Lucy TP-5

When Yuki entered the room for our second tutoring session, I noticed he was wearing a cross. I asked him about it, and he began to tell me how he had begun visiting a local church with a few American friends of his. Though he does still claim to be Buddhist, he expresses great interest in Christianity. He confided in me that his family probably won't allow him to convert, even as he told me how he had never 'felt so much peace'. I didn't quite know what to do. I don't want to convert or prosthelytize to anyone, ever. I have more atheist and agnostic friends than otherwise, and I think your relationship with spirituality is quite your own, and I know religion to be an often sordid affair for folks. I am Catholic, but as open-minded as they come.  I answered his questions as best I could, which mostly just dealt with how Protestants were different from Catholics. We had an interesting discussion on what the "Holy Spirit" meant, and I pulled up the definition of Dharma- which was compared to the idea of the "Holy Spirit" in a Buddhism class I took, and in articles I've read.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1390158?uid=3739600&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=56247848503

Yuki is really interested in Religion, which is awesome, because it was one of my specializations for my International Affairs major. We decided it could be interesting to do some church-hopping together, just to experience other religions. 

After our culture lesson, we got to skills tutoring and worked mainly on pronunciation. Yuki has great difficulty saying his th's, s's, f's, b's, and v's. It can be tricky understanding him. We did some work with a pronunciation book I borrowed from Ramin...It was a funny sight with the two of us stretching our mouths to try to figure out the mechanics of making particular sounds.

I got to meet one of Yuki's tutoring partners who is a history major and didn't know how interested Yuki was in religion. I left them as he was drawing a map of Europe on the board. Le sigh.

Good luck, Yuki!