Kids, kids, and more kids!! - Week 2

By: Elizabeth Zhang

I woke up extra early on Monday morning, wanting to get to school early to get ready for our lessons this week. I honestly was pretty nervous because we were starting our extracurricular classes and moving on from introductions in the English classes. However, I was surprised when I received the text notifying us that school was canceled because of flooding! I was honestly really grateful for this extra day to spend with my host family before our busy week started.

My host parents went to work early in the morning, and my youngest host brother was with his grandparents. Arthur and I headed over to their family friend’s house to hang out with his friend, Jordon (a 7th grader), and their other neighbors. They’re all really close with their neighbors so they always have a bunch of kids over. Jordon’s mom took us to the mall for lunch, and we ended up eating at Burger King. I’m not sure what it is about the fast food in China, but I think I like it better than the fast food in America. The McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC fast food restaurants have many different burgers, egg tarts, milk tea, and even Peking duck wrap! I love how the different foods in these universal fast food restaurants reflect the culture it’s store is located in.

After living with my host family for a week, I’ve finally started getting used to the constant shouting and screaming from my two host siblings and the other kiddos who come over. Most of the time the boys just play with each other, and I end up trying to be the peace maker, making sure they don’t fight. But other times, Arthur (the older one) asks me to play soccer with him or build things with his legos together. To be honest I wasn’t sure if they really liked me at first. They didn’t seem to really mind me living with them, so at least they were not upset about me potentially taking attention away from their parents. On Friday night, I got back home kind of late because we went out to celebrate Evan’s birthday. I was expecting the kids to be asleep, but I was shocked when I came back home to Arthur waiting for me to build something with him with his legos. He recently got a new pack of legos that had instructions to build a boat, helicopter, and a plane, so we’ve been building a different one every day. It honestly made me really happy knowing that he wanted to share something he loved with me! In six year old language, him sharing toys with me definitely means I’ve reached friend level. I hope to get closer with them as the weeks go by!

This week we started teaching our extracurricular classes. I taught film with Wes on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday and sports with Andrew, Evan, Jill, and Shelsea on Tuesday. I got sick on Wednesday, so I wasn’t there for the first sports class, but the film classes went by pretty smoothly. The first week was mostly coming up with film ideas, plannings, and dividing the class into groups. Film class is in a computer lab, so each kid has access to a desktop. When we asked each kid why they wanted to be in this class, a lot of them gave the same answer, “I like to play computer games.” We knew the kids would be tempted to just play games on the computers, so we locked all the computer screens using the main desktop. However, a few kids were still able to figure out how to unlock it and still access the computers. After warning them to stop using the computers for other things, most of them stopped. Hopefully this won’t be a big issue but besides that, I am really excited to see how this week goes in my extracurricular classes!

It was Evan’s birthday on Friday, so we decided to surprise him with a Hawaii (because he’s from Hawaii) themed birthday party. The plan was for some of us to decorate the room while the rest of us first went ahead to lunch. After lunch Hsiao-mei distracted him while we all changed into tropical shirts and hid inside the room. Yanan even got us flowers to put in our hair and Bryant even found Evan’s Spotify playlist to play some of his favorite songs. Seeing how surprised Evan was when he walked in and especially when we started playing his songs honestly made me tear up. It’s amazing how close we’ve gotten in only two weeks. It made me really grateful knowing that I had such a great group of friends to work with and create amazing memories with in Zhuhai!