Easter Week

Three things defined my week. 

First, the compound cold. That's when you get a cold, start getting over it, and then get another cold. Then you hack your lungs out for a week and freak out your co-teachers and students. 

Seriously. My co-teachers have lectured me on wearing sweaters, taking Chinese medicine, and drinking hot water, and students have offered me their used hankies before class. 

Second, it was parents week, which meant I was being recorded on several iphones by staring parents who sat in the back of my classes. 

Third, I taught my Easter lesson this week. 

That was a TRIP.

 My Easter presentation started with a picture from our Christmas lesson so that the students could make the connection that this was the same guy we talked about at Christmas. As soon as it came up, students would blurt, (in Chinese, of course) "I know that guy!! The baby! Christmas! Yesu!" 

My co-teacher would translate the story, adding details and making it exciting, and the students would respond with interjections and wild questions. 

"Why would they kill him?" 

"How did he do that??"
"WAH-SAY!"

And my co-teachers, who may have never heard the story before, were the ones who got to discuss these questions with them. I just gave the basic information in English and watched everything else unfold. 

Then, of course, we talked about the Easter Bunny and chocolate and egg hunts, which is also exciting. 

Then the kids AND the parents all got to draw Easter eggs and get stickers.

Oh yes, and we had Natalie's birthday.

Also, mom sent me chocolate eggs in the mail.
I love Easter.

Impact vs. Checking Out

I thought homesickness would hit its peak right around Christmas.

By Spring semester I was sure it wouldn’t be a problem because I’d be so close to going home anyway.

During the first week of Spring semester, I thought I was right.

No problem, this will be a breeze, I thought.

But then we hit the 100-days-left mark, I ordered my plane ticket home, and suddenly I was pulled under by a tidal wave of longing to be back home.

It was like that point in a long workout video where you still have 15 minutes left and you don’t know how on earth your poor, shaking legs will be able to go on without skipping to the cool-down at the end of the video.

My legs aren’t shaking, but the temptation to “check out early” can be very strong.

Oh yes, I talked to the Father about it, received encouragement from my team and friends back home, tried to pull myself out of it. I really wanted to be all here while I’m still here.

What really pulled me up, though, was a comment from my teammate, Jenessa.

I was talking to her about how my co-teacher, Anne, who is new to the school and new to teaching in a big classroom setting, is very caring toward her students. The kind of affection she shows them is not the same as I see from some of the other teachers.

Jenessa replied, “She probably gets that from you.”

Come again?

Now, I don’t think that her caring nature comes from me, but it did give me a moment of pause. I am Anne’s first and only American co-teacher this year. Because she has never taught in a large classroom, I have more management experience than she does and she gets to watch it in practice when I teach the three classes we share.

It reminded me that I do still have an impact just by living life here. Checking out early is not an option because there are things to be done all the way until the finish line.

It’s the only time I’ll ever have with my students, my co-teachers, my friends in Taiyuan. 

And now we're down to only 91 more days. 

Yikes. 

Also, I ended up on the school bulletin board for parents week. 

That's pretty cool.

Spring Semester

In the midst of a lazy Saturday (I kind of wish it was a rainy Saturday, but I haven't seen one of those in four months and am not supposed to see one again until at least April), I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on the first 2 1/2 weeks of Spring semester 2013. 

Yep. 2 1/2 weeks have already gone by. And we've only got about 11 left in the semester. Time flies, y'all. 

First, a note on this semester's co-teachers: I LOVE THEM. 

Angel and Evelyn with Flat Stanly, my "boyfriend", at lunch.

Angel and Ann with Flat Stanly in the office. 

Angel is one of my co-teachers from last semester, Evelyn is with me in my only first grade class, and Ann is a new second grade teacher who was hired this semester. All of them are sassy and ridiculous. 

We share an office with two other Chinese teachers who are also sassy and ridiculous. In the course of two weeks, I have been called Barbie, Jie jie (older sister), and Charming Lady. I have also been scolded several times for not wearing a sweater when I got a cold this week.

Ann is particularly interested in the methods I use to teach. I play a game called "Boom Boom Boom" in my class and one day she asked me what "Bombombomb" meant in English. 

Um. 

My three new second grade classes are some of the easiest classes I've ever had. Unlike my classes last term, who didn't know English from Click-Click, these students already know everything in the book and sit up straight when I say so. YES. 

