Many congratulations to our local elementary school, XingRen 新北市淡水區興仁國小 on celebrating their centenary today, with beautiful sunny skies and temps of over 30 ºC!

St. John’s University and Advent Church are in the XingRen Elementary School catchment area, and we have a really good relationship with the school ~ the principal, teachers, staff, children and parents are all our good friends, and there’s lots going on ~ here’s some of our friends on the school welcome desk this morning!

Hundreds gathered for the centenary celebrations today ~ and we joined in! Advent Church has a drum class who were invited to perform, and we also invited the drum class from St. John’s Cathedral to join us ~ the teacher is the same for both groups.  The cathedral group has been going for 8 years, whereas our group has been going for only 8 months – so their support was much appreciated ~ and everyone had a great time!

The drums were the opening performance, first thing at 8:30 am ~ they did 2 songs, and I filmed the first half of each…. do take a look at these 2 short videos, the group performed really well ~ ah, such talent!

The next performance was an amazingly agile and very fast group of Rollerblading Dragon Dancers who zoomed around and around… check out the first 40 seconds of their performance here!

Had a great time meeting lots of people we knew, including our good friend Jasmine (second left below) from our neighboring junior high school branch and some of her students who had made special centenary bags for the occasion!  Here they are with the principal of XingRen (third left below) …

And the final performance of the morning was our lovely Advent Church Band who performed 3 songs, and the highlight was the final song, ‘Happy 100th Birthday!’

It was such a great way to end the morning’s celebrations!

Congratulations to all who performed and to all involved, there was a lot of hard work for everyone, and it was very hot – not typical October weather, but we were all so happy the weather was so good – we’d been praying all week!

And very special congratulations to XingRen Elementary School on their 100th anniversary ~ and here’s to the next 100 years ~ YES!