Twenty Minutes' Tuition

I parked my car in front of Ps Albert's house, opened the entrance gate and walked into the empty garage. Pastor was not around as usual. Since his wife Hanny had got a job offer from the kindergarten under Calvary Life Assembly (CLA), only the children were staying at home at that hour.

"Sarah, tuition!" She unlocked the front door for me, not excited at all to see my smiling face.

"Hi, Mark! Hi, Farah! Hi, John!" I also greeted Sarah's other siblings who were surfing on the laptop, lying on the sofa and watching television respectively.

"Hi!" They answered back.

I asked Sarah, "Any homework?" This semester, since I had classes in town on Tuesday mornings, I always went to their house to help Standard-Five Sarah with her homework in the afternoon. That day, I arrived a bit late because I had spent almost two hours at the "Su Fes" bookstore.

"A little. Farah also needs your help in the mathematics."

Farah got up and followed me to the dining table with her exercise book. She was unable to do her Form-Four homework alone, for she had missed a lesson in geometry when she went for a sports event.

Not having contact with angles and shapes for more than ten years did not prevent me from recalling the formula fast with the revision of Farah's text book. I used to excel in this subject in school and I still enjoyed solving mathematical problems.

It was less than half an hour when my cell phone rang. It was an unknown number.

"Hello, Sister Lee Sah!"

I did not recognize the male voice. "Yes, speaking. Who are you?"

"I'm Wilson. I'm using my mum's cell phone."

It was the friendly boy that I had known last year at the jumble sale for the Calvary Care Home (CCH). Since then, I realized that he was from the CLA traffic roster. On Sunday mornings, as soon as he saw me driving into the church compound, he would approach me to chat for awhile.

"Hello, Wilson! Is there anything?"

"Can you come to the Care Home? I don't know how to do my two exercises in Chinese."

"I'm helping Ps Albert's daughters here. We have just started. And I have a class to attend at eight o'clock later. If you had called me earlier, I could have arranged..."

"But I really need your help."

"OK then, I'll go there at around seven. But I don't know where the care home is."

"Ps Albert knows. It's not far from their house."

"I'll try to find out. If I have any problem, I'll call you back."

"My mum is leaving soon. I give you the fixed phone number here... I wait for you!"

"Bye! See you later."

It was already 6pm. I had not even settled a quarter of the exercise with Farah. When we finally finished, it was 7.15pm. Ps Albert and Hanny were still not back.

I was in a dilemma. Shall I continue with Sarah or start my car engine again to rush to the care home?

The Spirit of God helped me to make my choice very fast by reminding me, "Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble..." (James 1:27 NKJV)

Wasn't Wilson's homework in Chinese a trouble to him? He was not really an orphan but I knew that most of the time he was without his parents' care and love like other boys in the care home. Sarah, no matter how late she had to wait for his parents to be home, would not feel as neglected.

So, I invited Farah, who had followed her parents to CCH for the celebration of its anniversary in January, to go with me with my car. At first she was unwilling. She just wanted to indicate orally the shortcuts.

"I've just helped you with your homework. Now a boy in the care home also needs my help. If you don't come with me, I might not find my way there."

Finally, she agreed to be my guide. Even with her presence in the car, we still got lost for a couple of minutes before reaching our destination.

"Sorry, Wilson! I can only stay here for twenty minutes."

He welcomed us with a broader grin than mine.

The first exercise was writing a formal letter while the second one was changing a dialogue into a paragraph by using the vocabulary of the indirect speech. My Chinese educational background enabled me to give him some guidelines.

Actually there was a third exercise to submit the next day. But I would not have enough time to understand the lesson first before I could help him. There was no disappointment at all in Wilson's eyes. He would just copy from his classmate when he went to school the next morning.

"Now I know where you live, I'll try to come here more often to teach you boys Chinese, OK!"

Before we left, I said hi to another volunteer Albert P, whose name was like the one of Farah's father, in another big room with other boys. This brother in Christ had been giving his love and time there. I made up my mind that I would give much more than my twenty minutes again to these CCH children.