I am a panda

This week I visited my two placement primary schools for the first time. As of next term, I'll be doing training workshops with all of the teachers in each school, which is different from the middle schools where I only work with the English teachers. Anyway, the two schools could hardly have been more different! children at Wu Guan Primary

Wu Guan is a small school in a remote village with few resources and lots of children that board there during the week as it's too far to go home each day (though on the plus side, the class sizes are small!) Wu Guan school building on a sadly dull and smoky day. Villagers in particular use coal for heating in the winter and so the pollution is at its worst in Jan/Feb.

Shang Zhen is also in a village but it's a much bigger one quite close to Danfeng and has the best resources of any school I've seen in China. It has a library, a science lab, a running track and a computer suite.
In both schools, the leaders and staff seemed quite enthusiastic about me coming to work with them and I must admit that it'll be nice to work with primary age kids again after a term in a middle school.

Shang Zhen's beautiful and well resourced school library




After looking round Shang Zhen primary, the school leaders took me out for lunch and after that we took a walk around the village as it was having its monthly market, where all the farmers and craftsmen from round about bring their goods to sell in the street.
I asked my colleagues if they thought it would be okay for me to take photos and got the perplexing response, "Of course. You are a panda."
After a bit of discussion, I managed to figure out that what they meant was that I was a precious and rare thing and everyone would want to help me and look after me. Yeah, baby!






Buying eggs











Farmer selling peanuts and sunflower seeds

In the news this week...

I'm now getting the China Daily, an English language newspaper, delivered to me in Danfeng. Unfortunately, it's always about 3 days old when I get it so I don't use it particularly to find out news but it's very useful for finding out about Chinese culture, opinions and beliefs. Sometimes, the stories are frightening - like the dairy farmer who was executed when his polluted cows milk killed some babies - and sometimes it's hilarious, like this extract from last week's paper.

A shopping centre in Hebei is planning to build an exclusive car park, especially designed for women, with their preferences in mind. The Wanxiang Shopping Centre plans to design the facility with bigger parking spaces and women-friendly colour schemes such as pink and light purple. It also plans to employ specially trained female parking attendants to guide the women drivers into the parking spaces.

Wang Zheng, an executive at the shopping centre said the car park was designed keeping in mind a woman's "strong sense of colour and different sense of distance. The parking spaces are one metre wider than normal and will have signs that correspond more to women's needs," he said.

I love it!

We are stardust

It has been a while since my last post but since I haven't been in China (and this is a China blog) that makes sense. And as my wonderful dad died on the 21st Dec, I haven't really been feeling like writing. Anyway, as my mum says, "life goes on," and so here's my latest update.
I got back last Thursday to a flat that hadn't changed since I left (what was I expecting?!) Everything still in one piece, everything still working, and all my belongings where they should be, which made me feel "home."
I had lots of presents to give out in return for the kindness shown to me by my friends in Danfeng the day or two before I left.
On Friday night, my school took me out for a "welcome home" banquet, where I tried quite a few new dishes including some kind of baked flowers from a tree (delicious) something called "wild plant" fried with garlic (edible with the garlic - would be less edible without!) and something which came with the vegetable course and so fooled me. It looked beige and bland so I took a slice but once it was in my mouth, it was clear that it was NO vegetable. "Zhe shi shenme?" I asked. "What's this?" Pork, I was told, which I immediately realised meant a slice of pure pork fat! Bleugh! I let it slip down my throat but I'll be more careful in future...
Today I walked around Danfeng and it was nice to see everyone, even though for a lot of people it seems to be like I was new in town again and they're back to staring and pointing. Sigh...
The students have exams for the next few weeks so there's little work I can do with their teachers so my goal for the next three weeks is to make proper inroads into Mandarin. It's embarrassing how little I can speak now.
Case in point: I bumped into my boss's mother today on the way back from the supermarket. She's an old woman and she grabbed my hands and pulled me back to her home.
Obviously it's nice to feel wanted and part of things but after the basics of "I came back three days ago" and "yes, I've had lunch" (very important in China!) I found I couldn't say anything that she could understand. I tried asking where her granddaughter was ( my 2 year old pal!) but I obviously didn't make sense cos she smiled and nodded instead of giving me a place, and then I tried a few other conversational gambits to no avail.
So, written in black and white (er, or purple) my New Year's Resolution is to reach a decent level of communication in Mandarin in the next month or so. Will keep you posted on my progress...