In fact, little Mike walked up the board before class one day, read everything I had written up there, and looked at me like now what?

Class 16, which is now class 2.

Due to a new management system, my four classes from last term have also straightened up. Why? Because at the end of every class I give them a behavioral score. I write it on a chart with everybody else's score so that ALL the classes can see each other's behavior. 

And if your class gets a 4, you look stupid. 

So sit up straight. 

My one and only first grade class...

Oy vey. 

I'm not quite sure what to do with children whose attention spans are about as long as they are tall...and they aren't very tall. 

A child named Raoul runs the show. 

He calls me "Mees Lovuuuuuuu". 

And then continues on to make an obscene amount of noise whenever I don't have eye contact with him. 

Walking through the hallways in my building (one of three elementary buildings on campus that my team is scattered throughout) is the best part of the day. 

All the classes in the second grade hallway this semester are MY students, and naturally getting all the attention makes me beam with happiness. 

High-fives and hugs abound, along with random students screaming "HOW AH YOU?" and "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!"

My birthday is in August.

I have a new student named "IAMTOM".

Grace and Amy always give me air kisses in the hallway. 

Fabio found out he's my favorite and now gives me faces during class instead of speaking English. 

A first grader called me "Mrs. Shma" (Mrs. What). 

Lily grabbed me around the waist and said, "Mees Love, your heer is beautifuh!"

Two different groups of students patted my belly last week and asked if I was pregnant in Chinese (which is confusing because I've lost weight in China, thank-you-very-much). 

Raven thinks her name is "Raisins". 

If I happen to be going home early from the office, I usually try to visit my other old classes out on the playground while they're at recess. 

Those visits are accompanied by scenes like this:

 Also, Spring is almost here, which means jackets, dust storms, and cherry blossoms.

As you can see, I'm pretty jazzed about that. 

Here's to 101 more days in China.

Time flies, y'all. 

Orphans.

Orphans.

It’s that word that conjures up images of sad, big-eyed, hollow-cheeked children sitting on dirty floors with torn clothes hanging from their thin bodies. The word alone lends itself to a heavy heart and teary eyes as we imagine the pictures of those sad, helpless children.

Because that’s all they are, right? Sad, helpless children somewhere far away.

I've had a three different encounters with this particular group of people in the last month. 

The first was in Thailand, where I visited an orphanage started by a friend and got to play piano with one of the girls living there. 

 

But I was only there for a few shorts hours, barely able to glance at the lives of those children. The orphanage was a lovely place and the children were well cared-for.

The second was at Taiyuan Teens winter camp. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, a group of children from the local orphanage came to join us there. As soon as I heard they were coming, those sad images were conjured up in my mind and my Mother Theresa instincts kicked into gear. I would make these children feel loved and wanted because NOBODY else in their lives did that. (a little on the dramatic side, yes, but can’t we all admit to those sorts of attitudes every once in a while?)

But it didn’t take long to realize that being Mother Theresa wasn’t my job. These children were loved on by everyone at camp. I was just a cool foreign teacher who couldn’t speak their language, but could teach them the cup game and laugh at them. 

The weekend after camp ended, we got to go visit those kids at the orphanage where they live. We went with Chinese volunteers who go visit them every week, some of whom had been counselors at the camp. The kids were excited to see us, but they were most excited to see the volunteers who visit them on a regular basis. And they didn’t live in dirt or squalor (though I’ve heard some different stories about the special needs kids who live in a building we didn’t visit).

I asked one of the volunteers about the kids’ stories, and she said that some had been abandoned at the orphanage because they were sick and their parents didn’t think they would grow up to be functional adults, some had been “stolen and rescued” (human trafficking, maybe? I'm not entirely sure about that), and one had been left a few months ago because his extended family members didn’t have the means to take care of him anymore. Some of them have been at the orphanage since they were babies, but are not allowed to be adopted because they still have family out there somewhere.

Even if they are perfectly normal kids who would blossom in a family.

I won’t be here forever. I won’t be able to establish relationships with these kids like the Chinese volunteers do. But my heart knows more now than it once did.

 

 

Last week, though, I found out that orphans are not always the kids in the orphanage.

My third encounter was--is--with a child in my own classroom.

One of my students lives with his grandparents because his parents are dead.

He’s a different kind of orphan.

