April Daydream

December 19, 2021

Swedish Wafers

This is a traditional family Christmas treat in the Harward household. It is the ultimate in comfort food with the most basic (if not particularly healthy) ingredients. Enjoy them with your family during the holiday season!

Cookie:

1 cup soft butter

2 cups sifted flour

1/3 cup heavy cream

Combine butter, flour & cream. Mix until balls form. roll out on flowered surface. Cut into 2" rounds. Coat with white sugar. Place on cookie sheet & prick 3 times with a fork to create a grid pattern. Bake at 425 degrees for 7-8 minutes. The cookies should be very light. Do not brown them.

Frosting:

1/3 cup butter (soft)

2 cups powdered sugar

1 tsp. vanilla

Green and Red food coloring

Mix butter, sugar & vanilla. (This takes a while to thoroughly mix.) Add red food coloring to half and green food coloring to the rest.

Sandwich frosting between two cookies. (It ususally takes 2-3 batches of frosting per batch of dough.) Serve.

Merry Christmas!

February 29, 2020

I'm still here!

What an eventful year it's been! I took a long break from Facebook but I failed in my attempt to stay in better contact with the people who love me. I am very sorry. It has occurred to me that there are some people who are natural hubs; you know, the ones that seem to pick up and disseminate information as naturally as breathing, who have hundreds of real life friends and thousands of Facebook connections, and who seem to gracefully make others feel a part and valued. I so admire those people. Our lives are so much drearier without them. I, however, am not one of them. So, I write this now, like Sting's "message in a bottle," hoping that it reaches those hubs in my life.

Seoul has been a much better situation for me. I have been able to enroll in Korean classes, I have other foreign co-workers, and my students are ridiculously talented. My kindergartners are working at a 1-3 grade level through the course of the school year. This is amazing to me! As you might expect, it does create some interesting challenges. While their command of English is excellent, developmentally they are still pre-primary school. They sometimes have assignments in books that are impossible for them to comprehend, not because their English is inadequate but because they haven't developed enough cognitively to understand the parameters of the assignment. The best illustration of this was an assignment where they had to pretend they were Abraham Lincoln and write a letter to another famous person explaining something. I forget what. Their problem wasn't that they didn't know who Abraham Lincoln was or the person to whom he was writing. They also had no problem with the topic of the letter. Their challenge was pretending to be a specific person. Ask them to pretend to be an astronaut or a singer or a doctor and they have no problem. Ask them to be Abraham Lincoln and write a letter AS Abraham Lincoln and they just look at you like you are speaking Pig Latin. It has been such an enlightening experience!

Unfortunately, this school year did not end on the most satisfying of notes. With the spread of the Corona virus, the schedule was necessarily altered for the safety of the students and staff at our school. We were unable to hold our yearly graduation activities and say goodbye to our students properly before they enter elementary school. The teachers were also sent home for Spring Break, a time when we were supposed to be planning for the new school year. We should be returning on March 4th to do some planning and set up before the students come on the 9th. I will still be teaching the same grade in the same classroom, which makes me happy. I have a great co-teacher who will be teaching with me. I will miss my students and my former co-teacher but I am hopeful that we will have a great new year!

I am healthy and doing well! I know many of you have heard all kinds of sensational reports about the situation here in Korea. I can only imaging the disturbing images that you see on the news. Mostly, life is going on as before. Korea is full of people who are very aware of their health. The great increase of numbers in cases reported are more likely, in my opinion, to be due to the fact that nobody is trying to ride out their illness on their own. In the US, we have a tendency to wait until we are truly suffering from our illnesses before we see a doctor or go to the emergency room. In Korea, they go to the doctor at the first sign in hopes of heading it off before it becomes a full blown case of something nasty. That is encouraging to me. It means that the people who have contracted the disease are seeing professionals at the beginning of their illness and limiting the number of people with whom they come in contact. For most Koreans, this is how they deal with illness all the time. The masks may be in short supply right now but many people have their own supply at home. Don't worry.

This Fast Sunday, while we will be having church services in our homes, we are also focusing on those who are suffering and praying for a quick end to the disease's spread. If you feel the desire and don't know what you can do to help, please consider joining the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in fasting and prayer. Each first Sunday of the month, for those who are unaware, the members of the church fast for two meals and donate the money they would have spent on those meals for the support of the poor and for emergency situations such as this. All prayers for the people here are greatly appreciated.

