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Frank Vukovich writes...

...about his experiences while volunteering in China.

Greetings from China,the land of 1.3 billion smiling faces!

Sadly I'm coming to the last week of my stay in Yantai,a coastal city in China's Shandong province where I'm doing a month long stint as a volunteer teacher. I'm teaching English as a second language at a Middle School which is equivalent to a Senior secondary school in Canada.While I may be used to the age group I can assure you that almost everything else is different. Golden Valley School at home is a pre-k to Secondary five school with a total population of almost 400. Middle School#4 has between 2000-3000 students.(No two people have the same answer.) The students are all between 15 and 19 years of age and come in portions of anywhere between 45 and 70. My 20 classes and I have 6 of them range in size from 48 to 64. In China you very quickly adjust yourself to the fact that small means something very different than what you are used to. Yantai for example with a population of 7 000 0000 and rising is considered to be a small city and doesn't even rate a weather forecast on the national news.

The classrooms needless to say are wall to wall and adding to the claustophobic atmosphere is the fact that the students have no lockers. ALL their texts and workbooks for all their classes are piled to Everest heights on top of their desks.In China audio-visual is a term used to describe the Teacher and not the equipment available in the classroom. I am limited to two ancient blackboards which probably date back to the Cultural Revolution if not the Great Leap Forward, all the pieces of crumbling chalk that I could possible want, use or inhale and a worn out brush which my students can do wonders with.

Having said all that, teaching has been a true delight. The students are without exception a joy to be with. Initially shy they were always polite warm and friendly and after the first week more open and at ease with this foreign devil from the land of the white snow, Avril Lavigne,and Dr Norman Bethune.For the most part they are very eager to learn and to improve their English and they each have their own dream, their personal hope for the future that they are always willing to share with you in conversation.

Their school schedule is gut wrenching and would provoke a revolution in either Canada or the U.K. Classes begin at 7:20 A.M. The kids who live in the school get up at 6am every morning.There are about 700 students who live in the school during the week and go home "weekends." We even hear basketballs as early as 5:30 some mornings - when the "we love basketball" group tries to get a few shots in before breakfast.In any case their classes are 40 minutes long and they have a 10 minute break in-between during which time some students prepare the classroom for the next teacher by cleaning the blackboards etc. There's a 20 minute break at around 10pm when the whole school goes out to go an exercise drill which is more arobics rather than traditional Ti-Chi.

It's then back for periods 4&5 of the morning before a lunch break which runs from 11:35 to 1:50pm. Before starting the 6th period the school yard and the hallways and the stairs are swept and cleaned by the students on a rotation basis. The boys are also responsible for bringing up the large bottles of water for the water coolers in each of the class rooms. There are 4 more periods in the afternoon bringing the total to 9 before the supper break at 5:10. I do say supper break because they are back in class at 6pm with 2 double periods of 80 minutes each which end at 9pm. Students then go home and those who stay here head for the dorms. At 9 pm there's usually a half hour of running and shouting followed by a half hour of quiet time and the light generally go out for the students at either 10 or 10:30pm. This runs not only from Monday to Friday but also Saturday until 5pm and Sunday from 6-9pm. Phew!!!!!!!!

When asked what they think about it all one of my students simply said that she thought that it was too much but that China was not a developed country like Canada so they had to work harder. She added that if she wanted to get into a good university such as Beijing then she had to have very good marks because of the competition for the limited number of places. With the workload and pressure they depend on one another for support and friendship. The class as one boy said was a family.

China itself is a true combination of ying and yang. The warm and friendly faces which greet me in the market place each morning and evening and the true beauty of the places that I have travelled to on weekends stand side by side with the pollution in the air above China's largest cities and the litter on the ground that one still too often sees.The litter I must admit does mostly get swept up by the legion of street sweepers that patrol the streets by both day and night. The wind however does manage to create havoc with platic bags tossing them into bushes and trees and out of human reach. Still China is making an effort. Trees are being planted everywhere and as one young man who I meet on a train journey said, "You should have been here 10 years ago."

The poverty in the countryside where agriculture like is still very labour intensive stands next to the exploding skyline of urban China where buildings seem to pop up like mushrooms dwarfing old city neighbours. In the countryside one can still glimpse the old China of Pearl Buck. Tilling the soil is still a back breaking task. Women and men still pull ploughs with little evidence of great numbers of oxen let alone tractors. Mechanized agriculture is left to the large agricultural corporations which seem to have some equipment but they too still depend on large quantities of China's most plentiful resource, human labour. In the cities traditional street markets with all their colour smells and flavours now compete with the KFC's, Big Macs, Cosco's, and Wal Marts of the world.

But make no mistake about it China is truly on the move. Construction is everywhere. New apartment buildings are being built a score at a time. Hey with China's new families of three- one size truly fits all. Cities are sprawling in all directions as rural China migrates into the urban centers. Motorways are extended and enlarged as the automobile begins to replace the bicycle and bus.Being here you can hardly not realize that the dragon is not only stirring but rising to its feet. Much of the first half of this century will I feel be about how China deals with the many challenges it will face and how the rest of the world perceives and reacts to the new player on the block.

In the streets of Yantai however it's still about day to day living. The old street market seems unchanged. Competition is keen. To sell meams to survive. Each stall has it's own competitive edge whether it's location, reputation, quality, price, or a winning smile. Your ability to bargain is of course tested but when the prices are so low and the faces so friendly their need always seems greater than mine. Their smiles and hellos are there whether I buy or not. The sense of home and belonging albeit even for a short time is palatable. It's a good place to spend some time before I'm launched into the world of China Tourism at weeks end.

I'm off to Beijing at the end of the week just in time for May Day celebrations and then I'll join Imaginative Travellers - a British tour group for a two week journey through China which will take me to the Great Wall,the Forbidden City,to Xian and the Tarracotta Warriors, the Longman Grottoes of Luoyang, the Three Gorges of the Yangtse and the hills of Guilin before heading back via Hong Kong to Canada and a very patient and loving wife who is willing to put up with a husband with a gypsy soul.

To those of you more accustomed to more personal letters from me my apologies for this group mailing. I will always remember someone I met aboard the Maestral in old Yugoslavia. The moment he stepped on board for a two week cruise he had the barman give him 25 postcards and stamps. He sat down at a table; whipped out 25 pre-adressed stick-on-labels; and slapped them on the cards. On each card he wrote "I'm having a wonderful time! Wish you were here! - Peter".He affixed the twenty-five stamps to the cards and stepped ashore to mail them.He returned before the others even unpacked and flopped into a chair ordered a beer and sighed "There now I can relax!"