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I'm experiencing some renewed motivation and energy to study Chinese and have already (re-)started my lessons with Guo Naping. My aim for this term is to get my reading and writing up to the same level as my speaking. Focusing on reading is also helping to 'tidy up' my Chinese grammar and vocabulary, which are pretty scrappy round the edges after learning much of it through daily life rather than formal study. I'm now discovering the meaning of many words that I thought meant something quite different! Freda is helping me out with homework exercises and dictation, which she marks very strictly. This is a way to keep her Chinese going too. One of the greatest discoveries was a number of FREE ipod applications - mostly flashcards and quizes to test our knowledge. Ali spends the evening going through the food categories. To push myself in my learning I've also switched my mobile phone to Chinesea, so if you get a few incomprehensible messages that may not even be intended for you, you know why!

 
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The duck ladies
 Today we went to the market to get duck food for the ducklings we have. The food cost 4.5yuan a kilo. The ducklings that we bought cost three yuan each. Mum was wondering if we can actully make a profit out of the ducks or not.

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Duck for showing-off
 This biggy only cost 20yuan. It was standing on only one leg. Do you think they sold the other leg for a snack? Our ducks are growing quickly but it is going to be a while until they are this big. Mum says we have to do the maths in home school on Monday."Are these pets or produce?" she asked. She's vegetarian so I don't know what she's complaining about!

 
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While Sue and Ali were enjoying some kitchen therapy (yesterday was Cooking Club day) I took my feet off to see Mr Li, my reflexologists. I haven't been for a long time and it was good to catch up with him and his wife. I was delighted to find it less painful than usual and even Mr Li remarked that my big toe (corresponding to the head) was less troublesome than usual. I remarked that I hadn't been having as many headaches this term but it wasn't long until he had found another pain spot to work - around the ankle. Still not quite sure what that area connects to....my physiology vocab isn't too great. I'll just leave myself in his hands and enjoy the weekly time out.

Mr Li spends half an hour on each foot, also working on the front of the lower leg, up to just below the knee. Each session ends with some toe bending/cracking and leg thumping, effective for bringing me back to reality. This one-hour treatment costs 20 yuan.

 
If it wasn't for the ongoing support and understanding of Hou Wanxia, I don't think I would have stayed in China so long. She is my shelter in a storm, and the encouraging voice in my head when I face demoralising attitudes or apparently unsurmountable challenges. I was excited to get news from VSO last December that they wanted to invite a Chinese partner to London to represent China's education programme at a corporate fundraising event. Here is the article Hou Wanxia wrote that won their hearts. Unfortunately the event was cancelled due to lack of support, but I still hope to arrange a UK trip for Hou Wanxia, especially now she has her passport (one of the many barriers to leaving the country).
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Hou Wanxia in Ninger
I am an ethnic minority girl—Qiang nationality - and the luckiest girl among my 16 cousins (16 girls out of 21 cousins), for my father was Han nationality and he got a job as civil servant in our County seat. This meant I got the chance to go to school, a chance that many children in my family didn’t get. When I finished junior middle school, my father told me that I could go to high school if I passed the entrance exam. I succeeded. I then went on to college, followed by university. I am, up until now, the only girl with a university diploma among the 16 girls in my big Qiang family. Of my fifteen cousins four are illiterate because of poverty and sex discrimination. Four finished primary school, two half-finished primary school, three got through junior school and only one went to high school.

After graduating I became a junior middle school English teacher. There was an informal regulation in my school that young female teachers who were not married could not have equal chances to further education. Male teachers had the opportunity to finish their higher degrees in university but we could not. This was because because most female teachers would transfer their jobs after getting married. I was eager to go to a normal university to improve my English teaching ability and, of course, to realise my dream of being a well-educated person. Every year I handed in my application for the entrance exam to be admitted to an open ‘normal’ university to major in English education. It took seven years for the leaders to finally approve my application. This was as a result of my persistence and my high teaching results — both my junior and senior students’ entrance exam results were the highest in my County.  No university or no marriage, that’s the choice. In our culture there is great pressure to marry young. Not getting married early with your family’s support may seem impossible for many young women. You know, as a result of this regulation, most female teachers give up on their jobs, their own careers, and get married.

