Would you rather have a Beemer, a Lexus, or freedom?
That’s from some hip hop song, I would say most Chinese would choose the first two, or a Mercedes. They may settle for an Audi. Freedom? I was chatting with the office kids that I teach English to [really its more chatting than teaching because their English is already pretty good] and we were talking about the cultural revolution and I was saying that I heard that more people died in china from the start of the “great leap forward” [ironically a giant leap back] to the end of the cultural revolution [like 1950s to 1976] than in WW1, WW2, and the Vietnam war combined… my students said, no that wasn’t possible. I asked how do you know? They said, my parents lived through it! I said, but they wouldn’t know how many people died altogether? They said no but I’ve read it when I studied history. I said the government wrote your history books, right? Right. And that same government lied about how many died as a result of SARS, right? OK, you’re right, we don’t really know how many people died. Anyway, thought it was interesting. I’m trying to teach them about the exciting world of healthcare research, we just read an article from the Economist which was challenging to me and them [ha!] and they really just want to know if what they watch on American movies is really how American life is. They specifically mentioned “American Pie” I had to shamelessly agree that that movie can be a realistic portrait of American life…
I would like to write more about my Gansu trip but I think I summed it up well in my last email… photos are coming, I promise. I’ve been slacking on my blogging, photo uploading, emailing in general due to the fact that I seem to be actually working now, which is a happy change. It’s nice to have two part time jobs. The healthcare teaching is going pretty well, I like teaching to an extent. It turns out the book I got for the beginning class is way above their level and I’m going to have to go get a little kiddie book and start with the basic basics, like talking about the weather, before we can start introducing each other and talking about what department we work in. But its going well.
Hui Ling is an interesting experience… working in a Chinese NGO, well I would say our motto is to reinvent the wheel, each time a little different, sometimes the wheel goes around, sometimes we just pretend it goes around and still ask for money. Currently we are discussing a commission based pay schedule, which me and Chris [the Belgium guy I work with] are strongly opposed to, and my father calls “but unethical and strongly discouraged.” Our new executive director seems to think that the only way to evaluate our progress as the development office is by the money we bring in, so we should get paid accordingly, not as a team, but as individuals. I am sure you are thinking, how would that work? Why would it be effective to have us be working against each other to bring in the most amount of money? This pay schedule might be effective if we were in telemarketing, but not development. Chris and I decided to change the name of our office to ‘Show me the money department’. In the end, it doesn’t matter too much to me, because James is still paying me enough, but it does dishearten me that I am on such a different page than my boss. My current project is to write a newsletter to keep not only the local community informed [and reminded that we need money!] about Hui Ling but also to gather the email addresses of the honky’s that come to visit us and then ask them for donations like at Christmas. So although this won’t turn into immediate money, it seems like something we need… anyway, working in China can be frustrating. Sometimes I feel like everything I do here is so new and it’s the first time and therefore such a challenge, such an uphill battle, I miss the sophistication of the US. Of course if I were in the US at an NGO I might be totally entrenched in the over sophistication of the organization, stuck somewhere counting staples… who knows. In any case it’s a good experience and McDonald’s coffee is keeping me going.
Ok, I feel carpel tunnel coming on, I got to get out on this beautiful Saturday and go for a bike ride.
Hope everyone is well. Apologies again for not blogging more often. It’s a busy life I lead!
I would like to write more about my Gansu trip but I think I summed it up well in my last email… photos are coming, I promise. I’ve been slacking on my blogging, photo uploading, emailing in general due to the fact that I seem to be actually working now, which is a happy change. It’s nice to have two part time jobs. The healthcare teaching is going pretty well, I like teaching to an extent. It turns out the book I got for the beginning class is way above their level and I’m going to have to go get a little kiddie book and start with the basic basics, like talking about the weather, before we can start introducing each other and talking about what department we work in. But its going well.
Hui Ling is an interesting experience… working in a Chinese NGO, well I would say our motto is to reinvent the wheel, each time a little different, sometimes the wheel goes around, sometimes we just pretend it goes around and still ask for money. Currently we are discussing a commission based pay schedule, which me and Chris [the Belgium guy I work with] are strongly opposed to, and my father calls “but unethical and strongly discouraged.” Our new executive director seems to think that the only way to evaluate our progress as the development office is by the money we bring in, so we should get paid accordingly, not as a team, but as individuals. I am sure you are thinking, how would that work? Why would it be effective to have us be working against each other to bring in the most amount of money? This pay schedule might be effective if we were in telemarketing, but not development. Chris and I decided to change the name of our office to ‘Show me the money department’. In the end, it doesn’t matter too much to me, because James is still paying me enough, but it does dishearten me that I am on such a different page than my boss. My current project is to write a newsletter to keep not only the local community informed [and reminded that we need money!] about Hui Ling but also to gather the email addresses of the honky’s that come to visit us and then ask them for donations like at Christmas. So although this won’t turn into immediate money, it seems like something we need… anyway, working in China can be frustrating. Sometimes I feel like everything I do here is so new and it’s the first time and therefore such a challenge, such an uphill battle, I miss the sophistication of the US. Of course if I were in the US at an NGO I might be totally entrenched in the over sophistication of the organization, stuck somewhere counting staples… who knows. In any case it’s a good experience and McDonald’s coffee is keeping me going.
Ok, I feel carpel tunnel coming on, I got to get out on this beautiful Saturday and go for a bike ride.
Hope everyone is well. Apologies again for not blogging more often. It’s a busy life I lead!
posted by Claire at 1:51 AM
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