Week Four At the Special Needs Center

On Monday, June 11 (that is how far behind I am on staying updated, but I will catch up, I promise; that's what long layovers are for anyway) I started work with Ziyu, Jingfei and Helen, the three Chinese girls who began work with me at the special needs center when I returned from Wuhan the week before. Just to refresh, Ziyu is studying at Brandeis University in Boston with Jingfei. Ziyu is from Wuhan (and probably was in Wuhan for at least part of the time while I was there as well, which is just weird) and Jingfei is from a town close to Shanghai. Helen attends the University of Toronto and is originally from Shanghai. We arrived on Monday early enough to help the advanced kids walk to the school and then we got ready for the day as they did their morning chores as usual. We gathered in the classroom on the first floor to hear everyone talk about their weekends and followed this with an arts period where the kids colored in pictures of animals we drew for them, continuing their work for the arts competition. When it was time for lunch, we went up to the kitchen to get our lunch which consisted of a soup with egg and some type of greens in broth and a white bun with some vegetables and rice to follow. Helen, Ziyu and Jingfei finally let on, however, that they did not really like the school's food and would rather try some of the local food from the many small restaurants in the surrounding area. We left shortly after lunch to try a local dish even though we had already had lunch. We stopped at a little restaurant and were seated by the waitress. We decided to order a local specialty, lamb. There is so much lamb served here because of the large population of Muslims in the city. The way it is served here (called "rou jia mo" which, as it was explained to me, literally means "meat between the bread"). Ziyu made a mistake, however and ordered "pao mo" instead which was the same chunks of lamb served in a soup cooked with small balls of boiled dough which tasted like noodles, made of the same dough used to make the bread in the sandwich. After we realized this, we ordered both and they were both very good. I really like lamb, especially how it is cooked in Xi'an with the spices. We also had "suan mei tang" which is basically prune juice, but it tasted really good and I continued to get it from the side street vendors in the Muslim Square during the remainder of my time in Xi'an.

When we returned from lunch, we returned back to the school where the three girls took nap time with the other kids and I read. After nap time was over, we continued to work with the kids on coloring pictures. This was pretty much the pattern of our days during this week. I will introduce some special things that happened on each of the days, but pretty much, our schedule followed the same general pattern: Meet at the apartment, walk the kids to the school, artwork time with maybe some other short lessons, lunch usually eaten out at a local restaurant and our break during nap time, and more artwork or lessons before walking the kids whose parents were not coming to pick them up back to the apartment.

Monday was really the first and only day that we ate at both the school and out at a restaurant. After that we started trying different places close by. Often what I mean by restaurant consisted of folding tables placed outside on the sidewalk under huge square umbrellas mixed in with the myriad of fruit vendors selling watermelons, cantaloupes, peaches and cherries on the street. In addition, all the restaurants we went to were extremely cheap. Virtually all food here is cheap. The going price was about 6-7 yuan (1 USD) for the food and maybe 2 yuan (you do the math) for the drink. I had so many different kinds of noodles and dumplings and steamed buns filled with mushroom, pork, pumpkin and spinach. It was amazing. It was so great to be able to go out into the street and eat what everyone else around was eating and to have people with me who knew what to order and knew what was good.

It was on Monday that I got to witness my first Chinese court hearing as well. The special needs center is housed in a sort of government/social services center which provides a lot of local services to the surrounding population. So I guess that is why it served as a good location for a court hearing. On Monday afternoon, the teachers got the kids to gather in the courtyard all of a sudden and started pulling lots of tables and chairs out of the classroom. A long table faced what would become the audience with smaller tables and two chairs on either side for the plaintiff and the defendant. I asked Ziyu what was at stake and she said that the hearing was over a traffic accident. The justices arrived with a few policeman, some assistants and a court reporter with a laptop. Chen Laoshi helped to hang a red banner with the official seal of China on it over the door and the hearing started. It was extremely long as the the small panel of three judges questioned both parties. Then, the hearing was over and the teachers brought out lots of watermelon to serve to the kids and the people involved in the case as a reporter and her cameraman arrived to interview the head judge.

Something else interesting about this week was that this was the week I started teaching the ABC's. I am not really sure how it happened. Zhu Laoshi is the young teacher who conducts most of the kids' lessons, whether it is recitation from the little book of life rules (as we started to call it) or teaching the kids how to dial the right numbers in case of emergencies. He is also the teacher with whom we have the most contact. He came up to me one day and started talking to me and I could understand that he wanted me to do something with the kids. Ziyu clarified that I was supposed to teach them English. I took that to mean ABC's because I didn't know what else to start with and I figured it would be simple. So, I got a marker, erased what was on the white board and just started getting their attention in Chinese. Ziyu had to help because it was pretty crowded. I started with A, saying it a few times, showing them how to write it and telling them the sound that it made, as best as I could explain that concept. They copied and made rows and rows of A's on their notepads as if they were copying down another character. Some of them couldn't write, but the ones who could caught on pretty fast. Wang Jia Hen has a lot of trouble writing and pretty much writes only his name. He tried A, but then just went back to writing the character for "wang." Xia Wei told Ziyu he didn't want to learn English and closed his notebook, but soon was writing again. Patience is an incredible tool in these kinds of situations because what the kids want to do sometimes seems to be changing all the time. Nevertheless they got to it and we pushed through and they succeed. By the time we got to G, Ziyu said that they had probably had enough. So, I told them we would do it again tomorrow. We played some review games and then ended class. I was amazed at how many of them had caught on and remembered the letters during the review games. Just to show you the diversity of needs at this school, Liu De Xia (Jackie Chan) has the entire alphabet memorized and can pretty much point out any character. Some of the other kids, however, sat in the corners and didn't write and didn't speak, just watching. One kid that started visiting every day with his grandmother sat in the corner with a bib on just watching, every now and then making a sound and playing with Chen Laoshi, the older teacher. At any rate, after that day, learning the alphabet became a regular part of the kids' day for this week and in the weeks to come. We attempted about 5-6 letters a day and some days we just took a break.

