Summer 2007

My new goal is not to have to apologize at the beginning of each post. These last 6 months have been a completely egregious gap in the blog, and, as always, I’ll try to do better. I left off at the end of the spring semester last year, in mid-July, so I’ll pick back up there, with Summer Project.

Summer Project
On July 20, all the Gansu PCVs headed North and West to Jiuquan (means, literally, wine springs), a medium-sized town near the desert, and just 20 minutes from the very end of the Great Wall. There we spent two weeks running a teacher training program for about 200 teachers from the general area. We worked with a VSO volunteer from the UK – her job for the last year and a half had been attempting teacher training and while she’d experienced plenty of frustrations (as well as high points!) that mirrored our own over the course of the two weeks, her familiarity with the teachers, the job demands, and the Chinese education bosses was invaluable. Every morning, in pairs, we rotated to a new class of teachers. The first week, all of our lessons focused on specific English teaching methods, such as using story-telling and poetry in a lesson, using activities in a lesson, etc. The second week, all of our lessons focused on using social issues/topics to enliven their classes -- for example, using the Generation Gap, minorities/migration, the environment, etc. to engage students’ interest and make them more active in class. Each afternoon, a different volunteer gave a presentation and ran breakout activities/discussions on a variety of topics from multiple intelligences to HIV/AIDS and safe sex – things we thought the teachers would be interested in and might prove useful to them.

As I look back now, finally, it is the high points that stick out for me. A particularly successful lesson with a very difficult, lower-level group. A discussion with some of the advanced female teachers on their roles in society and in the family. Seeing other volunteers in teaching-mode. Dinners out with some of the trainees. Crazy evenings with the other volunteers, preparing, stressing out, telling stories from the day, and unwinding. During summer project though, we ran into enormous frustrations. Logistically, though Michelle, Kari, and I had been planning for months, the small things were never quite right (they were largely out of our hands). We all had to be very quick on our feet throughout, living and breathing Peace Corps’ “Be Flexible” mantra as we constantly revised plans in the face of locked doors, lack of facilities, trainees’ job schedules, etc. We had to deal with the reality that after running a really successful lesson, the average trainee would still not be convinced to take all or parts of it back to their own classrooms, and their own students.

Middle and high school teaching jobs here are so exam-based (with monetary penalties, in Jiuquan at least, for teachers if students don’t pass), so text-based, that while most of them have heard of general western-methodologies, it just doesn’t seem, to them, to be something they can reasonably start innovating with. And having foreign teachers running around the front of the classroom telling them they CAN engage their students, do interesting things in class, and still have students pass the exams? Well, they enjoyed the lessons, but it was clearly not convincing for a majority of the teacher trainees. If China is serious about changing teaching (especially language teaching) in this country, I think they need to have teams of really excellent Chinese teachers whose students HAVE scored highly on exams running these trainings all over the country in order to convince the average teacher Chinese teacher to try new things in their class. Many that we met have never made a lesson plan before, and their idea of a warm-up is to read the title of the lesson after the students have opened their books. As everywhere in the world these days, there is clearly room for improvement. A final mess when it came to getting certificates stamped by the Education Bureau (crucial for the teachers to get credit for spending their entire summer holiday in our training, often involuntarily), left many of us with a sour taste in our mouths as we had to say goodbye and move on with our summers.

Family Visit
As we were making our way through the twists and turns of summer project, I had another big thing on my mind: my family was in China! Arriving less than a week after we began our teacher training, my parents and sister arrived in Shanghai, and, via Beijing and Xi’an, began to head Northwest. One more week later, and I was picking them up at the airport in Jiayuguan, and taking them back to Summer Project to meet Ben, the other volunteers, and some of the trainees. It had been just over a year since I’d said goodbye to them, and it was more than a little surreal to have them here in China with me!

We made a whirlwind of the next 10 days. After spending the last two days with the other PCVs at summer project, I brought them home to Lanzhou. From Lanzhou, we took a weekend trip down to beautiful Xiahe, at the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, and spent an incredibly special afternoon in the grasslands. The next morning, we walked the kora together, circumambulating Labrang monastery. From Lanzhou, we said goodbye to Ben and flew to Chongqing where we boarded the Dragon Boat for a 2 and a half day cruise down the Yangtze River to the Three Gorges Dam.

This catch-up blog is going to be long enough at is, so I’ll let it suffice to say that from start to finish, the cruise was fabulous. First of all, I felt so fancy in the cabin I shared with my sister! We had a little teeny deck off the back of it. Each day there were day trips, one to a series of cool Taoist temples (for the King of the Dead!), and another up a very small tributary to the traditional area of the Tujia minority. We went through the Dam at night, and it was completely dramatic -- the sheer magnitude of the construction feat was pretty breath-taking. Throughout the trip we could see clearly where towns had been relocated upwards, and where the water line would eventually be.