After my seven years of big effort I realised my dream of going to university, but this had a cost: I got married and gave birth to my daughter at a very old age according to our culture. I was so old to become a wife and a mother at thirty, especially in Yunnan, a remote mountain area of China with twenty-six ethnic minority peoples.

With the university diploma, however, I got the job as a teacher in Simao Teacher’s College in Puer city. My main responsibility was to teach Middle School English Teaching Methodology to English teaching majors. I still have this job today. It really was a big challenge for me at first, to change my role from that of a middle school teacher into a College teacher. As before, I put my heart and soul into studying, to find the right ways to do this job. As you know, however, China is an old country with a very long history of “teacher-centered” ways. This has been, and still is, the one and only popular way to teach every level of student, from primary to secondary, to university. Over the years it has been too hard for me to find any better ways to teach these pre-service students and nobody could help me because all of the teachers work independently, separately.

In 2001 our country began its national educational reform, calling for new methods for the “New Curriculum” and a more humanistic education. But nobody knew how to start this totally new thing in a totally traditional situation. As the methodology course teacher, I worried so much about how to solve this problem and I tried something new I had never tried in class before - I asked students to do some group work after class, as homework, and to present their work in the next lesson. I recognised this to be a good start. It was only part-time “student-centered” but how could I deliver all my lessons in a purely “student-centered” way? This seemed impossible to me.  It really was a challenge and I simply didn’t know how to do it.

When Lesley, a VSO volunteer from the UK, came to our college in 2005 with her family, my opportunity came too. She introduced the aims of VSO: to share skills and to improve lives. She showed me her great willingness to work with me and to co-teach my methodology course. Co-teaching, what’s that? It was so new to me, to everybody in our college, and perhaps to our nation. When I decided to try this new thing, all of my colleagues were so surprised. Some doubted, some displayed very negative attitudes towards me and Lesley. Even the students were surprised and doubtful in the first class. After a short time, however, they loved our co-teaching. Both the students and me benefited so much from this cooperation of ours. They themselves learned how to cooperate, learned how to take responsibilty for their work, becoming more and more positive and creative. We all learned how to reflect on our work and our lives.

It is Lesley who helped me understand the true meaning of “volunteer”. That is: someone who is always ready to give you their hands when you need, without hesitation; someone who is devoted to the work they choose, without complaint; someone who contributes their energy, their skills and professionalism, selflessly; someone who will not give up easily. Here I should say, “Thank you VSO, for sending us such a great volunteer, for saving my work, for giving me a chance to help save so many young souls from the murderous traditional teaching methods of our country, by showing them the right methods—humanistic methods”.

Over these five years Lesley and I have been co-planning, co-teaching, co-training, observing, reflecting and discussing. We have been like two swimmers struggling against the tide, trying our best to show sound results. We have led the way to co-operation, led the way to use new teaching methods—student-centered methods, led the ways to develop the “PIE” project with the help of VSO’s support. Their biggest support has been sending us such a professional trainer - Lesley with a great personality, who made proposals, wrote training workbooks, training plans, delivered the most training course, did the most follow-up. She has visited sixty-five countryside schools and directly helped two hundred and twenty-five rural middle school English teachers. Of them one hundred and eighty are women and two hundred are ethnic minority, meaning they often have fewer chances in education. More than one thousand teachers from other subjects have observed new teaching methods in Lesley’s demonstration lessons and more than eight thousand poor countryside students have been lucky enough to have a lesson with such a ‘humanistic’ teacher, a chance that they might not otherwise have had in their life.

