On Freezing to Death in China

It is cold here. Really. Like really cold. Well, ok, I should qualify this.

I haven’t had real fall like weather since 2007, and that was in good ole Atlanta and so it really wasn’t that cold feeling till later, and even then I was more prepared for it. That is a good part of the reason. Senegal only had coldish weather starting maybe around December, and then, well, it was Africa cold, like 80s, that kind of cold. But to be fair, it was really like one long summer, punctuated by periods of more heat, more rain, or more wind. Though generally, it was a big long two and a half year summer.

And now apparently it is fall. I was first informed that it was fall back in September. That was around the time that I was teaching with rolled up sleeves and sweating through the shirt anyway. My fan and AC were on whenever I was at home and I thought that I really should invest in a hand fan (though they just don’t seem the same after having one in Africa so long). It was hot here. Not really like dreadful Sahel heat, but up to 40 some days and the worst was that it was humid. The air is so thick sometimes with coal smoke and fog that it is hard to see the scenery, even mountains that are just a kilometer or two away. But anyway, it was hot, and that was only a month ago.

Now I guess the seasons are changing or something. Though you cannot tell it here from the trees. There is one kind of tree found in a couple spots on campus that looks like it is losing its leaves. But then maybe it is just diseased or something. Everything else is a green as ever. Anyway, so I guess it has been around in the 50s this last week. Not terrifically cold, but cold enough for me. The other problem is that that I don’t really have any kind of reliable way to heat my apartment. There is this AC thing that is up near the ceiling that I can switch to heat, but it only stays on for a couple minutes at a time, maybe enough to heat the ceiling near its thermometer, then it clicks off and I think the heat must mostly all go to the windowpane a foot away and the rest of the room, let alone the rest of the apartment, stays about just as cold as it would be anyway. So that’s to say, I wake up pretty cold, which I would enjoy except that I have class at 8.30 most mornings and this cold really makes me want to sleep past 7.

It’s becoming more of a problem because I really don’t have enough winter clothes. I knew this coming over but I figured I would just pick stuff up here and so far that hasn’t really worked out. Bargaining is a bit intimidating when you don’t speak the language enough to say more than some numbers and the things I would bargain for here aren’t on the same level as Senegalese prices (where I could get a shirt and shoes together for three dollars if it’s a good day). Not to say that I don’t have some. I even have a couple of nice suit jackets that my aunt was nice enough to help me get. But I will need to invest in a couple sweaters and maybe a coat before this winter comes on for real. And that is really strange because I am told that it doesn’t even snow here so it shouldn’t even get as cold as Atlanta…

The other fun news of the day is that because of various factors that are beyond my understanding, the school here has decided to keep its students from trouble in the city by instituting a 7 day school week. I was informed of this for this weekend by a phone call at 8am saying that I needed to teach on Saturday like it was a Tuesday, and teach on this Sunday like it was a Wednesday. That is just super fun. Not. The students seem disgruntled, I am certainly disgruntled, and I don’t even know who or what to be mad at. There are rumblings that it will continue next weekend and maybe will go on to the indefinite future. I sure hope not, maybe someone will talk some sense into someone this week to stop all that from going on. I didn’t even have the will to do anything today about class. I had been thinking of traveling to visit some other volunteers who were having a Halloween party in Chongqing. But I guess it is a good thing that I wasn’t there because then I would have missed all this excitement…. I also wanted to do a movie club meeting this weekend. Oh and maybe relax, that would have been fun too. But today I showed pictures of Halloween stuff in America and told them, from the best of my memory some American fairy tales that involved witches and pied-pipers and whatnot. The students just wanted to watch a movie, but I don’t know if I can get away with that much laziness.

Anyway, here’s to hoping for the weekend…

Classes and Schedules

We just finished up our fifth week of school here. I am an actual university teacher and everything, with all the grading to do, but then, none of the money... ah well.

I have six classes of freshman English majors where I teach oral English. In each of these classes there are a little more than forty students that I get to pretend I know what I am doing in front of for an hour and a half once a week. Twice a week I meet with a class of non-English major freshman, for a listening and speaking class. There are fewer of them, 19, but their level is obviously much less than that of my major students.

Teaching is interesting. I don’t think I am very good at it at this point, it’s my first time teaching like this anyway, but I think it is really interesting and it is fun being creative and finding different ways to get students to practice what they know. And I am learning a lot. Maybe next term I will emphasize things like vocabulary more because I feel like I am presenting a handful of words each week and they remember them for the length of one class, then when I do recall stuff later they have no idea what I am talking about. Things like that I still need to work on. But then, vocabulary is not particularly my emphasis anyway.

I also find myself in fast associations with many people, English major students, non major students, other teachers, and just other people in the city that want to be my best friend if only so I can personally teach them all English. And I am not an English tutor. I don’t know how to be a tutor and I don’t have time enough to be a tutor. But then all too frequently I don’t know how to get out of situations like that when I would like to be doing anything but being a free private tutor for one person.

