Volunteering?

Organizing Books at the Suangliu Library

Group Photo of the NSLI-Yians, Other Students, Children, and Teachers

Today, after a normal day of class we headed to the Suangliu Library once again in our oversized school uniforms. Suangliu is the district in Chengdu where our host school is located. My host family lives outside of this district. Anyways, at the library we were supposed to be doing volunteer work, but it was a bit unorganized. Before we left to go to the library, we were supposed to choose where we wanted to volunteer, but when we got there, the leaders didn’t do a very good job of guiding us to where we needed to be and what we needed to do. I went to the e-reading area and said two sentences in Chinese saying what this area was and what you could do there. They handed me a microphone and recorded me saying those two sentences, and then some Chinese students educated me about a few Chinese inventions based on a large stone art piece. Next, we were guided upstairs where we looked at a mini museum type place. It was interesting, but it felt like they were just trying to burn time. Afterwards, we broke up into groups and organize books. I organized one shelve of books, and then they guided us to a group of Chinese kids. We played with the kids for a little while, making quite a bit of noise along the way, and then we returned back to school. While we were at the library, people took tons of pictures of us, making me feel like this was more of a publicity stunt and a check mark on a list then a meaningful experience. I wanted to help more. I love organizing and books, but I didn’t feel like we helped much at all. I felt like we were more of a burden. On a more positive note, my host mom gave me tea for the first time today! When we were at a restaurant last week, I found myself drinking over eight glasses of jasmine and buckwheat tea, which I think demonstrated the fact that I love tea. I'm pretty sure they thought that I, being an American, wasn't very found of drinking hot water and/or tea because they tend to give me cold bottles of water as opposed to luke warm or hot water. I appreciate cold water on warm days, but I've really begun to appreciate boiling hot water, and I have already found appreciation for tea in America. The only major difference with Chinese tea is that, based on my experience, they don't use tea bags, which I really don't mind. It’s less waste and more flavor. For dinner we had some delicious chicken wings and Chinese cabbage. The chicken was cooked in a soy sauce like sauce and had a distinct, salty flavor. The Chinese cabbage was cooked in fish broth and was also very delicious. My host family keeps giving me tons of cabbage and mushrooms because they’ve realized that I’m really into vegetables. I’ve become a die-hard fan of mushrooms because I’ve been eating so many different varieties of mushrooms. It’s mushroom heaven. I’ve also eaten kelp and seaweed and different types of squash and lotus root. After dinner, 吴璨 taught me some Chinese poetry. Chinese poetry is a bit difficult to understand because most of the language used is for specialized for literature. Whenever I search the words in my Chinese dictionary, they mention its use in literature. It’s one of of my dreams to be able to read Chinese poetry and actually understand it, but first I want to master conversational speech.