Fengyan Village

We had an incredible day today! As we mentioned in our previous post, we met a couple from Sweden who are volunteer English teachers in a rural village about 1.5 hours from Yangshuo, where we are currently staying. We had a driver pick us up around noon and we were off on our adventure, a true adventure considering the driver didn't even know where the village was because it was not on the map. So he made several stops along the way and screamed something along the lines of "Which way to Fengyan Village?!" in Chinese. (We both like the way he operated because that is how we have gotten around this country, but instead of yelling in Chinese, we show them a piece of paper that says the name of the place we are going in Chinese characters and follow people's hand directions til the next block, when we do it all over again.)
We turned on a TINY, (or should we say tiny) road and then waited for our friend to show us the way to the volunteer English teachers' house. Every student there has some sort of English training, so while waiting for our friend, a two-year old yelled, "Hello, bye bye!" at us several times. We were given a tour of the volunteer house which was a beautiful old house with nice renovations. Then we went down to the swimming hole and got a bit of the history of the village. We passed old brick houses with chickens running around and ducks mating and old old cars beeping past us.
After our mini-tour, we went to school. Our friend Caroline was teaching a lesson on travel. The students were very different than our students on some levels (they were quiet when we were talking and they had all brought paper and a writing implement), and similar in others (general 14 year old apathy). They introduced themselves and told us their age, hobbies and favorite food. There was a lot of "basketball" and "rice". We got to introduce ourselves and talk a little bit about where we were from. Then the students wrote down their answers to "Where you would like to travel and why?" There was a lot of "America" because of "the NBA". Many of their other answers reflected the presence of the visiting volunteer teachers -- "Australia" and "Canada" and "hamburgers" were also popular.
We were drawn to the 2nd floor where the 4 and 5 year olds were singing the alphabet and going through the numbers 1-10. We know what it is like when visitors come in so we waited until they got to 10 and walked in and recess was called. Heads turned and "HELLOs" were screamed and Ellie took her camera out and complete chaos ensued. Ellie was attacked at the door with peace-signs and jumping children who could not wait to get their picture taken. Ellie did a little jump rope with everyone jumping around her. It was time for them to get back to class so we handed each of them a "I HEART NYC" pencil and they all said some version of "thank you" to us.
We headed back to the volunteers' house (equipped with Western toilets and mosquito nets) and had a delicious home-cooked meal. There were many volunteers from the UK doing their gap year with the program, which is ever expanding -- two new volunteers were entering as we left!
This program just started in February, but it is off to an awesome start and is in the great hands of two passionate people, Leo and Isabella. Check out their website at http://www.thegreenlion.net/.