It's been years since my little obsession with Japan began, and I had a chance to live there for a year as a high school exchange student back in '99, then decided to seal my fate and major in Japanese, so if someone had told me that I'd be living in Hunan now, I'd have been shocked and depressed that my little dream world of Chrissy-becomes-Japanese-and-the-whole-country-loves-her wouldn't come true! :)

Anyways, after studying Japanese for a long time I was really interested in learning about where the kanji all came from and also thought that Chinese sounded so cool with all the tones, so I signed up for some Chinese classes and was hooked after the first semester. I ended up going to Beijing the next summer to take more Chinese. We had absolutely no free time to explore the city because the study load was so intense (it only took a week or so before the PIB program stood for "Prison in Beijing"), but what really made an impact on me was seeing the mixture of extreme wealth and poverty in the city, with immigrants from impoverished areas coming to cities to serve the new wealthy populace. I was shocked to find out that the waitresses at our favorite restaurant actually lived in the restaurant on little cots, and I often saw the myriads of construction workers just sleeping on the street or in makeshift tents with plastic sheets. That memory kind of stuck in my mind the next year and I researched about some poverty issues in China, but the more I read, the less I felt I understood...

To make a long story longer, I found this great volunteer program ("China Summer Workcamp") online while searching for information for a paper and was absolutely set on becoming a member. It was great because there were volunteers from the US, Japan, Korea, and China, and it'd be helpful to have volunteers who spoke those languages. The workcamp is in a small village in eastern Hunan where volunteers spend a month giving language classes and environmental education to local kids for a month. It was a wonderful, exciting month, and toward the end I was sensing impending misery at the idea of going back to start the job I'd gotten when I found out that they had dreamed of starting an all-girls school in the village for a long time but needed an English teacher... and the rest is history!

Now I've been in Hunan for about 6 months, and we just finished the first semester at the "Phoenix School for Girls." It's been a wonderful experience, albeit an emotional roller coaster, and I'm excited to have a place to write more about it!