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!