July 30th Post

Hello. My name is Andy, what is your name? …

…

… I gave you time to respond

That is a good name. How are you today?

…

… You say “I am fine, thank you, and you?”



I am fine too.



CONGRADULATIONS!!!! You can have a conversation in English!



This is the first dialogue the students have learned it is followed by the harder questions like:

Who is your teacher?

How old are you?

How long have you studied English?

What sports do you like?

And for the advanced students:

What is your favorite western food/movie/song/singer/book?

But despite the sometimes gargantuan language barrier we are starting to glimpse the hearts of the students and we love what we see.



I am teaching the seventh level class with two Canadians (Albert and Rejean) and a Chinese T.A. named Mandy. Our class has decided to name themselves SOUL and I hope that this will provide an opportunity to minister to them. Our class contains 15 boys and four girls all about sixteen and up to nineteen years old. It is a difficult age to teach because it is hard to tell what they understand. Unlike the younger kids they have shed their enthusiasm and unlike the higher-level students they don’t just tell us when they have a question. To fix this we have incorporated a little Chinese into our lesson. “Dong Bu Dong” which means “Do you understand?” It seems to be a success but some cultural differences remain. Today during an activity one boy (Larry) sat and didn’t participate because he didn’t have a pencil. This was due to a small oversight when we passed around the pencils that we assumed would be corrected by any of students by asking for a pencil. But the boy just sat there instead.

Sometimes the lesson is too easy for the students so it requires lots of improvisation. For instance today to help the students with their pronunciation I taught them a poem actors use to practice speaking clearly. We also have to make games up in the spur of the moment and follow tangents in the subject. These changes can be quite challenging to explain to the students. If you don’t believe me then go talk to a class of third graders and teach them some descriptive dualities like Tall/Short or Thin/Fat or Smart/ not smart and then tell them not to call each other mean (that means hurtful) things. It won’t go over very well. Then try to explain tact. You shouldn’t call someone big or fat but you could call them strong and you wouldn’t call someone without friends unfriendly instead you call them shy. It can be crazy to teach a single lesson but then we must hurry up and try to learn the next lesson before the next class.



Thankfully each team has one night off and ours was tonight. We went to a fancy western style restaurant for pizza. Unfortunately this was done in a single van in two trips. The driver only speaks Chinese so we weren’t sure which restaurant was the one we had made reservations for. So we waited an minute or two out front until Mark saw that ne of the restaurants was labeled American Food. However the restaurant next to it was an European restaurant and we expected pizza so that was still no good. Unfortunately the van was clearly stuck in traffic and we couldn’t meet with the second half of the group containing Chloe the Chinese girl from Hong Kong and Eric. We decided that it must be the American restaurant because it was closer to where the van had dropped us off. So we walked up to the restaurant and met a waitress who didn’t speak any English. The group turned to me to try and tell her that we didn’t know which restaurant we were supposed to be in or that we had a reservation. They thought that my little bit of high school Chinese would allow me to talk with the waitress. Through lots of gesturing and a little bit of Chinese and the card for the taxi to drive us to the hotel I managed to have them call the hotel and put me on the line with one of the T.A.s she thought that it was the right restaurant so we just had to wait for everyone to arrive. I had to figure out how to tell the waitress that we wanted to wait for the other seven people and that I didn’t know if we wanted a private room. Here is the end of that conversation.



Video to come



That is all for tonight, thank you for your support and your prayers, tomorrow I am going to a Chinese church for service and it promises to be both radically foreign and comfortingly similar.



--Andy Ingle