Destination Known

Yesterday was the day many of us had been waiting for.  Eighty trainees gathered in a hotel conference room waiting for the Peace Corps staff to announce our assignments and our sites.  It would be the answer to the question: where am I going to be for the next two years.

Finally, we were handed a plastic envelope with the name of a college or university on it. The color of the envelope indicated which province we would be going to.  My heart sank a little as I was handed a blue envelope while my friend held a red envelope in his hand. Peace Corps staff turned around a gigantic map of China with all of our passport-size photos pinned to it.  Now, we finally knew who was going where.

I am assigned to Zhangye, Gansu, the northern most site in which Peace Corps volunteers are posted.  It is near Mongolia and the Gobi Desert.  Zhangye is a small city by Chinese standards consisting of roughly one million people. Compare that to the city of Chengdu where I live now which has a population of around 14 million.  So the location may sound isolated but it is an urban area developing as quickly as are many, many other cities in China.  The rate of development I see here is astounding!

A common sight all over Chengdu

High-rise apartment complex communities are constantly in construction to meet the housing needs of a quickly growing population.

This is the balcony of the apartment I am living in now. It is the same view from my bedroom window. It's a massive apartment complex. At the same time, residents are very social here. Many families, older people take walks every evening or go swimming at the pool. I feel at ease in this community. I don't have a security card, but the guards know me and let me in the gates anyway.

Zhangye is a city over two thousand years old that holds historical importance as the Hexi Corridor along the Silk Road where imported/exported goods were transported from the East to the West.  It is a city known for its natural beauty, streams, mountains, clean air, and cold, dry climate.  There is a significant Muslim influence there and also 29 other minority groups including Tibetans.  I am eager to learn more about minority groups in China.  I have heard differing counts of how many minority groups there are from 100 to 400.  My sense is that people can easily say what minority group they belong to but talking about what that means in a social, political sense is a topic that must be tread lightly.  At this point, I am not even sure what I want to know or for what purpose.

My assignment is to train teachers at Hexi University (HU).  I will provide in-service training for current teachers and training for student teachers. I have a site mate named Susan.  We co-taught in the PC Model School as part of our training in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL).  This was a two-week class in which we taught oral English to Chinese students.  We worked great together!!

Room 302

Susan and I with our students from Model School.

Susan and I will be part of a Peace Corps pilot program to assist in developing the teacher-training curriculum at Hexi University.

Zhangye is a long, long train ride from Chengdu.  Thirty hours.  I leave Sunday afternoon for an eight-day site visit. During which I will stay with a second host family, view my apartment and map out the university. Then it is back to Chengdu to complete the last three weeks of training.  August 31, we are officially sworn in as volunteers and then I will return to Zhangye.  Over the course of the two years, I will be back and forth to Chengdu and other cities/provinces for trainings and summer programs.

I am super excited about ALL of this!  Zhangye sounds fascinating and beautiful. I am very pleased with my assignment.  It will be a challenge no doubt, but I am totally up for it.  My second host family does not speak English well, so my Mandarin speaking skills will have to go to the next level.  Who knows what the train ride this afternoon is going to be like!  And I feel very grateful that I have real, true friends for which my heart already pines.

After a long, physically tiring and emotionally exhausting week, I am feeling my energy replenishing and ebbing me on with even more wonder and bravery.  This is the week that answers my question: where am I going?