Orientation: Movie Night

We wanted to share more with you about our IICS orientation and decided that it would be best to break it up into several posts. Let's start with day one. After driving for 13 hours on Saturday (with a small detour through Topeka to check out the Kansas state capital), we arrived at our hotel in Kansas City ready for some sleep.

Orientation started bright and early Sunday morning at 8:30 am with worship time and a chance to get to know each other. This was followed by Daryl McCarthy (IICS President) sharing the mission and vision of IICS (see below) and Teri McCarthy (IICS Writer-In-Residence) discussing culture shock and teaching us this mantra, "It's not good, it's not bad, it's just different." There were several other talks about raising support and earning the right to be heard, but the highlight of the day was Movie Night after dinner.

In order to help demonstrate the cultural immersion of an American in a foreign culture, we watched the 1956 film, The Teahouse of the August Moon, starring Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford. It is about American soldiers trying to help rebuild Japanese towns after WWII. We were initially skeptical, but it turned out to be an excellent film, with some great cultural lessons and a lot of great comedy, particularly the line "Socks up, Boss!" Highly recommend it! It also left me curious to know how good Marlon Brando's Japanese really is. Great way to end our first day, although we were definitely ready for some more sleep.

Their vision is that someday every university student in the world will have at least one instructor who will articulate and demonstrate the love and lordship of Jesus Christ for them.

Their mission is to bring glory to God and impact the world by developing godly leaders for every sector of society - government, business, home, church, the arts, law, the sciences, education - as we provide key universities and academic institutions with educational services and Christian faculty who teach and live in such a way as to draw others to faith and transformation in Christ.