“You awake?” “Yup.” “You?” “Yup.”

It was 1:00 in the morning of our first night in Hong Kong and the jet lag and the jitters of being in a different hemisphere conspired to wake us both up in the middle of the night. Julie and I lay in bed chatting about all that had transpired in the last 24 hours and all that needed to be done in the days ahead. It became pretty evident that Julie was feeling a little overwhelmed. The school was gracious enough to stock the apartment with some food (cocktail wieners, really?). But it was only enough to get us through lunch the next day and Julie had no idea where the grocery store was.

We would have settled for a convenience store, but we didn’t even know where that was. And we’d heard a rumor about an IKEA in town, but we had no clue where that was? And how do you get all your stuff home anyways? On the subway? And let’s not even talk about the need for school uniforms. Does Annika really need to have her school uniform for Monday morning’s orientation?

So many questions, and no answers.

So we prayed. Very specific prayers. Right then. In bed. At 2:00 in morning.

And then we both managed to get a few more hours of sleep.

All four of us were up before 5:00 a.m. (have I mentioned the jet lag?) and were busy unpacking and getting settled into our new apartment. At 6:50 we heard what sounded like a knock on our door. None us moved. Instead, we looked at each other as if to ask, did someone just knock on our door at 6:50? In the morning? Sure enough, there it was again. We opened our apartment door and there stood Ruth. Of course, we didn’t know it was Ruth yet. But we were about to find out.

Ruth is our across-the-hall neighbor. Like me, she’s a first-year teacher and is here with her husband and two boys. While new to the school, she and her family have lived in both mainland China and Hong Kong previously. For the next 25 minutes she talked non-stop. She not only answered all the questions we had been wondering about (The Park and Shop is one subway stop south), she answered questions we didn’t even know we had.

To be honest, it was a little like drinking from a fire hose. We only caught about twenty percent of the information she was giving us (have I mentioned the jet lag?), but knowing that answers to all of our current and future question were 10 feet across the hall, gave both of us -particularly Julie- a tremendous sense of peace.

When Ruth pulled the door shut behind her, the first words out of Julie’s mouth were “Thank you, Jesus.”

Over the next two days, Ruth, her husband Tony, and their two boys, quite literally took us by the hand and took us shopping all over our little corner of Hong Kong helping us get all the things we needed to make it through the week.

Now granted, Ruth has been living in Shatin a little longer than we have, but she is one of those people who just knows things in a freakish kind of way. No matter, how obscure your request, she knows a guys. “Hey Ruth, we could really use an eight-foot extension cord. Any ideas?” “Oh! I know a guy!” And sure enough, she takes you three blocks up and five blocks over and yup, there in a store about nine feet wide is a guy who speaks English –granted, he’s bareback, but he speaks English- who will make you an extension cord to whatever length you want.

Oh, and I am happy to report that we now have Kellogg's Honey Nut O’s in the cereal cabinet.

-Jack