We arrive!

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We are on a five-month professional leave to teach in the School of Social Work at Zongshan University, Guangzhou, Guandong Province, PRC.

Since arriving on the 16th, we have met with students and faculty and have visited a number of social service agencies here in Guangzhou. The past two days we have been accompanied by a group of Hong Kong social workers, people who have had close and ongoing ties to the efforts at establishing non-governmental organizations (NGO) here on the mainland.

Today, we first visited a program that serves as an outreach and center based program for those with mental illnesses. Everything we saw was largely consistent with the North American approach to these problems, although their resources were considerably fewer. The days of consumer empowerment have only begun and when I shared the experience in our part of North America (Vermont) with consumer involvement, especially as it relates to the establishment of a replacement State Hospital, they were surprised. Even the Hong Kong professionals find themselves operating in a top down, overwhelmingly professionally dominated system, while recognizing that professionals and patients might have different interests

No trip to Guangzhou is complete without large food fests, and our experience is no exception. The usual format is a large, noisy Cantonese restaurant with large rooms filled with hundreds of diners. We would then make our back into the inners of the facility, passing cages and tanks filled with dinners to be (snakes, chickens, seafood, no dogs so far) from which we kept our distance. There is continued curiosity over our near vegetarianism (we tend to permit some fish on these extra-territorial excursions) but our apparent robustness forestalls any detailed incredulity. The Cantonese, on the other hand, can and do eat all sorts of things; the saying is that they eat everything with legs except the table.

Last evening we went to a hotpot restaurant, there were several pots of boiling broth on the table intro which a diner would dunk, cook, eat and retrieve the morsel of their choice. As a special “treat” for us, our hosts provided a plate full of fish heads, each one of them the size of a dinner plate. I think we blanched (involuntarily) at the sight and they let us off the hook without too much back and forth.

You are placed at a round table for these meals, with a large, table sized lazy susan in the middle, on to which the various dishes are placed. For a party of 15 this noontime there were 18 different courses presented; in addition to the usual and not so unusual meat products there were noodles and tofu and two kinds of stuffed pancakes (the sweet was a mochi like product stuffed with pineapple), and several all vegetable dishes.

In addition to three such large we had a wonderful dim sum breakfast yesterday with some Hong Kong friends, again with more courses than is decent. Canton certainly gives life to the Chinese proverb, “To eat well is good fortune”.

We have also had good opportunities to make the acquaintance of students who we will b teaching this semester. We always have one assigned to us to help out; one day we were delivered household goods (tea pot, coffee maker, etc), today we were accompanied on a shopping trip by another student, we were met at the airport by yet another and so on. They are very eager to learn and make the prosepct of the coming semester an exciting one.

Our accommodations are excellent, ten-minute walk from the University and on the promenade that borders the Pearl River. One slight problem has been the weather, about the coldest they have experienced in Guangzhou in recent years, with daytime temperatures in the high 50’s. NOTHING is heated in this city and people seem to delight in keeping the windows wide open, in some denial that despite the palm trees, sitting around in a meeting with the temps around 50 with the windows open is a bit short of torture. You are constantly plied with green tea, which does warm you but necessitates frequent trips to the WC.

We begin classes on Friday and I will post again over the weekend.

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Photos

Stuart and Ellen on they way
At Minneapolis Airport

Guangzhou digs
Our apartment building

Our lunch companions
We dine with our colleagues from Zonghsan University and some visiting Hong Kong social workers

Mah Jong on the streets
Many activities taking place outdoors, this was in the community we visited to tour their community based social services

Motorcycle swap site
Scooters, mopeds and 125 cc Honda look-alikes

Card Player
With the ubiquitous cigarette (although none of our SW colleagues are smokers)!

Supermarket products
Large, Western style supermarket with a Tofu counter (9 choices) and many examples of dumplings, etc