When we weren't learning the ABC's, the kids were back at reciting the rules of life from their little books, often doing this outside in the mornings in the courtyard shouting every word after either Chen Laoshi or Zhu Laoshi. When they weren't reciting, they were drawing. I was asked to draw everything. Cheeseburgers, pokemon characters, alligators, flamingoes, goldfish and regular fish (there is a difference), pandas, anteaters, lobsters, starfish, ducks, chickens and a small puppy riding a skateboard. I drew the outlines and they colored. And gosh, they colored fast. I was a regular drawing factory pumping out drawings that were colored or half-colored or marked through if the kids disapproved and then I was being asked to draw something else exotic and new. When the drawing got old, usually in the late afternoons, some of the kids (usually Liu De Xia and Wang Zi Hao) got us to play Ma Jiang with them, which is a Chinese board game involving little domino-looking pieces that are used almost like playing cards in Rummy to make matches and sets. It is a huge thing in China and if you walk around Xi'an in basically any place, you will see people of all ages huddle around small tables or blankets on the ground, playing Ma Jiang. Since the special needs center is actually located in a community center which services all the residents of the surrounding area, on some afternoons a huge group of retired people gather in the empty classroom next to us and take up two Ma Jiang tables, taking turns playing or either watching and talking.

Later on during the week, Ziyu, Jingfei and Helen decided they didn't want to walk to the school anymore, which was kind of a bummer for me because I really enjoyed that part of my day. Even with all the craziness around, the honking, the shouting, the loud bartering, the screeching of brakes, and the sizzling of the hot griddles where the street vendors cooked their egg/pancake/hashbrown all-in-one breakfast (more on this later), I could think. I really liked to just walk and think, watching all the busyness around me but not feeling a part of it at all (at least until, on Tuesday, I was almost run over by a bike, though that is just all in the course of a day's work in Xi'an). So we took the overcrowded bus there and back missing our stop a few times because of it. This is where I learned that if I actually did want to ever get off the bus before it left the city, I needed to start shoving the people in front of me out of the way. I am ashamed to say that I eventually got quite comfortable with this, because I had to. Don't worry. I won't do it in America.

On Thursday and Friday, Peter and Lance, who had both stopped work at the sites where they used to work for some reason, started coming with us. With the three girls, it was pretty calm. But when Peter and Lance started coming (if you remember, they are both fifteen years old and go to American prep schools), things got quite crazy. They all became pretty close, but in the process, they just started all talking to each other in Chinese and sticking to themselves. I didn't think much of this at first, but just started spending more time with the kids. I will have more on this in the next post as well, but it was a developing issue that I noticed that got somewhat worse the next week. At one point, the school had apparently asked us to help them with a translation of their mission statement into English and better Chinese in order to attract more donors. I helped in perfecting the English once it was already translated at some points, but since I am definitely not that kind of a Chinese student, the whole job of translating from Chinese to English was up to the three Chinese girls and Peter and Lance. Except, I assumed that it did not require all of them working on it at the same time. However, on Thursday afternoon. I looked around and realized that I was the only one helping the kids with the games and drawing. I went upstairs and found all five of the Chinese volunteers in the office working on the translation. Eventually they moved on to help with the kids, but it was honestly kind of frustrating at first to find them all huddle around the computer when it was only a job for really about two people.

On Friday, Hiskia, Jessica and Mayra had arranged with William and Charles to travel by train to a small, ancient city called Pingyao further north. So I got back to the hotel and packed up. I said final goodbyes to Felix, Andrew, Alyssa and Helene (Felix was the last of the original group of people I had met when I first arrived in Xi'an). The four of us caught Bus 40 headed toward the city center, to the Xi'an train station and were soon off to Pingyao on an overnight train.

Ziyu coloring with Zhun Zhe (her favorite)

Ziyu coloring with Li Jiang

The kids' names which they all wrote on a notebook after class one day.

The court hearing in the school courtyard

Jingfei and Liu De Xia

Helen and Liu De Xia

Cars parked on and blocking the sidewalk. A regular occurrence.

The kids lined up in the courtyard, reciting the rules of life with Liu De Xia (typical) being bossy and acting like the teacher, directing them.

Ding Hui and the other kids reciting the rules of life

The ABC's, over and over and over again

Zhou Ming and a picture he colored for Ziyu

More artwork

Liu De Xia and his perfect ABC's

A new student who arrived this week (and whose name I do not know) and his version of the ABC's (it includes every letter, just not in the traditional order).