Day 15: Here Comes The Sun

Another song reference? Yes. We had a full day of sunshine today; it was hot and humid but the rain stayed away.

Today in class we taught our students how to describe people. We divided the adjectives into certain categories, such as physical appearance and personality traits. We still haven't gone over what I would call the "mental traits" category (this would include words like "smart"), and we plan to also teach the words for various common emotions. This return to vocabulary was brought on by an acceptance of some of our limitations as teachers. The main one is that we aren't trained, and so teaching grammar, which is a very complicated task, has been a struggle for us, and it hasn't seemed to make as much of an impact on the students as straight vocabulary. These sessions go well, and most students remember more than half of the words that we teach on any given day. I brought the camera into class and got some great shots of the kids, which I will put up once we get back to a city. Tao Yuan stayed home today, as he had his hands full with some of the accounting work I mentioned in yesterday's post.

We headed out to work immediately after lunch. We took a public bus to the outskirts of Tonglu, and we walked to a local riverbank, which had many stones on it. We need these stones to put on our paths at the park, in order to form a nice pattern on the cement. Therefore, we had fairly strict standards (which, admittedly, loosened as the day wore on and our patience wore thin) for which rocks to choose. We needed thousands of stones, and we were hand-picking them one at a time. This was a tedious task, made ever more excruciating by the presence of a strong Sun. It was not physically onerous work, but by the end of the day (we worked for about four hours) I was extremely tired, both mentally and physically.

For dinner, we went into Tonglu. There had been another student from Hangzhou who spent a couple of days helping us teach English; his name is Ken. I hadn't mentioned him before because he only spent that time with us and he didn't do very much of the teaching. But his parents took us out to dinner as a thank you (this is Chinese custom). In China, eating seafood is a sign of wealth, so of course they ordered seafood, which is not my favorite genre of food (I really only like fish). But I was obligated to eat many of these foods out of politeness. It wasn't terrible, and the non-seafood dishes were actually quite good. Afterwards we picked up some groceries and headed home.

I didn't get a chance to go see the progress that was made on the park today, as I wasn't in town all day. But I imagine that we are close to finishing laying the tile, so the stones are one of the final pieces of the puzzle. I'm heading to bed now as I am thoroughly exhausted. Good night.

Day 14: The Pieces Are Coming Together

It's amazing how it's only towards the end of a project that you see how much progress you have made.

Today we continued our teaching of time-telling with an exercise where we had the students talk about their days. They paired up and they each found out the other person's schedule. One person was to find out what the other person's usual schedule was (present tense), and the other person was to find out what the first person did last Saturday (past tense). As with the map, this went well for some students and poorly for others. Cherry and I have decided that it would be best to place a few of the kids who are struggling more in the class that Tao Yuan and Eric are teaching, so that we might progress a bit faster and make the class more worthwhile for the other kids.

Towards the end of class, a girl I had never seen before came up to me and asked me if she could have a word with me. I went outside and she and her friend explained that they were local high school students who had heard that we were here and were curious as to what we were doing. They were especially excited when they found out that I was American. So I spoke to them, sometimes in English and sometimes, when they couldn't understand, in Chinese, and told them about the park and our teaching English. They were also interested in what my life was like in America, so I talked about that a little bit, too. We exchanged e-mail addresses and they went home. I share this anecdote for two reasons: first, because this sort of practice would be considered unusual in America and thus illustrates another cultural difference, and second, to again highlight how much of an outsider I am here. I have been here two weeks now and still people stare whenever they see me. I don't mind much, but I'm surprised at how little they try to conceal their interest.

After lunch, we waited out the rain and headed out to work. However, a couple days ago (when we were lifting those marble slabs), Eric's grandmother saw us coming home and thought we looked tired, and so she yelled at Eric's uncle and told him that he made us work too much. He is now a bit more hesitant to give us what we consider to be our fair share of work. Additionally, the project is nearing completion, and this stage requires at the very least a semi-skilled laborer, which we are not. So our tasks are now restricted to hauling materials, shoveling dirt or stone, and moving rocks. Today we did all three. The pebble bed has been laid down in the paths we dug, and cement poured on top of that. Now we have to pick out attractive stones to place in the cement to make a pattern. We have to finish tiling the designated areas of the park, and move in the tables. This should take no more than three or four more days, if the weather cooperates.

Because we are not able to do as much labor, we have started to work on some of the other projects that Eric's father has already completed, including the building of a bridge and the opening of a waste management facility. Our tasks include financing (this evening we sat and copied the invoices from this project onto the computer) and marketing. As these efforts are entirely donor-funded, the accounting must be particularly meticulous. As far as marketing goes, we must make the project look attractive, not only to the businessmen who are potential investors, but also to the locals themselves, so that they see the projects as a positive contribution.

That's about it for today, but I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on our efforts with these other projects as well as the final stages of the park.

Day 13: Rain = Short Post

Easy come, easy go. It rained steadily throughout the day, and the fog has persevered into the evening, which does not bode well for tomorrow.