The Warriors in winter

Last weekend I finally made it to the Emperor's Warriors in Xi'an. Considering it was a snowy day at the end of November, I was surprised that the place was still fairly busy













(with Chinese tourists of course, not foreigners.) Visiting off peak certainly made the experience more pleasant as, with all Chinese tourist attractions, you have to run the gauntlet of souvenir shops, food stalls and street hawkers before you get anywhere near the site. In this case, it was almost a twenty minute walk between getting off the bus and getting a glimpse of the warriors! I think with crowds and the heat of summer, the experience would not have been a pleasant one...
Anyway, the site itself has been reasonably well managed and between buildings is actually very pleasant to walk around.





Here's a photo of the most biggest (and most famous) pit - the shot everyone recognises but, for me, it was the smaller pits of semi-excavated ruins that was the highlight. Looking at the broken 2000 year old statues who are no longer doing a very good job of guarding Emperor Qin Shi Huang's tomb reminded me of very much of Shelley's Ozymandias, "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Plus, I have to say the lighting in the smaller pits was much, much better than in the biggest one. Many of the warriors haven't been excavated at all yet and are still covered over (hopefully left for the future when better techniques can remove them more safely!)







The last building was a small but well lit and well laid out museum and at its entrance was a giant puppet warrior which was used for the Beijing Olympics and must have been cool to see walking around.
It was a pleasant day out - not least for people watching. Watching Chinese tourists taking photos of their heads popping out from the top of a headless warrior's body is all part of the fun of life in China!

Danfeng - the rich, the poor, the beautiful and the ugly!

Although Danfeng is officially classified as a poor part of rural China, not everything in the town is basic or falling apart. There are plenty of small, expensive looking shops where the owners take great pride in keeping them sparkling and pretty like this Chinese version of Boots.





There are also much poorer looking areas, where the shops are simply goods placed on the ground outside the people's houses, like this pots and pans shop.













And again, there are many people with no shop at all but simply a cart they wheel into town every morning and home again each night - and most of the vegetable carts have great looking vegetables!
















Shopping (or window shopping) is the main activity for people round here but I prefer to walk down by the river which is much more peaceful and the colours of the mountains in the early evening are beautiful.















And finally, as promised, me in my new red coat - though unfortunately most of the snow had gone by the time I got round to taking a pic!

what I actually do...

