I’m sorry for my absence. I made it a priority to blog when I first arrived in Hong Kong. But things started to get busy, as I signed up for two volunteer projects – one teaching English phonics to 10-year-old kids and the other visiting a shelter for battered foreign domestic helpers – and I’ve been stretched in a few different directions. In the last week, I’ve attempted to refocus on my number one priority. This year, that priority is improving my Chinese reading and writing. This is truly a labor of love. It is something I must do every day. And so, I’ve had my head (and hand) buried in Chinese characters pretty much every day. The work is starting to pay off. Yesterday, I read through a Chinese newspaper article without a dictionary and understood it.

Teaching phonics at the elementary school has been really interesting. For one, the kids are pretty badly behaved. You’d think that the Chinese kids are disciplined, respect authority, and are good students. Well, not all of them. In Hong Kong, as the phonics teacher told us volunteers, the students are very different from the immaculately behaved children in mainland China classrooms. In this modern Asian city, perhaps the Confucian idea of respecting your elders is not up kept. Then again, it’s not like the kids in China are that much better these days. I’ve witnessed one too many “little princes” 小王子 growing up in this era of China’s one-child policy.

The kids can get out of control in this classroom of 30 students to 1 teacher. That’s why they have the volunteers. One volunteer to a table of 4 children, to help keep things in control and to help the kids with the phonics training. The boys are rascals. They can’t sit still. There is endless chatter as the teacher speaks. Fights have broken out – punches were exchanged and homework sheets were ripped up. The girls are much better. But the ruckus at the boys’ tables is distracting. The kids have a lot of attitude. It seems to come with the Cantonese culture, and the very language itself.

Still, teaching this is incredibly rewarding. By the second lesson, the girls were calling me “Missy” – which is what the Hong Kong-nese call their female teachers. It helps that I speak Cantonese, because the kids aren’t able to fully function in English. I can switch from Cantonese to English as we fill out the activity sheets or do a dictation. It’s been a stimulating challenge for me.

I’m traveling to Holland this week for a friend’s wedding and a much anticipated reunion with a good number of friends from all around the world who are also flying in for the wedding. I’ll keep twitter updated as much as I can while I’m gone.

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