celebrate according to the lunar calender, but Autumn reaches its height on the Autumnal Equinox Day on Friday. Time to switch your watches syncronizing it with the day light saving time for those applicable. I do hope you had the time and opportunity to admire the fullness of the moon in its beauty for the past few nights. I know I did on my evening walks.
School is running its 3rd week of classes this week. Technically, I think I am settling into its rhythm soon. There is loads to do. Adding to the schedule I mentioned the last time, I have loads of reading to be done, book reports and a weekly meeting to discuss my graduation thesis with Dr. Franklin.
Let’s not talk about my busy life. As promised, I would like to share about the current ACTS-es Program. Well, as most of you should have known by now, ACTS-es is the name of my course (Asian Christian Theological Studies for English Speakers). we had our first batch of graudates in July. Since then, we have been missing the presence of Mervin, Felimon, Christian, Rathieshan, and Niroshan.
This year we have a huge batch of new students, and they represent the world in a whole pretty well. We have 1 from the European continent, 3 Africans, 2 Indians, 1 Nepali, and 1 American. We are also having with us 2 exchange students on campus. Jacob is a movie major from BIOLA (the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), he will be with us for a semester, and Ben who is from Kentucky Christian University. Ben will be with us for a year. So, back to the ACTS-es Freshmen. We are going to have a welcome party for them thrown by the Welcoming Committee of the Student Council this evening, so, allow me to recap and give you a short introduction about these people.
Matthias Sebastian Krammel is from Germany. I met him once before in March this year during my intensive coure with Dr. Gustafson. We even had lunch together then, with Mervin and Rajiv. Matthias is interested in becoming a missionary in Japan and his requirement to do so was to be sent to us.
John Ekpangi Ewule and George Nya are from Cameroon, and Hawaji-imam Raphael Hart is from Nigeria. John is a kind guy about the age of 35 and his fellow countryman, George, on the other hand is super passionate about soccer. Hawaji-imam is 1.97m tall and his name means "God is love." Cool, eh?
Theim Ngaih Lhing Gangte aka BoiNu and Shilsila Devi Pukhram are from the Northeastern part of India. (yeah, I know our body of ACTS-es students has many students from that area and adding to the TCU population of South Asians). Boinu’s actual name sound pretty Chinese- Theim Ngaih Lhing… She and I were assigned to the same church. She is very interesting and sporting. Both of us are built quite the same. yay! I am not the biggest sized ACTS-es gal now. I have competition in height from her too. Shilsila, on the other hand, has a small frame and is very soft-spoken. One word to describe her, CUTE!
Sunil Pradan is from Nepal. An interesting character I must say. I wonder whether all Nepalis are that fun.
William Matthew Johnson is from America. All i can say about this guy is that he is very very well brought up, and he loves to cook!
Well, I know the descriptions that I gave are not very helpful. I will try to be more sociable and find out more about them. We had a photo taking session 2 Fridays ago for the new ACTS-es brouchure. I must say that we are an interesting group. We had tonnes of fun having our pictures taken and some of us even had dun taking pictures of the photographer in his poses and positions to take the best pictures of us. We had a blast.
As for the rest of the ACTS-es students, a brief summary is as follows.
Sophomores (2nd Years)-
Mark Christopher Beling [Sri Lanka], Seth Mbrego [Zimbabwe], Joey and Ching Boi [Northeast India]
Juniors (3rd Years)
Ashesh Acharya [Nepal], Sang, Rebecca Tombing, AnnDee [Northeast India], and Ruth Bobbie Karunia [Indonesia]
Seniors (4th Years)
Rajiv Mattu Kumar [Punjab, North India], Rose Mary Puro, Lalmasawma and Jewel [Northeast India], Eugene Watanabe [USA] and yours truly.
I am trying to upload some pictures online that you may have a look to match the faces to the names that I mention ever so often. It is still under progress but do have a look if you have the time. You can check them out on my blog photo album. Well, that’s all for now. I will write again soon. Till then, stay in the pink of health and be good.