Spring is on the way! I hope that you are enjoying the beginning of a new season. I love and miss you all. Happy March!

February 20, 2019

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

I'm counting the days until I move to Seoul. I am looking forward to being in a hub as opposed to being....well, definately not a hub. I went home at the end of January and the beginning of February. The Family is moving to the Syracuse are in Northern Utah. Thank heaven that Rachel and Collin are good and selling things! We had a lot of stuff and I got sick about two days in to my trip. But it's less depressing to be sick with people around than sick all by yourself, even if you just want to be alone and miserable all by yourself.

I am finishing up my contract at Youngbuk Elementary. I have 4th , 5th, and 6th graders this week. Luckily the numbers are small. After all, it's just me and my bad Korean teaching the class and them with their broken English trying really hard to understand what I ask them to do. They are good kids, though, so it should be fun.

There are many people that I will miss here: my students and friends from church and school. Hopefully, we will all meet again.

I was watching the movie Hugo with my students yesterday and there was a very thought provoking part that I had forgotten from when I first watched it. Hugo likes machines and is repairing an automaton left by his father. He mentions that machines don't come with extra parts. They always only have all the parts that they need. He says that he imagines the world is just a giant machine and if we are here and apart of this machine then there must be a reason. I was really touched by that because it often feels to me like my reason is a mystery. Sometimes we understand the reason that we are here and sometimes we lose touch with that knowlege. So, it was a help to me to be reminded.

Love you all! Spring is coming! Yahoo!

December 18, 2018

April Updates: December 2018

My first attempt at an update was less than successful. That's okay. What doesn't kill you....if at first you don't succeed...make it work!

So, it's been three (almost) years since I moved to Korea and it's time for a change. I've been living in Uncheon since I came here. Uncheon is a small town in the north of South Korea.

Google Map of My Places

The red flag is my house. The star on Uijeongbu is where I go to church about 45 minutes away by car. The northern-most Seoul star is the stake center. The southern-most Seoul star is my new position. Woohoo! (The green Seoul flag is my dentist.)

Uncheon is very rural and mostly quiet. I say, "mostly" because we are very close to several military bases. That makes for some noisy neighbors.;)

There isn't much here although there are plans for a theater and other entertainment venues in the next 5-10 years. There are a lot of cafes and 노래방 (noraebang or karaoke) as well as some PC rooms. I can only go anywhere by bus and that takes a bit of planning because everything is a fair drive away.

I am the only caucasian around town. There are very few foreigners here of any kind. But it's beautiful up here. We are in the tops of their mountains and the colors in fall are lovely. Early summer is amazing. Winter is a beast. Spring is a relief. The air and water are clean and the people are mostly friendly if not very outgoing. In short, beautiful but excruciatingly lonely.

But God provides and next year I am looking forward to moving to the south. I'll be working in Gangnam. You might be familiar with the song, "Gangnam Style." That's the one. It is an affluet area south of the Han river. The subway is my friend. I will be close to the temple and all kinds of city conveniences.

I will be working in an English pre-school. I already know some of the teachers who work there. This can only be an improvement on knowing no one. I'll be able to interact with a lot more people. I can't tell you how exciting it is! I will have about 20 students, one class. Currently, I have 40 minute class sessions with 10 classes twice a week. Each class has about 20-24 students so I haven't learned more than a dozen names.

I'm looking forward to being able to teach children games in English, sing songs and have fun with them. Most of my current students are awesome but when the sixth graders get in a group...wow! Parents, I salute you! As they say in Korea: 화이팅!

Finally, as we come into the Christmas season, I just wanted to say, "thank you" for thinking of me. Thank you for your prayers and your love. I know there's a plan for each of us. I know each of us have our own tailor-made challenges. But I also know that everything changes. It's just a matter of time.

I hope you know that I think of you. I want you to know that I hope you are well. I hope your families are healthy and happy. I hope you are all growing together, strongly!

Celebrating the holidays with your family is a joy. Take the time to enjoy each other's company. I hope you laugh together a lot!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
All my love,
April
P.S. I'll be in Utah from January 23rd to February 6th. If anyone wants to get together drop me a line!