Post-China plans: Home sweet...

Colorado?!

It's finally official, so now I can officially tell you the exciting news!  I've accepted a position with the same organization I'm currently with, but now I'll be working at the U.S. headquarters; Fort Collins, Colorado, here I come!!  I'll be a Candidate Counselor, which basically means I'll be recruiting, training, preparing and coaching new teachers to do the same thing that I did this past year in China.  Father has given me such a passion for the work He's doing in China and He's laid it on my heart to help further His work through my new position.  I'm so unbelievably excited to get to join the awesome team in Fort Collins and walk alongside new teachers as they prepare to serve in China!

I've never been to Colorado, but I've heard only amazing things about it!  Where I'll be living is surrounded by hiking, mountain biking, white-water rafting, kayaking, mountain climbing, snowboarding/skiing, and basically any other outdoorsy activities you could ever possibly want to do!  I'm SO stoked :-)  The start date is August 27th and I hope to move out there 1-2 weeks earlier to get settled in.  I'll be back in Maryland on June 26th (only 12 days away) and I absolutely want to see everyone I possibly can before moving out to Colorado!  Here's even more great news: about 30% of my job will be traveling around the States, so I'll be able to visit friends and family all over the country!!

Thank you all so, so much for all of your support, encouragement and Thoughts this year!  I'm really excited to get to share this next part of my journey with you, as well!

Kids say the darndest things (part 2)

Kids say the darndest things part 2!  Here's just a sample of some of the adorable things my Chinese students and friends have said/done during the last couple of months.

Since my students know very little English, I've been teaching them a lot of vocab words. While I was working on sports vocab with one class, they were repeating what I said to work on pronunciation.  I started to say "volleyball" and then realized that I skipped tennis, so it came out something like "volley-er-tennis"... and then 36 little voices immediately began their repetition: "volley-er-tennis, volley-er-tennis, volley-er-tennis..."

Soon after teaching the sports vocab I got to teach Easter lessons, both the sacred and secular history.  Part of the secular lesson was on family traditions, one of which included an Easter basket.  When I reviewed the traditions with them and pulled out the basket, one of my students yelled out: "Easter basketball!"  So close.

I just finished a unit on transportation, which included some pretty hard words like: "helicopter" and "ambulance".  As much as we've worked on those words, my students still haven't quite gotten them down.  The last time I showed them a picture of a helicopter and asked what it was, one boy yelled out: "Harry Potter!"  At least it sounds pretty similar, right?

There was another pretty tricky transportation word, but for a much different reason.  My students have a hard time with the "p" sound and they tend to substitute it with a "t" sound; that proved to be very unfortunate when I taught the word "ship"...

June 1st was Children's Day (which I'll tell you all about in a separate blog post), so to celebrate the day, I gave each of my classes a party.  In one class we watched the kid's movie "Monsters vs. Aliens", and at one point in the movie a character announces that the alien problem is so significant that the president of the United States was called in.  My students immediately started screaming a chant: "O-BA-MA, O-BA-MA, O-BA-MA!"  Then this white dude walked on scene, and my students flipped out!  They were seriously devastated that the "president" in the movie wasn't Obama.  I try to not make any kind of generalizations about an entire country's population, but my teammates and I have found one exception in China: people here LOVE Obama!  In all seriousness, almost everyone I've met here knows at least two English words: "Hello" and "Obama", and almost every time I meet a new person, one of the first things they want to talk about is how great Obama is.  It's the funniest thing!

Yesterday, one of my students was standing next to me while I was preparing for class to begin.  He's one of the sweetest kids out of my 288 students and he's also really shy.  So yesterday he leans over and whispers to me, "Teacher, you are so smelly!"  I assumed that he'd made the common mistake of using the word "smell" when trying to say "smile", something that a lot of my students have done.  I pointed to my smile and asked, "I am so smiley?"  Then he shook his head and gestured wafting my fragrance to his nose and said, "Smelly. You are so smelly!"  By that, he meant that I smell really nice, but he still has me rethinking this perfume...

Couple shirts are a huge fad here.  They're sold everywhere and have all kinds of funny/disgustingly adorable/offensive sayings.  The two shirts are typical slightly different but compliment each other or else don't make sense without the other one.  The other day I was walking to the produce market and saw the greatest couple shirts ever.  For the first time, I was the one that stopped someone and asked to take a picture (foreigners are frequently stopped by Chinese citizens and asked for pictures/English lessons/phone numbers/or just followed around and videotaped).  Here's a picture of those adorable shirts:

And now it's time for some Chinglish!  This is a picture from a subway car.  It says, "Open protective cover and remove unlock-pin spanner to realize manual door-open in case of emergency".  Got that?

"Open protective cover and
remove unlock-pin spanner to
realize manual door-open in case of emergency"