Again, I want to thank VSO for giving me such a chance to learn about rural schools and education with our PIE project. It is the follow-up trips with Lesley that led me to the countryside, to discover the real situation for rural schools. I was shocked so much by the difference in development between city schools and countryside schools - so unbalanced: the former are in heaven compared to the the latter, which are often in hell, in terms of the conditions of teaching and learning, living and playing. I feel so sorrowful and sad for the rural school students and for the teachers. Firstly, it is rare for the teachers to get a chance to receive methods training and to get basic knowledge of education, such as an understanding of pedagogy and psychology, of how to treat children properly. Most of the teachers are unqualified and desperately need relevant guidance. What’s more, female teachers get fewer chances to take training and to study. Most of them don’t have the chance to fight the discrimination. Secondly, not every child can get have the chance to go to school in the first place because of their poverty, especially girls, who are kept on at home to help. As I said before, I was a lucky one. Not everyone is so lucky. Luck isn’t enough. We take our luck and add hard work. This way we can make a difference. VSO has made an immeasurable difference to my life and I can make such a difference to others in return. I hope all the children in the rural areas of Yunnan can have this same chance or at least the right to go to school.
 
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Mr Duan, the training centre caretaker, was a great help to us during our time in Ninger. As well as filling the hot water dispenser up before we arrived every morning and afternoon, and emptying our waste-paper baskets, he helped us break into the TDC when the keys got locked inside. When it came to clearing things up on the last day he spent an hour with Ali, peeling sellotape off the wall where our photo exhibition had been. What's more, he was always the first smiling face we saw in the morning and he was usually the last to leave, locking up the classrooms and tidying up ready for the next day.

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Cooperation and skills-sharing was one of the key topics of the training course in Ninger. Although teachers came in pairs from 13 different schools and centres, they still managed to find out a lot about eachother and I feel confident that they will return as a stronger team. One exercise, used as an 'ice-breaker' is 'Helping Hands'. In pairs they draw round one of each of their hands. They then have to find out skills that their partner has that they don't, which get written in the fingers of their hand. Confused? These activities are much easier to demonstrate than to describe!

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Marcia and Joe getting to know each other during the Helping Hands activity.
 
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Joe was a brave man coming to help out this bunch of teachers, who were completely tied in knots. The activity starts with a pair of teachers, each with a bit of string. They tie the ends of one piece of string to one teacher's wrists (like hand-cuffs) and do the same with their partner, though the partner's string must loop round the first person's string, so they are interlocked. It's one of these activities you have to DO, not SAY. The aim is simple - they must separate. In this group I don't think Anna (in light pink) even knows where her own hands are any more!

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While Xiao Liao and Sue were running the first workshop this morning, Hou Wanxia and I sat in the TDC, reflecting on the training experience. When the Simao Teachers' College and local Education Bureau leaders came to visit yesterday afternoon the trainees gave some very open and moving feedback.
 
Joy, who had just given a model Chinese lesson (the focus of the Team Leader-Trainer practical to follow) shared how she felt about the training. She said that when she arrived for registration last Sunday and saw that foreigners were involved with the training, she was so disappointed. Joy said it was like being dropped into icy water. She was shocked and in disbelief that we could deliver a course, not only to teachers but to Chinese school leaders. Within a day, she added, she was engrossed with our activities, the materials and our training ways. Having Wanxia and Xiao Liao here, working as a team and having the support of the training centre has made this one of the most enjoyable trainings I've done.

I've still managed to make lots of notes in the book, however, for how to improve it next time. Our main drive over the coming months is to translate as many of the materials as possible into Chinese, so that we can continue to reach out to teachers and leaders, regardless of English (or our Chinese) language skills.