We continued teaching directions today, using a slightly different technique. We separated the kids into groups, and had them each pick a location where they were to start, and then they were to pick a mutual location where they would "meet up," and then they would tell us how to get from where they were to the meeting place. It went very well in some cases and not so well in others. The word "intersection" seems to be quite a stumbling block for them; they tripped over the word and forgot it many times. By contrast, 路口 (lukou), Chinese for "intersection," is very simple. After we finished that exercise, we moved on to telling time. Most of them had at least studied this before, so it went more smoothly, although there were a few students who didn't have a masterful grip on numbers, without having to incorporate the time aspect. We nevertheless explained different ways to say certain times (4:10 as "ten past four"; 5:45 as "a quarter of (or to) six"). Luckily the Chinese have an analogous practice in their language, so it wasn't difficult to explain.

The afternoon was disappointing in that we were confined to the indoors. I mostly read, and also did some coding. I'm trying to learn Java over the summer, as I don't really have room in my schedule for a computer science course, and Eric and Tao Yuan are helping me out, as they are both computer science majors. Other than that, the day was decidedly unproductive. I am hoping against hope that we can get at least an hour or two of work in tomorrow.

If anyone knows an anti-rain dance, I'm all ears.

Day 12: A Day Without Rain

I finally get to make that lame Enya reference!

We accomplished a fair bit today. In the morning we taught the kids directions. I stole some ideas from when I was learning Chinese, and drew a map of a town on the board, including place names, which we had conveniently just taught them. Then, we taught them left and right; north, south, east, and west; directions; intersection, and traffic or stop light. Then we quizzed them, by either giving them directions from one place to another and having them tell us where they ended up, or by having them direct us from one specific place to another. It was a little bit of a struggle. There are a select group of students who clearly understood what was going on, but most of them took a little bit of encouragement and coaxing before they produced the right answer. We also had quite a few mixups with the proper grammar of certain sentences, but I feel as thought they learned a lot today.

We rested at usual after lunch and then went out to work. Today was a beautiful day; the sun was out for the first time since the third day we were here. Consequently, it was also quite hot, so we came equipped with water and sunscreen. We began to lay tiles at the larger worksite, and also started and completed digging the paths which will be covered with small stones. This was tough work, as the dirt was still heavy due to yesterday's downpour. We worked in teams: one person broke up dirt and the other shoveled it. I was surprised and a bit perturbed to learn that there no one has any spade shovels here, so we are using shovels that can't dig very well; they can only pick up loose dirt. After we completed digging out our pathways, we headed up to the smaller worksite and started shoveling stones into a wheelbarrow to be hauled down to the larger worksite. These stones will serve as a foundation. On top of this will be a layer of cement (or concrete; I sometimes get those confused). And on top of that we will place the best stones we have, as this will be the top layer and must be aesthetically pleasing. While we were shoveling stones, we spent a great deal of time digging through the stones and looking for the ideal ones which we will use as a top layer; they must be smooth, relatively round, and relatively flat. This process is very meticulous, and we were not even close to finished by the time we headed inside.

This post is short, but that is because most of the day was spent doing fairly monotonous work. We were all grateful for the sun, even though that meant that we sweated more than usual. Hopefully this is an omen of the good weather that is to come.

Day 11: We Work When We Can

When the rain arrived today, it came down with purpose, but not before we had completed some work.

Cherry and I continued teaching grammar for the entirety of our class time today. We organized a sort of simplified MadLibs, where each row of students wrote down a different part of the sentence: one row wrote a time (like now or yesterday), another wrote down a subject (like I), another wrote down a verb, and another wrote down a place. This lead to such wonderful sentences as "Ten thousand years ago, a hamster played computer games at the supermarket." The students task with a given set of words was to use them to write a coherent English sentence on the board, providing the correct tense and necessary articles and prepositions. Most of the time, with a little coaxing, the students understood this process, and with a few exceptions, they succeeded in their task. On our last trip to Tonglu, we had purchased some snack-size candy bars, and we provided all the students who wrote correct sentences with one.

After lunch, we decided to take advantage of the weather and start on some work for the park. This was the most physically grueling work we have performed thus far. Our task was to unload a big truck full of large, heavy, marble slabs that will provide the tiling for our park's walkways. We developed a streamlined technique, and though the work was tough, we were efficient. No sooner than ten minutes after we finished unloading, the clouds opened up. We had started on another mini-project (digging smaller pathways in which we will place pebbles for a contrasting aesthetic), but our short work on this was destroyed by the rain, and we ran inside, sopping wet. We rejoiced in the fact that we had chosen to work while we could, but I am at least somewhat discouraged that it rained at all today, making it the fourth day in a row.

After dinner, we took a walk (the rain had stopped) towards the peak of the mountain on whose side Gaoxiang rests, an area where I had yet to go. We were accompanied by Eric's uncle as well as a couple of students from our class. It was nice to get to know them a little bit in a more relaxed, non-classroom setting. By the time we returned, it had gotten dark, and we were all fairly tired.