It's probably about time now that I say a bit about what my general work life is like here. I've been very lucky in that my school has been happy to let me make the decisions on what I do. VSO suggests volunteers take 1-2 months to simply observe and assess the situation before jumping in with ideas and changes and so I've been careful to do that. Actually, it only takes a few days to appreciate what the key development needs are but the longer timescale is required to understand the people and the culture and how best to approach these needs. I'm actually nowhere near understanding how best to meet the needs but I am now under pressure to make a move and do something.
VSO advises that countries and cultures are usually slow to change but here in China there's an extra dimension. The schools themselves - by which I mean the leaders, who aren't actually (and have never been) teachers - are keen for fast change, but those who actually have to implement the changes (the teachers) are much less keen. This causes problems for me as I obviously want to see things moving, but my main empathy is for the teachers and I want to support them at a pace that's right for them.
I did my first "English Corner" today - a group for the English teachers which aims to help them improve and grow more confident in spoken English - by organising a 40 minute chat on a specific theme. I wanted them to choose the theme but was told it was best for me to choose the first theme as they wouldn't know what to choose (and would therefore choose nothing.) I chose "Chinese and UK festivals" as a neutral theme that would allow us both to know each other's cultures better. I also chose the group that I knew would chat best (Grade 9 rather than Grade 8 or 7) but I still found that all the effort was on my part and that they were passive. Even when it came to them telling me about Chinese New Year, they still required prompts and questions to speak to me.
As one of my key objectives here is to make the students active learners, I worry how that can happen when even the best of teachers here aren't active learners themselves and therefore are going to find it very difficult to encourage their students to be...
I must say that, in general, what a Chinese teacher classes as busy would make a Scottish teacher laugh. They teach two (identical) 40 minute lessons a day to the same two classes each day of the week and the rest of the time they simply mark homework and write out a lesson plan which they don't follow.
My first workshop (on Enthusiasm and Motivation) is at the start of December and although I've told the teachers that the "enthusiasm" is for the students, it's at least as much as, if not more so, aimed at the teachers!
I'm also very lucky in my office. I share with three others, my translator (a university student teacher who is taking advantage of the chance to improve her spoken English (but who's sadly only here till Feb) and two 30 something female staff ( one who has been put in charge of the "foreigner" as she speaks a little English - and wanted the job) and one who is in charge of the Communist Youth League - still trying to find out exactly what this is...
We all get along great (although obviously half the time I don't know the finer points of what's going on - not helped by the fact that the Youth League Rep speaks no English whatsoever.) There's quite a "girly" atmosphere in the office, which I'm taking advantage of, and I'm now quite competent in offering compliments on clothes/shoes/hair in Chinese!


I know this is a terribly out of focus shot but I like it cos it it represents my office: minus 4 degrees inside - Ms Zhuang and Ms Yang warming up with their electric heater - me with my electric hot water bottle - snow outside - and a girly bonding session!

Winter in the morning and summer in the afternoon

The weather here has taken a cold snap and it's now around minus 2 at night. I have made all the necessary Chinese purchases - warm pyjamas, wrist to ankle thermal underwear and a long red padded down coat. The strange thing is that by the afternoon it can hit the 20s and it's t-shirt weather again. As my interpreter says, "For you it's winter in the morning and summer in the afternoon." It is indeed!
At the start of this week, I went on an interesting day trip round the rural north of the county to visit half a dozen schools which had "special features." What this means is that the government has given the school a substantial amount of money and they had often chosen to spend it on prettying up the exterior of the school with fountains, ponds, gardens etc. Nothing wrong with that per se, but then you walk into a dirty, bare cramped classroom with 80 kids sitting on broken stools and can't help wanting to tell the proud headmaster that the money could have been better spent. I managed to restrain myself though, and waited till I got back to school to tactfully put my views to my own school.



View of front of one of the "special feature" schools





Not all of the schools spent the cash on pure decoration. One school had built a library and one had built a "psychological room" to help students with emotional difficulties. Great idea! The problem was that these rooms were beautiful and were kept beautiful by not letting any students into them. So far, I have seen quite a few science labs, computer suites, libraries, sports areas etc and NOT ONCE have I ever seen any children using them.
"psychological room" - unused but beautiful!


A few schools however, put the money directly into benefiting the kids. I visited a very remote school (two hours along a dusty track up a mountain) for children of migrant workers. This means the parents have gone to the city to find work and have left the children alone so the school puts them up in dorms and feeds and educates them. I have seen some pretty gruesome dorms already and as the migrant school is for the poorest children, I expected the worst. However, the school leaders had spent the money on very practical things - the dorms and dining hall - and, for China, these were fantastic.

The dorms of migrant workers children. It looks unlived in, I know, but that's just instilling in the kids a sense of Chinese discipline - the
kids sleep two to a bed as well.




















Me and two of the migrant workers children. They were very shy as most of them had never left the mountains before and were probably wondering why a strange white woman was wandering around their school...

The reason that we were visiting all these schools is because my school, Longju Middle School has also been given money and the headmaster, Mr Yao, wants to see how best to spend it. Let's hope I can subtly influence him less for show and more towards the practical!