Friday, July 18, 2008

A Typical Day

Hello again everybody, long time no post. That's because I left my camera charger in Xian with George!! So I haven't really been able to take pictures...but i just recently found a replacement charger for my camera so I'm back in business.

So a lot has happened since my last post. So today was the last day of a week of teaching at a Migrant Workers' kids school in a district in Shanghai. Here is some basic background information about migrant workers in China:

China's explosive economy is only reaching a small minority of the population. Much of the rural areas remain undeveloped, so people hungry for opportunity flock to the big cities to work. However, Shanghai and Beijing operate under 户口 systems. Without a 户口,basically legal documentation proving that you are a Shanghai or Beijing resident, you can't get any of the higher paying jobs in the city. Moreover, your kids don't get discounted education at schools in the city, so migrant workers have to pay extremely high fees to send their children to schools in the city.

As a response, migrant worker communities sometimes build their own schools for their own children. Needless to say, the conditions of these schools are much worse than for other Shanghainese kids. Further, these kids after they finish elementary school have no guarantee of even making it to middle school since middle school enrollment is by lottery, and these migrant kids do not get priority. Migrant workers are treated as second class citizens in their own country. Some people have even compared it to the apartheid system in South Africa since the discrimination is more or less institutionalized.

So it's to one of these schools that we went with a bunch of Fudan students to teach English and run a summer camp for a week. Here is a typical day
6am wakeup for DT...way too early, but this week we had no choice. Here is our hotel room that we're staying in for 6 weeks.

Breakfast: waking up early is worth it because of the breakfast here. Every morning we're greeted with hot fresh steamed buns right next to our hotel at this bun shop. There's everything from veggie buns to spicy meat buns to daikon buns. We usually get two or three and an iced soy milk. I don't know if you can read it but each bun is about 0.7元,which is about 10 cents USD. So basically we get breakfast for like a quarter every morning!!

We get to the bus station, a 20 min. walk from our hotel at 8am sharp every morning.
we run class every day for the kids. Class starts at 9am with a lunch break at 11, and it ends at 4. Every day felt like a very long and crazy springfest. Today was a short day so we prepared some t-shirts for them to decorate with acrylic paint. Some of them are very artistic.







It was really sad to say goodbye to them. In many ways they are the forgotten and disregarded of this society, but to God they are as every bit as precious as anyone else. Our DT through Isaiah 1 was very timely-- to encourage the oppressed and to give a voice and plead the case for those who have no voice or power in society.

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