In three years, we have fixed up four houses and are our own little village inside the village. The Cottage, where Patrick’s family lives; the Main House, which is still mostly our family; and the Pink House, attached to the Main House by a hallway, where my mother and other helpers live. Our latest rental is the Stone House, a squat house built with one-foot-square granite blocks that is twenty meters along a path behind the Main House. We enclosed the patio, which is now our schoolroom—a big improvement on the wooden shack behind the temple.
As we fix up more houses, more Family members come to fill them. Ching-Ching moves here with her father, Zacky Star, and his two wives, Auntie Hope, a kind, round, American Jewish woman with long, straight black hair to her bottom and a big nose, and Auntie Kat, one of the first Chinese disciples who joined in Hong Kong. She has a cheery smile with chipmunk cheeks and freckles. They have five daughters and one son, with Ching-Ching the oldest (a year younger than me). Patrick and I are thrilled to have more kids our age.
While we still mostly live with our own families, during the day the children are put into age groups and cared for by one or two caregivers per group. This frees the parents to do their assigned work for the community.
I’ve never bothered to keep track of all the aunties and uncles; even before moving to the Farm, they have been coming and going. Some stay for three months, six months, a year, depending on how many times they can get their tourist visas renewed and whether they feel “called” to a new mission field. We fit them into rooms as tightly as we can. Sometimes a family of two adults and two kids might sleep in a ten-square-foot room.
Our lifestyle has greatly improved since we dug a sewer pit and built a tiled indoor bathroom onto the Main House with a sit-down toilet and separate shower. We used our connections with the Portuguese officials to get the city government to pave the main road coming into the village, plant electric poles, and hook us up to proper metered electricity, so we will only have to use the noisy generator for backup.
My mother is relieved, as she won’t have to carry car batteries back and forth to power the computers she uses to edit the Mo Letters. Since Hong Kong had the latest pagers, cell phones, and laptops made in Japan and India long before they were available in the US, she always had the first Apple, IBM, and NEC personal computers.
We’ve cemented the pathways connecting all the houses, planted flowers along the borders, and even pestered the city officials until they reluctantly added our village to the weekly municipal garbage collection route. It’s quite a different place from when we moved in a few years ago, and the Chinese villagers express their appreciation for how we’ve improved their standard of living by dropping off small gifts of food.
And my father finally found a solution to our poisonous-snake problem. Though so far, God has protected us and no one has been bitten, the snakes have been showing up when we least expect them—dropping from the roof or nestling into our beds. My father brings in three dump trucks’ worth of sharp-cut gravel rocks and spreads a layer of granite around each of the houses at least eight feet wide. He figures out that the snakes don’t like slithering across the sharp rock edges with their soft underbellies. Though some of the aunties and uncles shake their heads, the plan works. No longer do we have to do nightly cobra bed checks.
With all the new families, there are more kids, so school has changed as well. We now have three classes: older children, younger children, and nursery.
Nestled on Auntie Hope’s motherly lap, I focus on sounding out words and am not embarrassed to make mistakes when I read. It took me longer to learn than many of the other kids, but eventually it clicked, thanks to help from Auntie Hope. Now I speed through multiple Peter and Jane readers in a sitting and begin reading the Kidz True Komics and Picture Bible for myself, thrilled with the new way to entertain myself during our boring naptimes.
A few of the adults take turns teaching us for a couple of hours each morning after our two hours of Devotions. They don’t need any teacher training; they just read from the Childcare Handbook curriculum or copy out problems on the blackboard. Family Care, under Auntie Sara Davidito and Mama Maria, released the Childcare Handbook in 1982. Now, parents don’t need to use System educational materials and are no longer allowed to attend outside Christian schools. At almost seven hundred pages, the educational volume has everything Grandpa thinks a child needs for a Godly education on the mission field. One chapter has the history of the world, starting with Creation. Another is math up to multiplication tables and division, plus a little geometry for the boys who will need it for carpentry. Science and biology are another chapter, also starting with Creation, including a long section on debunking the evil lie of evolution. My complaint is that new teachers always start at the beginning, so we’ve done the first part a dozen times without getting to the end.
The opening page sums up what our leaders deem most important for us to know. Grandpa writes, “I consider for our children right now, the best education you can possibly get is in the Word, in the Bible and in the Mo Letters. As long as they can read and write and figure the 3 Rs, Reading, Riting and Rithmetic. The best education they can get is an education in the Word and faith and survival and mobility and preaching the Gospel, right now!”
The preface continues with an explanation as to why we have taken this view: “We are not against education, at least not our kind! . . . A little of the world’s education sometimes can help in a few instances where you deal with the world and meet the System on its own grounds. How much formal education should we give our children to enable them to live in our present-day society? Our children need only what is known as basic education up to 6th grade education.”
Grandpa says our lessons should always be based in something useful to serving God. We practice our letters and grammar by writing witnessing letters to the Sheep who write into our radio show or who we have met while out witnessing. Our Chinese teacher, Auntie Kat, writes witnessing lines on the chalkboard in Cantonese or the lines to Family songs translated into Cantonese for us to memorize.
More important than any scholastics is our spiritual education.
“Turn your toes out more. No, arms higher. Your thighs are supposed to be turning, too. Straighten your knees. Straighten your elbows, but curve them slightly.” My mother is trying to teach me ballet, but nothing I do is right.