He doesn’t like to talk in class, he wiggles all the time, and looks like he carries all sorts of mysterious secrets in his head. But he’s not one I would’ve pinned as an orphan. He’s a child that I loved simply because he was one of my students, not because he had a special orphan tag.

I'm called to love on everybody, no matter what I think their needs may be. 

I'm not Mother Theresa. 

I'm just Miss Love. 

That's enough. 

Rolling with the Punches

Last week was hard. 

See, last week we started our second semester of school. On a Thursday. 

We got our teaching schedules. On Wednesday. At 3 p.m.

Which means we (or, at least, ME) spent Monday and Tuesday wringing our hands in anxious anticipation. 

We knew that things would be different because the school officials were rearranging the primary and moving 6th grade to another campus. Instead of having 1-2, 3-4, and 5-6 grade buildings, they decided to make all three buildings grades 1-5. Which meant that all of our babies were going to be scattered. They were also rearranging the teachers, which meant we might be moved and might have different co-teachers. 

I was just crossing my fingers that my old classes, 12-19, would all be put in the same building together because their numbers were together, and that's logical, right?

On Wednesday, they handed us our schedules and we saw the first warning sign: all the classes had been renumbered. 

Then we toured the school buildings to decide who wanted to be in which building. 

That's when we saw that our classes had been all mixed up in different buildings and there was no way we could teach all the same students this semester. 

There were groans and misty eyes, but we put ourselves together, divvied out schedules, and spent the rest of the evening hastily patching together lessons for the next day. 

I was lucky and managed to get four of my old classes. I also got two of Alex's old classes and one of Jenessa's old first grade classes. 

First grade??? YIKES. 

I know that when I'm a big-girl teacher I'll have to get used to hellos and goodbyes with lots of students. I guess it's just hard to have to unexpectedly let go 140 little lives that I tried really hard to love and get to know regardless of our language barrier AND to want to put forth the effort to get to know 140 new little lives.

Of the 8 I had before, I managed to get my silly class, my "Miss Mommy" class, my eager-to-please class, and my "We hate your guts" class. My new classes have been accepting and eager to have me as a teacher. 

Which is great. Really.

Today I went to the other building's playground to visit two of my old classes. I was mobbed by my babies and loved. to. death. And I was reminded that they will not forget the Father's love that was bestowed on them last semester. By the time this year is over, they will have received that love from TWO teachers who know them personally and lift them up to the Father. 

Which is AMAZING.

Even if it means I have to teach a first grade class.

Camp.

A lot has happened in the life of Laura recently. 

Right now, we will travel back to my last full week of Spring Festival. 

CAMP. 

That's right. Taiyuan Teens had a winter camp, and since we didn't feel like sitting in our gray apartments for a week, a few of us headed out to the mountains to help out. 

Of course, the day we headed out just happened to the day after we got back from Thailand, so I was not terribly alert or ready for...anything. 

But it ended up being exactly what I needed. 

We got to be English co-teachers to the foreign volunteers who had already flown out from America and Australia just to work at camp that week. 

It was really interesting to have gone through several versions of culture shock in Beijing, Chengdu, and Thailand, only to return to a different kind of culture shock coming back to Taiyuan and being with other foreigners for a week. It was wonderful--but that's probably why I was so exhausted the entire time. 

Which was nice, because then I got to see the Father work regardless of my ability to fully participate.

We had 20-25 kids come for the week, ranging in age from 9-17. Some had normal names like Donna and John, and some had super names like Bilbo, Legolas, and Dragon Daddy.

Six of the kids came from a local orphanage. 

That was really cool. 

Throughout the week we sang songs like Lean on Me, played the Cup Game way too much (never teach anyone that game unless you want to play it unceasingly), wore coats and thick socks, learned lessons about American holidays, and watched lives change.

That camp was a really special haven for the kids who got to go there, a place where they didn't feel the pressure to perform perfectly and were loved for who they were. 

It was awesome.

And a great way to end all my Spring Festival travels.

Archery is cool. 

The night we went Christmas caroling in the local village so the kids could have a "real" Christmas experience.

One of the most important things you can teach is dancing skills. 

The class I taught with Gary, the Australian scalliwag.

This guy was a heartbreaker. 

We love these kids. 

My favorite handyman, Mr. Wang. 

Even our Ayi (the wonderful, special cleaning lady) practiced playing the Cup Game. 

And, just in case you were wondering, I DID sleep really well when we got home.