Tim: "Jesus Told Me to Eat It All"

One of the best qualities of ILP is that the organization stays in touch with their volunteers throughout their stay. This weekend we had our mid-semester visit form Jared, one of the three owners of our non-profit organization. He arrived Friday morning just in time to observe our classes. Prior to his visit, Kelly lined up all of our students and basically told them to behave for Jared's visit or they would be punished by a Chinese teacher. We didn't understand what she said to them in Chinese, but I could feel the fear in the room. Well, the good behavior effect lasted about 10 minutes; then they were back to their usual rowdy selves. My evaluation went ok, it was too bad that he hadn't come a day or two earlier, when the kids were better behaved. After teaching, the school took us out for lunch at a pizza buffet. Bruce was giddy with joy! They had 5 different kinds of pizza, soft-serve ice cream, fruit, deserts, french fries, stew, noodles, and much more. We stuffed ourselves! After lunch Jared met with us individually to go over our experiences in China and make sure we were doing ok. It is nice to know that they have our backs. For dinner, the school took us out again to a Chinese restaurant, it was basically another all-you-can-eat, but Chinese food instead of pizza. Let me tell you, we have not been that full since we left the states. Dinner was full of laughter and us trying to speak Chinese. Tim tried to marry off Michaela to the principal's son (jokingly) and we learned about Mongolian prisons. The Chinese directors kept telling us that we had to eat all the food before we left . . . our tummies were very full, and we all got to sleep around midnight and slept like babies. The next morning we had to get up at 7am to perform live on public China TV!