Off to Beijing

It's Friday night and Cindy and I are off to Beijing on the local bus. I'm leaving my precious mac behind, so will not be reporting in till Sunday night. Above you see a game of Go Fish! played with Brailled cards. This has been quite a hit during "English Corner" when no one is supposed to utter a word of Mandarin. Of course, there are a few slips.

Soon I will report in on my trip to Tian Jin to see Chun Yu. Those who are praying, please continue. Yesterday she had a procedure because her shunt was failing to operate correctly. She has an infection in her brain and is in a precarious place.
Thank you for your loving concern.

Walking the planets

Think about teaching blind kids about the relationship of the planets – about the fact that the earth spins and orbits, about the fact that the sun is itself turning and revolving around a larger center in our galaxy, about…ok, that’s enough.

Well, these kids had already had some exposure to the concept of the earth revolving around the sun, and about the seasons and why we have them. But they didn’t know about the other planets, or have any idea about the relative sizes of them or their relationship to the sun.

Cindy and I thought about this, surfed the net for info and found a site that had instructions for making a to-scale model. It had the relative sizes of the planets (e.g. Mercury, a pinhead; Earth, a peppercorn; Jupiter, a chestnut etc.) It also told gave info regarding how many paces we needed between each of the planets – the Sun being an 8-inch ball, from which we were to begin.

On day one, we began by explaining what a model is and passing models of a tree and a house around the circle. Next we had Xiao Hua hold the Sun (soccer ball) while the other students took turns being the Earth. This meant that they had to spin and orbit at the same time (you try doing that without falling down after about 10 seconds). They enjoyed this process and were excited to continue with step two.

We moved down to the craft room and got out the Das Pronto air-drying clay. We started with the largest planet (Jupiter) – each child got a ball of clay and rolled it to make their representation of the planet. We repeated this with each of the planets, and between each we recited the names of the planets we had constructed up till that point. Then we left our models to dry overnight.

The next day we walked out to the front gate of the property. We sat the soccer ball down to represent our Sun. Then we counted off the paces of distances for each of the planets. The first few were easy: 10 paces to Mercury, 9 paces to Venus, 7 paces to Earth, another 14 to Mars – then the fun began: 95 paces to Jupiter, 112 paces to Saturn etc. By this time we were getting pretty hot and sweaty, since it was almost 2 p.m. Before reaching what used to be Pluto (but hey, it turns out that it’s just a moon or something now) we decided it was time to turn back and collect up our planets and head home for a drink.

The lemon of real estate management

If you are of my generation or have parents of my generation or older, you probably know what it means to refer to something as a “lemon” – the kind that is NOT a citrus fruit. If you're not familiar with this expression, it means something you bought that falls apart way too fast – such as a new car that needs another engine and a transmission within the first year, or a computer that crashes when you’ve had it for 6 months: “it’s a lemon!”

By some unknown logic, there is a sign on one of the buildings near the front of our gated property that says “The Lemon of Real Estate Management” – and indeed, to look at the buildings here, you would assume that the management is a “lemon.” Why? – the buildings are falling apart. As you can see, even the sign is disintegrating. I wish I was a photoshop expert so I could "stitch" the sign together for you.

Allow me to fill you in a little on the place where we are staying. The foster home is comprised of 4 buildings that provide housing and space for schooling of the orphans. The school building (#17) houses the organization’s offices downstairs and the schoolrooms upstairs. On the same cul-de-sac is #22 where the volunteers stay upstairs,(see photo above, with lions) and which also contains a physical therapy room and a kitchen on the lower level. The older children eat their lunch and dinner in #22, but live next door in #21, along with a few of the younger children. The children with multiple disabilities live in #12, which is on another road within this gated community.

The whole compound is owned by a huge garment company, which uses it as housing for some of their employees. There is constantly a uniformed guard on duty at the gate, to monitor the comings and goings. This is a place that is deemed acceptable for housing some foreigners who are fostering Chinese orphans. On the same cul-de-sac as Bethel, there are two other American families, one of which is running a foster home a couple of streets away, for orphans with multiple disabilities. The other family has adopted several Chinese children with severe disabilities.

Included on the property are: a full-fledged golf course (which doesn’t seem to get used much), tennis courts (which get used on the weekends) and a full Olympic-sized (maybe even bigger) swimming pool. Also a clubhouse. None of this stuff gets much activity.

By far the most fascinating thing to me about the physical place though, is the abandoned building projects. There are rows of traditional-style Chinese houses, each built around a central courtyard, with rooms on all four sides. Last year I wandered endlessly through these unfinished houses, taking way too many photos, some of which you see here☺ This project was started 12 years ago, and then abandoned for unknown reasons. Guillaume told me that there are many parties involved (bank, owners, construction company, gov’t agencies etc.) and sometimes negotiations just break down. Result: empty buildings that sit here and deteriorate.

