**Note- I wrote this post last Thursday or Friday, but due to internet problems, I was not able to post it until now. (Thanks Alex!)
It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a week! I’m not
entirely used to being back in China yet, but I still feel like I’ve been here
a bit longer than just 7 days. My
language skills are coming back to me very quickly; I end up doing a lot of
speaking and translating in class (especially for the elementary school
teachers whose English is not as good as the middle school teachers) and have
found that I can understand the majority of the local dialect here in Zhenfeng,
especially if I’m trying hard.
Zhenfeng itself is very beautiful. The city is quite poor
but still manages to have a few taxis, and the entire surrounding area is
encircled by vegetation covered mountains (much like the ones found in Guilin).
As I mentioned previously, the people here are also extremely nice. We have a small group of teachers from the
department of education who eat all our meals with us and escort us to and from
class. It can feel a bit constraining at times, but I’m sure they’re just
looking after our safety and taking advantage of the opportunity to be seen
with us foreigners. They have also been ridiculously accommodating to our
various “demands,” especially regarding food.
My cohort and I joke that we are making their lives less flavorful with
our numerous dietary restrictions: my aversion to pork (the main meat in China)
and her inability to eat spicy food (the Guizhou province, like Hunan and
Sichuan, abounds in spicy food). Overall though, I think our escorts are having
fun demonstrating their flexibility and trying to figure out what we will and
will not eat. Almost every meal begins
with a phrase akin to “we made sure they didn’t put a single chili pepper/
piece of pork in this dish.” And in place of pork, we have dined on chicken,
goose, and dog, all regional specialties. The dog was quite good, though a bit
fatty, and was served hot-pot style in a soup with lots of mint leaves, which
are apparently essential for dog dishes.
Teaching has been going quite well. We teach the elementary school teachers in
the morning, and the middle school teachers in the afternoon. The morning is usually much harder to get
through, but most people seem pretty interested in what we have to say. We
often play games which we then analyze and discuss how what skills each game
works on and how the teachers might choose to integrate them into their
curricula. Each class lasts about 2.5 hours with a small break in the middle of
the lesson… or that’s what we would like to happen. Thing is, our school is
located right next to a local hospital which often sets off firecrackers in the
middle of the day to signify a recent death. Although the firecrackers go off
about 3 times a day, I have been informed that that does not necessarily mean
that 3 people died that day. More
likely, people are just using the excuse to set off more firecrackers, as their
use is prohibited otherwise (except at weddings).
Other interesting classroom/ teaching things… many of our
students have interesting English names, i.e. Lonely, Pain, Amigo, Wing. Also, today for some reason everyone seemed
to have brought their camera and took a lot of pictures of us during the break.
This is a picture of some fantastic tea that we were given
as a gift by one of the school principals.
It was actually a half kilo bag that they divided up into these nice
little boxes for us to take home.
At this point, I think my best friends here are my coworker
and one of our escort’s daughters (pictured below). She’s 9 years old and reminds me a lot of the
little sister I mentored back in Grinnell. She’s super talkative and loves
telling jokes and playing games. I’ve found that, so long as I can hear her
clearly, I can understand about 90% of what she says. She’s taught me a couple
of Chinese card games and we often play cards together before meals while we’re
waiting for other people to arrive. I’ve found that this also tends to get me
out of taking part in awkward business talk which happened quite often during
our first few meals in Zhenfeng.