So here is what we have done on the park so far, and what we will do next. We have cleared the land and leveled it by digging up dirt in the high places and dumping it in the low ones. We have dismantled one of the walls on the incline and built some steps; we have also built steps at the smaller worksite. Interesting Chinese cultural sidenote: stairs must always have an odd number of steps, because in China, to end on an even step means that you are at the top of the world, and we must symbolically admit that we can always improve. The steps are made of brick, and secured with mortar. Then we put down a thick (4-5 inch) layer of cement, which we made by mixing dirt, rock, and water in a mixer. This has now dried. The next step is to put down some concrete everywhere – a large task – and then to lay down the slabs we unloaded today in the appropriate areas.

Okay, now I'm off to bed. See you tomorrow.

Day 10: Maybe Tomorrow

It rained on and off all day long, which is an improvement from earlier days, but not yet enough to do much work. We will be doing some heavy lifting tomorrow though, and it looks like we'll finally get the weather we've been hoping for.

The day commenced, as usual, with English class at 7:30. We started with our skit, as promised, and it involved a bank, a police station, and a jail. I was the bank owner (as well as a corrections officer later), Tao Yuan was the thief, Cherry was the police officer, and Eric was Tao Yuan's roommate in jail. And of course, the skit was in simple English, even involving an exchange of pleasantries between Tao Yuan and I before he robbed me, and between Tao Yuan and Eric when they met in jail. Afterwards, the groups each performed their skits. Theirs were understandably less complex plot-wise than ours, but some of them were actually pretty good. I think my favorite moment of the morning was when one of the students, Tao Shan Shan, said during her group's skit, "That sounds great! We can kill two birds with one stone." We definitely are not teaching them idioms, but this is the same student who, when we asked them what vegetables they knew in English, came up with leek.

We spent the rest of the morning doing some grammar practice. They seemed relatively comfortable with the basic tenses, so I attempted an ill-conceived lesson in the subjunctive; it did not go well. We went back to the more basic grammar, and it soon became clear that only a few kids knew the material. So we wrote this on the board:

Last night, I ______.
Now, I ______.
Tomorrow, I ______.
On weekends, I usually ________.

This seemed an effective template to help them understand the different conjugations of verbs for different tenses. We also changed pronouns every once in a while.

The afternoon was again uneventful, but all of us are very hopeful that tomorrow will be different. At dinner, I tried a new food: bird egg. Now some of you who know me well know that I have a great fondness for hard-boiled eggs. But these are better. First of all, they are bite-size. And second of all, they are boiled in tea leaves, so they have a flavor of their own; it is not necessary to season them with sauce. This was a wonderful discovery.

I think that about does it for today, but I promise to have a more detailed update of our progress on the park tomorrow night. See you then.

Day 9: At Least the Fog Is Pretty

Gaoxiang is a village on a mountainside, and on the rainy days, the fog rolls down into the valley; the result is a very picturesque scene. However, that is about the only bright side of the rotten weather we have been having recently.

Only the teaching continues unabated. This morning we began by providing some alternative answers to the question, "How are you?" The students have been replying, "I'm good," and we all know that's bad grammar, so I wrote something on the board that looked like this:

Q: How are you?
A: I am well. How are you?
A: Fine, thank you. How are you?
A: I am okay. How are you?

I couldn't help but think back to my days reading Gödel, Escher, Bach (part of this has to do with the fact that I just started the new Hofstadter book), and that this sort of setup could lead to an infinite loop of conversation. However, for the most part the kids understood to only ask the question once and leave the second sentence off the second time.

We then moved into new territory: place names. We started with things like post office and museum and moved onto things like police station and convenience store. By the time our list was done it was at least 30 in number and I still am confident we forgot at least one common item. But we drilled the names (with correct pronunciation) and translations into the children's heads for the rest of the day. We then split the kids into groups and will have them write skits involving at least 3 of the place names we learned. As an example, Eric, Tao Yuan, Cherry, and I will be performing our own skit tomorrow morning before the kids start writing. Today they only picked the places they would use.

After class was over, a journalist from Tonglu (a suburb of Hangzhou) stopped by to talk to us about the park, although at least a small portion of the discussion concerned the English teaching. We took her down to the park site, where the cement had thankfully dried before the rain started. While down there, I reflected with pride on how far we have progressed; I just hope the weather lets us complete what we set out to accomplish.

As we could do no work in the rain, we instead took another tourism-inspired trip into Tonglu, this time to visit the world's tenth biggest underground cave. The cave itself was beautiful, but there was too much artificial colored lighting for my taste. It was also quite wet down there.

After we returned and ate dinner, we stopped by two local businesses to pick out some marble tables and chairs for seating areas. The chairs themselves were somewhat unconventional by Western standards: they had no backs and were cylindrical like barrels. The first set actually looked like barrels, and were a little bit to small for one to sit comfortably. The other set was flared in the Greek style, and as a result had slightly more surface area for sitting. That set was slightly more expensive (100 kuai, or just under $20), but we decided it was worth it. There is still some debate as to how many sets we will get, but it looks like it will be somewhere in the vicinity of four. Afterwards, we walked down by the river, and on our way back up we saw a group of villagers socializing at one of the park sites; this was heartening to me, as I am glad that there will be people to use the tables and chairs.

I am hoping against hope that tomorrow will bring more favorable weather; I would think by now that there's no more rain left in the clouds. I guess we'll see if I'm right. Good night.