Extraordinarily Enjoyable Experience
December 23, 2017
The Green Lion
Rural Teaching
“The experience from Gaya Sela Heller”
I have decided to take part in Greenway China’s teaching program because I wanted to give something to others and at the same time to get to know different parts of the world and to study about a culture different from the ones I am familiar with. I expected a different and unique experience, but reality exceeded all my expectations. After a journey of about 40 hours from Israel, which included traveling via quite a few different forms of vehicles, I finally arrived at the village.
The center of Greenway China is located in a particularly impressive old building, about 160 years old, at the foot of a mountain. The house was exceptionally charming and I enjoyed the thought that this was going to be my home for the next three weeks. The peaceful village life and the special landscape were very pleasant. I shared my time with Ann-Yu, who arrived the same day I did, from Germany.
We taught English every day in a pre-school class in the village’ school. When we first got to class we met some 30 children aged 5-6, whose language we couldn’t speak, and they couldn’t speak ours. At the beginning, because there was no mediating language, it was quite a challenging experience, because we could only communicate through body-language, which is also different due to culture differences. But with time we learnt how to overcome these gaps, and how to communicate our class in the best way possible. We danced, sang, and played many games with the children while studying new vocabularies.
Eventually I managed to make a unique and personal contact with each and every one of the children almost without words. In addition, I got to learn a lot about the Chinese culture, both through explanations given to me by the staff and through daily encounters with local people. Taking part in this program was not only extraordinarily enjoyable and enriching, but it has also given me tools and experiences which I could not have obtained in any other way.
