Volunteer's Story: Heidi and Laura, Holland  

Heidi and Laura were the stars of month-long English Summer Camp at a ZhengZhou Midde School during July, 2009. They gave a goodbye speech which is shown below in both text and video format. For much more on the ZhengZhou Summer camp, including several fun videos, click here.

Two university students in China, it could be the title of a movie. Sometimes it feels like a movie in which we are the stars. Not just actresses, no, the superstars. Being laowai in Zhengzhou is an experience, sometimes amazing, sometimes rather annoying. Chinese people are very friendly, but we don’t have time to talk to all of them, and certainly not with the few words of Chinese we speak. But most of the time we can laugh about taking pictures with random teenagers asking for it, children and their parents staring at us or shop owners asking a way to high price for simple things.

Four weeks in Zhengzhou were like for weeks in a different world. Living in Holland for about twenty years and than going to China was lifechanging. We never ever expected that a chicken head was something you can eat. Even something you can like to eat, although we didn’t try it. The food was always very good but Western people don’t eat as much as Chinese people do! So we really wanted to try everything we were given in the great meals with some of the students’s parents, but at a certain point our stomachs really were full.

When we ate at the school some very delicious meals were cooked for us by mister Li Bao Yi and mrs Bai Yu Hong. Every morning a breakfast, every day lunch an a lot of dinners were cooked for us. They put a lot of effort in it and we enjoyed it every single day. Also the watermelon was a very welcome treat.

Number 42 Middle School was a great place to stay. We had very beautiful rooms with everything we needed. Mister Guo provided anything else. He and his lovely wife showed us around, took us to dinner and provided anything we wanted. We are really thankful towards them, and are sad that we have to say goodbye to our new Chinese friends. We want to give an extra compliment to mister Guo for being such an excellent student. We really saw and heard his progress in English growing with speaking to us.

Also the other teachers were really helpful. Every English teacher joining our class said that if we had any problems, we could ask them at all times. The only teacher we really needed though was the computer teacher, who fixed the beamer time and time again. Also sometimes the English teachers provided an extra translation to make things more clear to our students.

Yeah, our students… We call them our monkeys, and that’s what they are. Chinese kids are very different than Dutch ones. They are much more respectful towards the teachers, they are a lot tougher and they study very hard. We played a lot of games, taught them a lot of new words and tried our best to improve their spoken English. Our way of teaching surprised a lot of students, parents and teachers so that’s why we will explain it a bit.

We noticed that our students were very shy at the beginning so we started by playing games in which they had a lot of fun with us. We even made fun of ourselves to take the edge of and make us more approachable. This worked very well and most students started talking straight away. During the weeks we noticed a lot of improvement. Not only in their spoken English but maybe even more in their daring to speak English to foreigners like us. And that was what we came here to do!

Every class had a specific order in which we first introduced new words according to the theme we would work with that day. After that we played a game to familiarize the students with the new words, after which we talked about the theme or played more games. In a lot of classes we also watched English movies to expose them to daily conversations in English, so they would recognize different accents and more importantly, understand them.

Besides the spoken English we also taught our students about some Western culture, more specific the Dutch culture. We discussed Christian holidays, traditional Dutch holidays, Dutch food, Dutch habits, our royal family, our school system, interpersonal relationships, foundamental cultural differences and much more. The children always were very interested and learned a lot about our culture and the differences. They also told us, in English, a lot about the Chinese culture.

Our job was not done at the end of the class. After class we went to see a lot of cultural things with both students and mister Guo. We went to see the night market in Zhengzhou, the Shao Lin temple, Kaifeng, the Yellow River, Xi’an, but we also went shopping and rollerskating with our students. We got used to speaking through dictionaries and also our Chinese improved at the same time as the improval of our English students.

Altogether, we are very thankful for having this opportunity. Going to China was a dream to both of us and became reality. And we saw China, not mainly as tourist but more as a friend of all the people around us.

Today we want to celibrate four great weeks of summercamp and show all the parents what a good time we and the children had together. We are going to show an English play, listen to English poems, demonstrate one of our games, listen to what our students think of the summercamp and much more.

We want to thank everyone: Mister Guo, the headmaster, the teachers, our students, the parents and all the other people who contributed to our wonderful stay in this wonderful country.

Thank you very, very much.

Email:Heidi     Laura