Teaching English Day 1

---

Day 1
July 7, 2008

I am on a train to Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province. I will be here for the next ten days or so teaching English to children in the countryside. After arriving at the train station, we will take a bus to Ledu County.

This is all part of the Summer Service Learning Program sponsored by the Poverty Alleviation Office at Tsinghua University. My traveling companions include one female and four male Tsinghua students, a Chinese-American who just graduated from Duke University and a female professor from the University of South Floriay. We will later be joined by a female Chinese teacher who works at an elementary school at Tsinghua.

I am very excited for this opportunity. It's not every day that you can just walk into a rural, non-touristy area of China and start talking to people, but here I am with the chance to do it for 10 days!

*******

We arrived today and spent the afternoon looking for electric power strips and hunting down an Internet cafe. I believe that Shannon, the U.S. professor, had to submit some grades online. I'd actually never been in an internet cafe in China because I always used the internet in my dorm or in a Western cafe or restaurant that had wireless. It actually reminded me of the days when I went to ICZ (Internet Connect Zone) with my friends in high school. It was pretty much a bunch of boys sitting around playing Counterstrike, a popular online shooting game. It certainly brought back some memories.

For dinner we were invited out by some of the school administrators. Most of the discussion was in Chinese, so I wasn't entirely sure what was going on most of the time and Shannon was completely lost. Lucikly, Jack, the Chinese-American participant, is fluent in both Chinese and English and is happy to translate for us when we don't understand. It seems that they are excited to have us here, but we won't be able to start teaching for a couple of days because the students are taking exams. everything seems very up in the air right now, so I think we are all just going to to go to sleep and see what the morning brings.

---