The morning after the Dam, we disembarked at Yichang, and hopped on a train for Hangzhou. After a great 20 hour train ride which involved a lot of map-studying on the part of Dad, and a lot of catchphrase on all of our parts, we arrived in Hangzhou. West Lake was mesmerizing as promised. After getting stranded by our boat on a far island the first evening, Dad and Adrienne and I walked back along the bridges spanning the lake. They spoiled me with Pizza Hut that night. The next day we went to the Lingyin Temple area… skipping the pricey temple itself, we took a cable car up to the peak behind it for panoramic views of Hanzhou, and then spend a few hours scrambling through ancient Buddhist grottoes and paths all over the hill below. Had a great dinner that night, after a little trial and error at a restaurant downtown.

As it came time for my family to go home, we made the quick hop back into Shanghai. That night we met up with my Chinese friend Wondering for dinner, and then had a last stroll along the Bund, all lit up and gorgeous as always. The next day we spent a very full afternoon shopping for all the friends and family at home, and as we came back to the hotel, my sister told me it had been perfect – there wasn’t anything she’d dreamed of doing that she hadn’t gotten to do, nothing she’d really fallen in love with that she hadn’t been able to buy cheaply. I think that after a 20 day trip in China, they were sated. The next day, I took them to the airport, waited with them through the long check-in lines, said goodbye, and headed back into the city.

Post-Fam Summer Travel
That night, I started my train marathon. Took the first one overnight from Shanghai to Beijing, where I met up for the afternoon and evening with my friend Lee, a fellow veteran of many China history, culture, and language classes at UVA. That night, another overnight train from Beijing to Datong, where a student of mine lives. She and her dad met me at the station, and we spent the day first at the stunning Yungang Caves, and afterwards, wandering around town. The Yungang caves were cut back into the cliff wall just outside Datong, and are filled with beautiful paintings and imposing (enormous!) Buddhas. My student remembers that when she was young, she could climb right up into the laps of some of the towering statues.

After being walked onto the platform and waved into the distance by my student and her dad, I was off again for my third overnight train, bringing me home again to Lanzhou. I think I had about a day and a half for laundry before hopping on another overnighter, this time with Ben, to Chengdu. It was unbelievably hot on the train, and we sweat buckets all the way there. Once there, though, we met up with Pierce, my old sitemate, who was now sporting a really scraggly-looking beard, and had just returned from visiting his lady in Kyrgyzstan (she’s Peace Corps too). With Pierce, we headed, by overnight train again, to Tongren, Pierce’s new site down in Guizhou province. From Tongren, we went to Kaili where we visited with a few other volunteers, including on of the China 10s who had done some of our training when we first arrived and was back at his old site, visiting old friends. From Kaili we left – in the pouring rain – for an all-day bus trip(s) up and around and over and through the (very) mountainous terrain. We finally found ourselves that night in a small Dong minority village.

The country down there is all mountains and hills cloaked in mist at the top, just dripping with brilliant green, and valleys in between filled with rice paddies. The houses way down in the Southeast are made all of wood, most without any nails. They have lots of decks and open air drying platforms and rooms, and most of them are set up on stilts on the sides of the mountains. It rained a lot when we were there, but when it wasn’t raining, we walked around the town, hung out on the bridges with all the old guys, and did some fantastic hiking up among the rice paddies which cling all the way up the sides of the mountains. We also sweat a lot. Guizhou is gorgeous, but seems to sit at maximum possible humidity from what we experienced.

On our way home, we stopped by Xijiang, thought to be the largest of the Miao minority villages (the Miao people are ethnically Hmong), where we spent the night in a pristine little hostel. The next morning, we walked all over this village set entirely upon a hill which in turn sits in the middle of a natural basin surrounded by rice-paddied hills. It was beautiful and incredibly peaceful.

We had to head back to Tongren at this point, and spent a day taking a boat down the river with Pierce and his friend from college, Mahfuz. After a few hours of boat, we were dropped off at the foot of a mountain with a famous cave up at the top. We walked around the base of the mountain for a while, eventually coming to a teeny waterfall and swimming hole where we relaxed until a storm chased us back to the river to find a bus to take us home. That night we train-ed back to Chengdu, where Ben and I had our yearly physicals with the med staff and got to go to the dentist(!) and eat lots of Pete’s Tex-Mex. We also had the chance to spend a little time with the new China 13 volunteers who were going to be coming up to Gansu, and I got to chat with my old language tutor. Finally, it was time to admit that the summer had come to an end, and we hopped on the train one last time to take us home to begin our 3^rd semester.