Which brings me to my other problem is that I never feel like I have enough free time or know anyone easy going enough to allow me to study Chinese at all. Outside of restaurants and supermarket situations I have had no opportunity to practice at all, which seems absurd except that on campus everyone wants me to speak English constantly and so this is hardly an immersive condition. It’s frustrating, and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Chinese wasn’t so impossibly hard for me anyway. Honestly from how things look at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t learn anything new to say in the next year. Ok, maybe I can, it is just really hard to ever practice and I’m feeling overwhelmed by it is all.

But I do like teaching. And all the students seem to mostly like me. I try to teach a little about American culture in my classes too. Sometimes I think I know too much about linguistics, like when a student asks about the spelling of something and I get to talking about Old English, German or French and then just stop and have to say, “well, that’s just the way we do it…”. And it is all really fun. In my listening class we have listened to a few songs and I have had them try to figure out what some of the lyrics are. And sometimes things are just baffling, like when a student comes with an English textbook for another class asking her to fill in blanks with “a” or “an” or “the” or “some” and one of them is seriously like “Harry wants to go to __ store”. And I just say, “well, I guess you should put “the” but you really could put “a””, and the student looks at me pleadingly and I know if I say anything more I will just make this more baffling and be making fun of this illogical textbook. Or one of my textbooks that asks students to look up the word ‘brasserie” because it is used in a listening activity, but then of course, it isn’t in anyone’s dictionary and I have to explain it and explain that no Americans actually use this word.

But with all the ridiculousness and all the whatever, I really like it here right now. If nothing else but for the PC goals of showing people of other cultures what Americans are like, I think people are surprised by things I like and do and say because it is not in line with their American stereotype. I guess I could say a lot about stereotypes, but I can save that until another time.

Greetings from China!!

So this is my long awaited new blog about my life as a Peace Corps volunteer in China. I have actually been here for a while now, but it has taken about this long to figure out my internet situation well enough to be able to post something on here. So, gee, where to begin?

First, what am I doing here? So I ended my service in Senegal May 13 and was back in America for about a month and a half. Before I left I put in paperwork to be transferred to China. It took a little doing, it’s a different country and region obviously, but also it’s a different sector, PC China only has English teachers. The end of February then, I met up with my new group in Washington DC and after a short staging orientation, we all left for China together.

I can give a general idea of what’s all happened:

We went straight to the city of Chengdu, right about in the middle of China, in Sichuan province. That is where we had our training and figured out China and how to be English teachers and all that fun stuff. For a few days we lived in a hotel together, as a training group of about 90 people, but soon enough we separated into four more manageable training groups and went to different universities around Chengdu. I spent my PST at Sichuan Normal University, East campus (SNUE). At our training sites, all of us trainees had host families.

Our training here was a good deal of language training, like any good PC program should have, but it had a good focus of teacher training. After all, as soon as we are done with training we will all start teaching at universities around China almost immediately. We had a lot of interesting crash courses on how one goes about teaching a language and about how China’s school system generally works. We also had two weeks of model school where we got to practice on some students that were nice enough to come over to hang out with us on their summer vacation.

We were also able to visit our sites before we finished PST. They made it rather dramatic, the whole revealing of our sites. I was chosen to go to the city of Yibin with one other volunteer, Leo Dorsey. We are to teach at Yibin University, following a long succession of volunteers at the same school. On our site visit, we stayed with a different host family, with the idea that they could be our community contact and they could show us around to things outside of the university. We say our campus and our apartments and a little bit of the city too.

Then, on August 28, we swore in as new volunteers. Here in China, they refer to the group by numbers, so we are China 16, the 16^th group that has come to China with the Peace Corps. They also don’t seem to like the words “Peace Corps” here, so on a lot of official stuff, they put “U.S.-China Friendship Volunteers”, which happens to be the literal translation of the words they use in Chinese.

The same afternoon we swore in, we took a car down to our site and I landed in my apartment to decompress and figure out what had happened. We started school on the 13^th of September so we had some time to figure out what was happening. Some volunteers started teaching as soon as they got there and a few schools had even started school before our training was over so they had to pick up their classes when their students had already been there for a week or two.

I am about to start my fourth teaching week. I have six classes of English majors that meet for an hour and a half, once a week, and I have one small class of non-majors that meet twice a week for an hour and a half each time.

Ok, so that is about as general as I could possibly be in a post, but this is the first entry and if I put everything that had happened and all about how the food here is too spicy, then that would be much much longer and no one would probably finish one entry.

I could say so much about just about every aspect of everything that I have done so far and all I anticipate doing that I am not even sure where to begin. But maybe this is a good start…

Well, I write you more later!