From Chaos at School to Typhoon Nuri

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Wow! What a week!!! From chaos at school to Typhoon Nuri. This last week was spent “scrambling” trying to get our classroom and curriculum ready for school to start on Thursday. We finally got our class lists on Tuesday and most of our textbooks…still short some. Tom’s schedule of what he is actually teaching continued to change up until Wed. night. The name of the game here is, “Be Flexible.” Thursday morning the students arrived in a crowded noisy gym eager to find us teachers. I have a great class of 16. (I think. It could change next week.) One from France, Israel, Singapore, Taiwan, Seychellois (islands near Madagascar which belong to Australia), Brazil, Germany, the US; and the rest from Korea. A good group of kids who are very sweet. I observed 3 of my boys on the playground helping the younger kids to play on a zip line type of equipment. They took turns and lifted the little one up and made sure the zip line handle returned to the next kid. Tom’s group of students changed again after the first day, but we survived our first ½ day.

Then came Typhoon Nuri and school was closed on Friday. This was a huge relief for all of us. It gave us a chance to regroup. Tom and I went down to the school to get our books and lesson plan stuff to work on before the rain and stronger winds came. The weather was not too bad until late afternoon. We heard the crash of a marquee falling from a restaurant behind our building. I actually saw the 2nd part of it fall and almost hit a worker. Wind was howling in our apt. complex hallway through the emergency door at the end. Tom took some tape and covered the bottom. That helped some. Then at midnight it really hit. The wind was really howling. It was so noisy….we got very little sleep. No one in our area was reported injured, but 8 in Hong Kong were injured. Nuri was the worse typhoon to hit Hong Kong (including us) in 5 years and that was enough for us!

On Saturday we took a bus to downtown Shenzhen to look for some equipment for school. We went into areas that we decided we would not return to….crowded and dirty. We ate lunch at McDonald’s (one of the few places that looked “safe” to eat) and it wasn’t too bad. It was the first McDonald’s established in mainland China back in 1990. (Mao is rolling in his mausoleum.) For a combo meal, it was about $3.00 each.

Tonight (Sunday) we will watch the Closing Ceremony of the Olympics.