 
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I came up with a simple but very effective strategy for surviving my first telephone interview yesterday, with the British Council in Malaysia. Yes, this interview was a well-kept secret! While waiting 20 minutes for the scheduled call (they had been given the wrong number internally) I doodled some figures along the top of my notepad. These were to be revealed as my interview panel. Jill seemed to be in charge and Emily and David were Senior Teachers in the Penang Centre. There are a number of odd things about a telephone interview. Firstly, and obviously, you can't see their faces. This means that there's no way to read whether they're even listening, never mind whether they're frowning because you've misinterpreted a question or such like. I found myself rewording and checking questions more carefully than in the past, in order to check I had the right end of the stick. What's more, the words seem more 'weighty' as they fall in the silence. The interviewers must keep quiet or there is too much interference on the line. There's no "mmm", "uhuh", "I see" from the other end. At one point I thought we might have been cut off! The interview lasted 45 minutes and I was quite happy to put the phone down at the end. I'm very glad I had this experience and I know I will do a million times better next time.

The job? Full-time English Teacher. The outcome? They will let me know in a week's time. My feelings? I've just sent an email to Singapore, withdrawing my application. I love teaching but I don't want to give up training. 'Pure' ELT is not for me at the moment and in this job there wouldn't be scope for anything else. I still very much want to work for the British Council, or another teaching and training organisation, but I would like to maintain a training role, even a small one. That's what I am doing these days and I love it.

 
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When a local government official (dressed in a tracksuit) turned up at the College recently with CCTV, looking for a foreigner, we thought it was just another 5-minute interview they were after. It wouldn't have been the first time we've made a cheesy "we love Pu'er" appearance. As it happens, this government employer was arranging the production of a 7-million yuan television feature on Pu'er, to be broadcast round the clock on May Day, when much of the nation will be putting their feet up in front of the TV. We all failed the audition, except for Ali, who inspired them to take a more subtle approach to representing an appreciation of tea. Rather than having a band of us dressed up in minority costumes speaking poor Chinese, they opted to have a "handsome, cool guy" sitting in a cafe on a rainy day, glancing at a passer-by as the best Pu'er tea in the Province slips smoothly down his throat. It took at least an hour and a half to set up his scene (with a crew of 20+) but only 15 minutes to shoot, as Ali took to his new career like a duck to water.

Speaking of ducks, they're growing every day and spend their time at the training centre splashing around in puddles and playing with wet leaves. We may need a larger box to get them back to Simao.

Oh, did the 7 million include Ali's pay? Not in cash, but they did deliver a 6-kilo bag of fantastic tea cakes to the centre last night, by way of thanks.

 
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Yesterday morning, during Sue and Xiao Liao's Inclusion workshop, trainees had to roleplay a scene where someone was excluded. [see above] The second roleplay was to show the concept of 'inclusion'. The group showed how a whole community should pull together to keep the environment clean - not just leave it to the cleaners to pick up the rubbish. You can imagine how disappointed I was to find the classroom littered with plastic bags, tissues and paper cups at the end of the day. The most shocking thing was, however, that when I started to help the caretaker tidy up their mess, several trainees said to me: "Lesley, you can just leave that. There is a cleaner to do that." Meantime, the cleaner was busy rearranging desks and chairs to help me. I didn't hold back in telling them how upset I was by this. I pointed the bin out and asked them to help. Today there were only 3 paper cups at the end of the morning.

 
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Yesterday, at Mengyang's morning market, as I was eating some delicious Dai-style kaoyu (bbq fish) stuffed with finely chopped chillies, spring onions and fragrant xiang liao herb, Lao Yang's Dad and the children nipped off to buy something. When they returned it seemed that someone (Freda, Edie, Lao Yang?) had persuaded him to buy them a duckling each. Quite good value at Y3 (less than 30p) each. All we have to do now is fatten them up on ground up maize mash and we can cook up a fine dinner in a few months...ha, just joking - I'm not sure Fluffy and Doudou will suffer that fate (though you never know!). We spent this morning clearing out the shed and setting aside a corner for our new pets. So far they've proven to be a bit of a hit around the college, follwing the girls around and swimming around in the pond. All we have to do now is worry about directly contravening VSO's avian flu advice, warning about contact with live poultry!