One (10-day) week down!

Well surprise, surprise here I am (Jason) actually writing a blog post. My excuse for not writing is that when you are in the middle of an adventure and someone else has been writing the story that it’s hard to know where to jump in.

I suppose I should begin by reporting that we are both alive and well. We have just about finished up our first ten-day school week. Today is the last day of the 10 day week and today the kids go back home, but I don’t have any classes to teach and Ressa has only one.  We have four days ahead of us that we have no idea what to do with it. Our spare time, o far, is pretty much always the same story. “So what do you want to do?” “Well….”, the other of us replies, “we could watch a movie….or play a game….or watch a movie….or play a game…” Then, one of us (usefully me) will start spouting of random and absurd ideas like “pin the tail on the Chinese man” or “taking all of our furniture out of our apartment and setting it up in the hall.”

We really haven’t found too much to do yet, but two days ago we were both done with classes fairly early in the day and it was nice enough outside that we decided to take a walk around. As you can tell from the pictures there isn’t much to do nearby, though every once and a while there is something worth taking a picture of.

Signs are sometimes rather entertaining or just odd....we never found the emergency shelter...

Unless this is it....but I think it is just a place where old men get together and play checkers

It is kind of fun/funny where we do find English in this town

This is the front of some "Swedish" bar. Can you see how thick  the dust is?

One of the hardest parts about walking around and exploring  is just not knowing what you are looking at. Who else wouldn’t be confused by a large building with “Ascend a Height Step by Step Expensive Foot Association” in big fancy marque? Ressa thinks it is a pedicure place and my guess is that it is a dance club.

As you may also be able to tell from the pictures, so much of everything is in such disarray (to us) that you can’t tell if a place is open or closed or if it is being constructed or demolished. As we walked around, we definitely felt like we were in a different country. One of the funniest things we saw on our walk were the little toddler babies. If you haven’t heard, the Chinese don’t use diapers. Instead they have funny looking pants with big slits around the bum and crotch of the kid so they can just go on the ground whenever they please. It really is a funny sight to see these little kids bundled up so tight they can hardly put their arms down and then to see their bum and everything else just hanging out there in the breeze. I half wanted to take a picture but it seemed kind of awkward. At any rate hopefully you will enjoy the pictures we did take and  maybe one of these days we’ll find some fun things to do in our little city.

This is the local garbage man....they need about 10,000,000 more...you think they could scrounge up the people too...

On a kind of random side note, what we are really wishing for right now (besides a long list of treats and foods we can’t find here) is rain. Everything is so dusty and dirty that it screams the need for a shower. Our liaison Fay said that it is supposed to rain soon, so we have our fingers crossed.

I should probably say a little about teaching. In all honestly, currently we both dread (though that is maybe too strong of a word) getting up, preparing lessons, and going to class. Probably the lack of good sleep due to a rock hard bed and not eating very well has as much to do with that as anything else. Some of our classes are really fun and some are nightmares. How well we can keep the kids in line and focused plays a huge part in how things go. These Chinese kids can get rowdy and out of control FAST and since we don’t speak Chinese they sometimes just don’t listen to us and we don’t know what to do. I teach mostly third and fourth graders. Third graders are just awful. Ressa’s hardest group seems to be the first graders.  

Besides trying to keep the classroom from turning into a chaotic zoo, just trying to figure out what to teach is really hard. The kid’s English is all over the map. Some of our preschool and first grade kids seem to know more than some of our second and third graders. It has been quite a challenge trying to figure out what we can teach these kids and how to do it. The school has a handful of Chinese “English speaking” teachers that focus on reading, writing, and are better able to teach the technicalities of the English than we can. So, for now, we feel like working on pronunciation and teaching a few new words is about all we can do. There is a text book, but honestly it is lousy and I think the school got ripped off since they probably didn’t know any better.

Since our resources are pretty limited I have been doing a lot of PowerPoint’s and Ressa has been making a lot of shapes and things out of the construction paper we brought. Our lessons so far have been going over stuff they mostly already know, often to our surprise. In our first couple of lessons we have gone over the alphabet, basic numbers, shapes, colors, and some animals. It has been really interesting how each class can be so different with which sounds and words they struggle with. In general, the Chinese have a really hard time with their m,n,x,i,r, and sometimes d sounds and they have a tendency to slur and draw out their words really bad. A lot of what we do is breaking up words into individual sounds, having them repeat each part of the sound and then putting it all back together for them and then getting them to say the word short and distinct.

That has pretty much been our life the last week or so. Nothing really too exciting. I think we are adjusting more and more to our life here. We watch a lot of movies at night and sometimes forget we are even here. I find myself staring out our apartment widow a lot though in kind of a daze and wonder that we are in China. Things here are definitely very different. The more we see the more richly blessed we feel to have been born to the families we were born to and to have been raised where we were raised. In coming here, I realize more and more that I have taken so much for granted back home.