My apologies to all
readers! I’ve definitely been slacking on posting to this blog. I didn’t even finish posting about my Yunnan
trip! But at this point it feels kind of silly to post on it. So I’ll just give
you a brief summary.
After Xishuangbanna, we
went to Dali where we rented bikes. That
brought a whole day of adventure. Before lunch, 2 bikes got flat tires, so half
our group returned, while 3 others and I kept going. We rode for about 2 hours…
then MY tire popped. It took us three hours to walk our bikes back, in the hot
sun, and we got a little lost. So when we finally met up with the others, we
were pretty frustrated, not to mention hot and hungry. Due to having to change our bus time in
Xishuangbanna, we only had that one crazy day in Dali.
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| A beautiful day for biking!! ... and walking about 7 miles... |
Next we went to Lijiang
as a starting point for getting to Tiger Leaping Gorge, which according to Chinese
legend is where a tiger leapt across a canyon to escape hunters. We hiked there two days and a night. We went down to the gorge and climbed on the
giant boulders, then hiked back up. I
wish I had that magical tiger there with me to get me back up! We hiked on to a hostel and enjoyed a
much-needed meal and a restful night. The
next day, we walked for maybe five hours and then waited at a guesthouse for a
bus. Back in Lijiang, we shopped for souvenirs and enjoyed the delicious street
food. My favorite was crepes with fruit, chocolate, and ice cream!
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| Down in the gorge |
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| Wow best crepe ever!! |
Since March I’ve been
teaching again. In April, I attended a
Peace Corps training session called Project Design Management workshop, which
was created to help us plan our secondary projects. It was very helpful to sit with other
volunteers interested in doing the same thing as me, which is starting a Women’s
Group to bring girl students together to have discussions about important
topics and train them to be leaders.
There were many different topics being brainstormed that weekend,
including theater club, environmental projects, starting and improving English
libraries, and a peer leadership group.
It was great to re-connect with volunteers and listen to all the great
ideas. It’s been a little difficult to get my women’s group started because
everyone has such different schedules, and there have been a few holidays
recently. Plus some of the students I
had hoped would join my group will actually be away from campus doing their
internships next fall (teaching practice at kindergartens or elementary schools
in their home towns). The school had
said they would do it next spring, but then they changed it to the fall. I created a flyer and had my tutor help me
translate it, so I will get copies made and give them to all my first year
classes, and also try to get some female Chinese teachers on board so they can
tell their classes. I hope that by the
end of the semester I can at least have identified a group of committed girls
and we can meet once or twice. Then next
year it will just be a matter of scheduling.
In the meantime, I’m
also trying to improve our English library. I have a three-pronged strategy: 1)
improve the physical space, 2) get students aware of and excited about the
resources we have, and 3) get other teachers involved. To improve the space, I have made some
posters and some coloring pages that students can color and that promote
reading. I’ve also asked my parents to
bring some posters this summer when they come to visit. I want posters about books and reading, as
well as travel posters and maps. We have
a lot of wonderful books but I would like to get more children’s books. To get my students excited, I will bring my
classes there more often to do activities, role plays, and a scavenger hunt. To get teachers involved, I will get more
keys made, invite teachers to activities there, and hopefully visit their
classes to make a pitch about how awesome our library is! There’s a small group of volunteers that
already go there pretty often on their own to read and study, and they’re there
if other students want to come and check out books. I believe that the library has so much more
potential and I really want to get more students to go there and use the books!
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| A poster I made for the English Library |
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