Heavy Heart Time (the one body part that I didn’t eat tonight)

Usually, when I’m on vacation or visiting a new place, some form of mechanism kicks in about a day before I’m due to leave, and I find myself ready to go home. I always enjoy my trips and adventures, but when it is time, I usually can’t wait to be back in my own house.

This trip to Central China hasn’t been like my usual trips. While I long to be back home with my sweetheart, I’m also very sad to be leaving here.  I feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to get to know and love the students here. I’m probably sounding like a stuck record, but Sias really is a very special university, and then the Women’s Academy takes that to a whole other level.

The other day, I heard that one of the foreign visitors to the campus was asked what she had found surprising about Sias. She didn’t pause for breath before answering “I didn’t expect to fall so much in love with the students”.

For this trip, I used moo.com to print a special set of business cards, which proved to be a big hit with the students. On one side, there is all of my contact information, and on the other side is a series of different inspirational quotes (Moo.com lets you print a different image on every single business card if you like, but I created 7 different designs.

After word got around that there were different designs, a couple of the students have asked me if they can have one of each, as they find them so inspirational. One thing that I’ve seen here, is that the power of positive reinforcement is, if anything, even stronger here than it is in the US.  What I’ve seen is that if you demonstrate that you believe in them, then they truly are capable of anything and feel honor-bound to do all that they can to live to your expectations of them.

This evening, I’ve met with four students who have come to mean a great deal to me (Bush, Amber, Gloria and Olivia) and tomorrow I’ll be meeting with more of them, with a whole group coming to see me off. Tonight’s meetings have been really emotional and very special, and also in the case of the meeting with Bush, very funny too.  He bumped into me while I was trying to get hold of one of the other students, and convinced me to go off campus with him to get something to eat. Through the built-in bilingual dictionary in his phablet (the Samsung android that is half phone and half tablet), he asked me if I liked duck. When I said  that I did, he got excited and led me to deli-type store that specialized in all sorts of duck parts. He ordered quite a selection, and we then strolled back on campus and found somewhere to sit down and eat it. The first dish looked like spicy sausage, and I didn’t get a translation until I’d eaten a piece. It turned out that it was spicy duck’s neck, and while it was quite tasty, it was a little too crunchy for my tastes.

Next up was something he referred to as stones, pointing to the chest area. Before I took a closer look, I assumed that he meant duck breast or something. No.. that wasn’t it.. it turned out to be that he’d bought us two roasted duck ribcages. I found that the ‘view wasn’t really worth the climb, as there was very little meat on on the bones, but as he told me that this was his all-time favorite, I did my very best.

Next up was what I assumed to be a bag of noodles. Boy, how wrong could I be. It turned out to be duck’s intestines, which do bear an uncanny resemblance to flat noodles. Again, I assumed that this was one of Bush’s favorite dishes, so I gamely tried a couple of pieces, only to learn that Bush had: a) never tried them himself before and b) didn’t like them either. We sat there for a while, trying to palm them off on passers-by. As they proved to lack the stomach for adventure, we dropped them off with his buddy who was working part-time in the local packing / shipping store.