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.