Dear friends and family,

Ni hao. Wo shi Joanna. Ni jiao shen me? Jian dao ni hen gao xing! Ni hen piao liang/shuai. Wo shi mei guo ren. Wo xiang zuo yi ge zhong guo ren! Hahaha that means "Hello. I am Joanna. What are you called? It's nice to meet you! You are very beautiful/handsome. I am an American person. I want to be a Chinese person!"

Well the last two weeks have flown by. I can't believe we have already been here for a month! Instead of saying "I'm going to be here for six months," now I can only say "I'm going to be here for five more months." This is strange to think about! He has been stretching us in many different ways, especially over the past week.

Last week we started teaching in the English Conversation Department as well as being involved in the English House program. Both of these programs are going on throughout the month of July. There are several teams from the US and Canada that are here as volunteers as well, so we have been working with them. Jeanna and I are both teaching Elementary 3: Life English. Thankfully, this is one of the only elective classes for the summer, so thestudents in my class actually chose to be there. Most of the other classes are for people who failed university requirements throughout the school year. It is interesting to get up in front of a class when I have never taught before! But He is good and is giving me the ability (hopefully...they just took their first test today, so I guess I'll see how well I taught them!). This was the thing I was most nervous about coming over here, so I'm glad that I am surviving it! Haha. I am only teaching one class and it is only one hour per day. And this is really good practice for the fall when we will be teaching in the Continuing Education department, which will be for two hours a day.

So despite the fact that we are only teaching one class, all the planning and grading and office stuff keeps us quite busy. Add that to the English House program, and we are pretty much busy all the time... This is a program in which about 160 students from YUST get to live with a native English speaker for a month. I have three girls in my room, and Jeanna has five. I think all of mine are Korean Chinese, but I am not sure. There are several activities that we do with them throughout the week as well as living with them, and the main focus is trying to build relationships. I have to keep reminding myself that it has only been a week and friendships are not built overnight! A lot of times I will feel a lot of progress with my girls and then none. I am trying to yarp for them a lot. One of them has a copy of dad's word and goes to his house every week, but seems uncomfortable talking about it at this point. I was showing them music on my computer and she handed me a copy of the lyrics to a song (one of her teachers will print out lyrics and have them fill in the blanks) and it was a Third Day song. She asked me if I had it and I did! So she wanted to have that song, and that was really cool. Later I played some more of their music after making sure it wouldn't bother the other girls in the room. I don't know if it will have any effect, but I think it may at least provide a good atmosphere.

We have had fun times with the girls; last week we went out to dinner and went bowling, and that was the first time they had ever gone bowling! It was really fun, and I hope we can continue doing stuff like that. It's difficult though because they usually are either studying or sleeping. In a normal semester, the students will take around 24 credit hours! So even inthe summer they are overloaded and they study, study, study all the time! And if they are not studying, they are sleeping, probably because they are so overloaded from studying. And I never want to interrupt them while they are doing the things they need to do... so I have to try to be sensitive to that kind of thing. The other night the girls wanted to watch High SchoolMusical and afterwards one of them talked to me for awhile about high school and college in America versus in China. I think I got some interesting information for my ethnography study! But the emphasis on education here is just all-consuming.

Something else that has been a struggle has been our language lessons. We had several lessons with our tutor but she is having an operation so she has to go home for the rest of the summer, which means we have to find a new tutor. I don't feel like I have learned a lot, but I have been able to use a lot of what I've learned, which is good. And I think I won't start learning a lot of vocabulary until I understand the tones better. So, overall, I guess Chinese is as hard as I expected it to be! But we focused on learning how to get around the city and ask for things. So now we can take a taxi by ourselves and go several places (or else take the bus, if we can find it) and order some food and bargain a little bit. This is all very exciting for us after having felt helpless for so long! But if you could continue yarping that we would have an understanding of the language, it would be greatly appreciated!

Something else I need yarping for is our food situation here at the university. Everyone who lives here says that the Korean food at the school cafeteria is just not good, and lately, it has really been getting to me. I like a lot of the food here (I even found a Korean dish at a restaurant that tastes exactly like American Chinese sweet and sour chicken! which apparently isn't really Chinese at all...), and it's really just the cafeteria food that isn't good. Sometimes it is so hard to eat, and it is the last thing I want to be eating! But it is free for this month, so I am trying to eat it as much as possible to save money, and also because I want to be identifying with the students. So... teaching is stretching, the food is stretching... and let me tell you, the freezing cold community showers are extremely stretching! Haha. Actually, I bought all the same bowls and thermoses and things that all the girls use to bring hot water up from downstairs to take sponge baths... so I feel like I am identifying with them. And our rooms are on the sixth floor, so I am getting a real workout here...

Well anyway, thank you for all your encouragement and yarpers! Please continue yarping for our relationships. The English House is a really unique program for relationship-building, and I want to use my time wisely and invest myself in my girls as well as my students.

Zai jian! (Goodbye!)

In him,

Joanna