Aside from the traditional houses included in this compound are three huge apartment buildings, about 20 stories tall, which were constructed with glass in the windows etc. – then left to deteriorate. Another project (see photos below) looks like it was supposed to be an office building (?) and was also abandoned at some point. This is a common sight throughout Lang Fang. I remember seeing the same thing in the Holy Land, but there the buildings were mostly personal homes, which had stalled because of lack of funds.

The other day Cindy reported to me that when she was exploring the houses early that morning she had discovered a dead bat hanging from the ceiling. “It’s weird that it would hang on till it was dead,” was my reply. So we went to find it. In the photo above, you see her “dead bat” – it’s easy to have an active imagination when you are in these buildings – they are kinda creepy☺

Please scroll down to the next entry for more photos of these buildings.

More shots of traditional houses

Showing the interior of the traditional house, looking across courtyard to the back area, where the women used to live. The men occupied the side and front rooms.

A view of the courtyard taken from the side near the front of the house.

A spider likes the accomodations.

One of Theresa's "art photos":)

Would-be offices and apartments

Abandoned apartment buildings - construction seems like it was almost completed.

Close-up view of the same buildings.

I'm guessing that this building was going to house offices of some kind.

Eeeek a dead frog!!

Before I complete my story about the Beijing trek, I want to tell you about our fun with the preschoolers. Our agenda (as per instructions from Delphine, who oversees the schooling) is to expand the preschoolers’ understanding of the community in which they live. We decided to start with the concept of neighborhood and neighbors.

In order to make this an active, fun-filled learning experience, we took a neighborhood walk and collected natural things in the process. Each child was given a zip-lock bag (what did we do without them!) with his/her name on it. We headed out into the cul-de-sac with six preschoolers to begin our collection.

There was great excitement over the presence of a dead frog, not completely desiccated and somewhat stinky, lying on the side of the road. True to archetypal form, the girls screamed and ran and the boys wanted a closer look. Fuzzy grasses, rose petals, rocks, seed pods, pinecones and leaves were among the treasures that went into the bags. During the walk, we stopped in front of various houses and talked about which neighbors lived where.

Blind children do not experience what we call “incidental learning” – information that most of us gather by seeing. An example of the way things can fall between the cracks is reflected in aa conversation I once had with a student I will call “Roland.” I was teaching Roland how to spread peanut butter on bread (think about doing this as a totally blind person) and we were talking about different kinds of sandwiches. He said that he really liked ham sandwiches. “Roland, do you know what kind of animal ham comes from?” I asked. “A chicken?” he asked. Sighted children would pick up this information at a young age by seeing (for instance) a little picture of a pig on the label of the package.


When we got back to the schoolroom, each child shared their favorite thing with the others. Then we gave them each a three-ring binder and helped them staple their bags into their books. Some of the bags were pretty heavy because of the rock collection, so teachers had to discretely dump a couple of rocks. These are “concept books” and this one will focus on learning about the community beginning with the neighborhood and expanding outward to the greater community.

Scorpions anyone?

With our bellies full we were ready for our foray into the marketplace. We entered a maze of alleyways to discover all sorts of treasures, the most interesting being food items. A few were things, such as fresh-roasted corn on the cob, that you might just as easily find at home – and then there were lots of really strange, somewhat scary edibles. At least some people consider them to be edibles, while the wimps amongst us cringe. Probably at the top of the cringe-making list were the scorpions and grasshoppers, skewered and ready for roasting (photo #1) – along with unknowable things in various stages of metamorphosis (photo #2).

There were also some little birds or animals that I am showing you in the third photo. Somehow I hope they are birds, because I don’t like to think about what little furry things they might have been. If anyone knows what these are, please post me a comment, which I will retrieve later. Oh yes, and please do leave me some comments or questions. I will be able to retrieve and respond to them when I get home.

There were also the starfish (crunchy?) and apparently we missed the seahorses, which Chris informed me are quite popular. The fried dough-ball things that the girl in blue was turning to perfection, looked quite delicious and there were skewered fruits that had been dipped in liquid candy, which had hardened (plums, small apples of some kind, didn’t know what the green things were). Now it was definitely our turn to gawk, and we did it quite unabashedly and clicked our mini-cameras here there and everywhere.

After the food lane, we headed down the drygoods lane and Cindy bargained for a teapot. I was too overwhelmed by the surplus of stuff to buy anything. I just proceeded to gawk and made mental notes about what I might want to purchase on a return visit. Bargaining is tricky when you have a hard time remembering your numbers, and being a bit of a softy doesn’t help either. Mexico has prepared me somewhat for this activity, but the Chinese vendors puts the Mexicans I have encountered to shame.

Soon, I will tell you about our journey back to Lang Fang, but first, a little about our adorable preschoolers.