Over the weekend we volunteered at a boarding school for kids who were displaced by the Sichuan earthquake last year. The first day it was rainy, and we started with some tug of war competitions. These kids were amazingly strong, and even Shaw and I together couldn't take on very many of them. They had a powerful technique, and it was exhilirating to be on a winning team. After that it was a classroom rotation. The kids were split up into three groups, and so were we. Two classrooms ran games, and one of the classrooms performed music for the kids. There were Chinese college students volunteering alongside us. Amira and I were the musical talent of our group, and so we were put in the music room. The first person to perform was a saxophone player, she played some Chinese piece that apparently the kids knew, because they always laughed when they heard it. Next up was this guy who played violin, he was really nice, and also AMAZING at violin. A girl joined him for a spirited duet, and then they would call Amira and I up. I played guitar and we both sang. Our songs varied from set to set, but we played Toxic by Britney Spears, Viva La Vida by Coldplay, What Goes Around by Justin Timberlake, Wild World by Cat Stevens, Allstar by Smashmouth, and Whatever You Like by T.I. throughout the day. We usually played some combination of three of those songs each time, with an encore at the end. After us this girl danced to western and traditional Chinese music. Her most impressive move was going down on her knees and almost touching her head to the ground behind her. I got a pretty big round of applause when I went in and one upped her by actually touching my head to the ground behind me. In one of the rotations a girl sang a song for us that was about Tibet (most of the kids were ethnically Tibetan) and her voice was beyond incredible. It was really moving. After three rotations of that we went outside, played some basketball, and exhausted, went home.
Day two was intense. There were a bunch of ex-pat and peace corps volunteers there organizing games. I ended up playing several intense games of soccer all morning. There is less to explain about day two, because it is pretty much exactly how it sounds, we played a bunch of different games with the kids. But it was amazing. There was touch rugby, badminton, jump ropes, basketball, some other stuff, and soccer. Soccer was amazing, and so much fun. I really put my all into it, and I am pretty sore today as proof of that. I scored a pretty intense goal, but other than that I played defense, letting the kids make most of the plays. We all decided that if we had the opportunity to, we would be content playing sports with displaced Tibetan children for the rest of the trip.
Chengdu (pronounced Chung Doo) is an amazing city, and after talking to a fullbright scholar and a peace corps volunteer, it really makes me want to investigate ways to explore the world after college. The longer I am here in Chengdu, the longer I want to stay and explore. It might be in my future to come back to China! Or maybe Cuba, if all this crazy news I am hearing about Obama and Cuba being new best friends is true.
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