Christina in China

Due to laziness, I’ve forgotten to post about several important things (i.e. my weeklong SALT orientation in Akron, PA), so I’m going to introduce something fun called a “retro post.” A post from the past, if you will.

So, SALT orientation. In case you don’t remember, SALT is one of the groups that I’m working with for my time in China. SALT stands for “Serving and Learning Together” and is a program focusing on language study, host family living, and service stuff. There are 18-20something people going to the Caribbean, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, and before we went, we all spent a very good week in the teeny, slightly-bigger-than-Houghton-sized town called Akron, PA, where MCC’s headquarters is.

MCC has a little village called the “Welcoming Place” there: little houses with dorm-style rooms, except way cooler. The “village” has four houses: Africa House, Asia House, Latin America House, and Europe/Middle East House. (I didn’t take pictures, but I’ll be there for the re-entry retreat next year, so I’ll take some there.) Each house is decorated with Ten Thousand Villages crafts made in each different region, so there were neat tapestries on the walls, carving, books of pictures from each region, clothes hung up on the walls, etc. I was entranced. I have a new silly dream, folks, in addition to my other silly dreams: Writing a book, visiting all seven continents (three down, four to go!), learning to bake, living abroad long-term (check!). There are others that I can’t remember, but oh well. Anyway. My new silly dream is, when I eventually have a little house or a little apartment, to have different rooms decorated in crafts from different countries, preferably that I bought myself in my visits to said countries. But yes. SALT orientation.

I’ve been impressed with MCC throughout the entire process but was more impressed with MCC during my time there. The first few days, I felt a bit out-of-it but gradually got to know the others there a little bit. It was cool to sit around a dinner table and stand around and drink tea with people who love God, who are compassionate and aware about international issues, who are very intelligent and interesting, and yet fun to be around.

The orientation was very good–run by a lady named Eva, who is over the SALT Program, and is very good at it, being a native of the former Czechoslovakia and having moved to the U.S. over ten years ago. She was very candid, talking about being in a new place where, when you open your mouth, everyone knows you’re not a native. Feeling frustrated and angry with people in a different culture. Going from being a well-educated college professor in her home country to going to the U.S. and working menial jobs. Plus, she is very funny, dryly funny, and had some really good insights about life abroad and getting over your rich-American-guilt-trip complex. A favorite quote, paraphrased: “We can empower others by allowing them to give to us.” Every day, we went to the conference room and had worship led by SALTers (which was also wonderful–a mix of favorite Menno Group songs, favorite Houghton worship songs, and favorite First Church songs–also with good prayers and meditations) and then had sessions about cross-cultural adjustment/communication, spirituality, sessions about MCC, personality types (I’m an Extrovert Intuitive Feeling Perceiving), and, surprisingly, some really moving ones about racism awareness.

We got to see the place where they store the relief kits and donated things (Menno Groupers: I saw where our school kits go), see the offices, and visit the gigundo Ten Thousand Villages Store, where they have everything from necklaces to furniture. And the SALTers had dinner at the Tea Room there, with good international food and tea and Mexican chocolate cake. Some of the tables were close to the floor so that we could sit on pillows, something I’d always wanted to do.

So now I have people I know that are all over the world: Shalom, an applied linguistics major and Victoria, BC, native, in Cambodia teaching English; Trisha, an engineering major from Toronto in Hong Kong doing computer work for a company that connects human rights groups; Patrick, a nurse from Ontario, in Bangladesh; Judy, a history major who’s doing editing work in Vietnam; Emily, who’s in Zambia living in a village and teaching English to pastors. Pretty neat thing, and I’ll see them again in a year, when we have many more stories to tell.

On the last day, the president of MCC talked to us, and then Emily, Nelson, Judy, and I led worship. We had a corporate confession of sin, sang songs (“How Deep the Father’s Love for Us,” a Taize chorus from the Iona Community, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” and “The King of Love My Shepherd Is”), said the Prayer of St. Francis, and were led in a meditation exercise from The Celebration of Discipline. And then we sang the doxology, all of us, a capella: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise him all creatures here below, praise him above ye heavenly host, praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.”

Amen.

This morning, I read this article (one of the headline articles on Yahoo, which automatically pops up on my computer) about the growing gap between rich and poor in China. I would recommend giving it a read; I think it’s a pretty well-written article.

This is something I’ve been able to observe here, even in my short time so far. In Beijing and Chengdu, I saw technology and relative wealth to rival that of the U.S., but last weekend, on a trip to Nanchong, a city a few hours away, I saw the other side of this. Farmers’ houses, some even made of mud and mud-bricks, which Eunice told me was a sign of the poorest farmers. CCTV9, the English channel, features shows on travel, art, culture, and other things that tell about a growing number of rich elite in this country, but even just a thirty-minute walk away from campus brings me in contact with manual laborers (“workers”), women and men digging through trash to get the recyclable paper or plastic bottles in order to get some money from turning them in, farmers who definitely don’t buy designer shoes or hand-tailored silk clothes or BMWs.

A couple Sundays ago, a lady at the Jiangyou church was talking to Eunice. She was a social worker from Beijing and was talking about her recent trip to Gansu Province, north of Sichuan, sandwiched in-between Sichuan, Qinghai (which borders on Tibet), and Inner Mongolia. The farmers in Gansu, the social worker said, were the poorest in China, and she said that she was afraid that if something didn’t happen soon, there might be an uprising.

There are definitely big differences between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” between businesspeople who send their kids to private schools and the less affluent, some of whom can’t even pay the fees to send their kids to primary school (elementary school). Thoughts to ponder. And definitely to pray about.

I had a week after I arrived in Jiangyou to settle in a little before I started teaching. I had to go to Chengdu (about three hours drive) for a medical exam in order to get my visa changed ... [Continue reading this entry]

Before I go further, I guess I should write a little about this crazy place I'm living. I may have blogged before about this, but the word that epitomizes my China experience so far is "contrast." Jiangyou fits ... [Continue reading this entry]

My first few days in Jiangyou felt very full and very strange--but a good kind of strange. The kind of little-kid excitement that I normally have, except up another level. My apartment is not bad--in fact, sometimes I ... [Continue reading this entry]

Four days and a bit less jet lag later, I got to board a plane from Beijing to Chengdu, the closest airport city to Jiangyou. This was my first experience with intra-China air travel, and it mostly went smoothly. ... [Continue reading this entry]