Shell in China

Okay, so with the help of Rachel and Tomas, we now have a weekly movie night on campus. Our film club consists of six student leaders who will choose the films to show, as well as be in charge of set-up before and clean-up after the movie. The movie starts at 7:30, but students have been crowding into the hallway starting about an hour before the movie starts. While we love this interest, it has caused a bit of a problem.

When Thad and I got to the room last Saturday night, we noticed that the door was off the hinges. I jokingly asked what happened to the door, only to be told that the students had broken it when they stampeded into the room to get seats for the movie! After having a small conference, the student leaders came to us and said that they though the movie for that night should be canceled as a consequence. We said that we totally agreed with that decision and that it was fair. Before sending the students away, the leaders did give them quite a haranguing in Chinese. The gist of it was that they had embarrassed themselves in front of the foreign teachers and that they need to be more respectful. The poor student leaders felt really bad about what happened and apologized to us several times for the classmates and countrymen! (At first I thought this was odd, but the more I think about it, it makes sense. When we go somewhere like Xi’An and there are loud, annoying Americans there, I also feel the need to apologize for them! It is the same thing…)

Tomorrow evening we are going to meet with the students who are the leaders to talk about crowd control, as well as give them our DVD stacks from which to choose movies. Thad and Tomas have been doing most of the work on this one…I just come and hang out!

Other than hosting supremely popular movie nights for the students, we have been keeping busy with tutoring, classes and everything else. We are both super excited for Justin to come at the end of the month. Justin will be our first visitor (other than PCVs), so he gets to be the guinea pig! Lucky him!! We would love to have anyone else from home come and visit in the next year or so. When we are in school, we can’t travel a whole lot, but if it is China that you want to see, we have lots of that around Chengxian and would love to show you around. Anyone wanting to come is welcome to stay with us for as long as you would like! So this is my call out to anyone wanting to visit! Please come and see us!

One more side note:

I don't know if I mentioned this before, but I have been selected to write a weekly "journal entry" for the Peace Corps homepage. I, along with four other PCVs, submit our weekly updates. Sometimes those writing will be similar or the same to what is here, but sometimes it will be different, so feel free to check that out as well. :) The web address is: http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=learn.whatlike.voljournal