I had a very relaxing night last night as I was exhausted when we got back around 9:00 PM and decided to take a break from exploring. We were scheduled to meet in the hotel lobby at 8:30 AM to get on our bus and travel to the Children’s Sun Village for our service learning experience. I got down to the lobby and unfortunately missed breakfast, which I heard was excellent. I will definitely be in attendance tomorrow. Upon arrival at Sun Village, I helped carry our donation box inside and we were greeted by a nice woman, Dr. Li had to translate for us. We were given a tour of the village before we watched a video explaining the purpose of the village. I will explain the reason for the village before I explain the layout. We learned that this was a village for children whose parents were arrested and put in jail and the children would be left stranded on the street if not for the village. Other circumstances could also come into play such one parent being in jail but the other parent passes away, leaving the children stranded. Also, scenarios where the children can live with another family member but that family member is too old or will neglect them is a situation where the Sun Village would step in a take them into their care. The Children’s Village was created in 1996 by a woman who was a prison guard and understood the struggle for parents whose children were left alone. It’s a non-profit organization that receives no help from the Chinese government and functions purely from the donations it receives. It was very sad for me to hear that the children were left stranded, but what the organization is doing is honestly an amazing thing for these kids and extremely impressive. I was already glad to be there and we had barely even started. During our tour of the village, the little dorms for the children held 16 children, 8 per room staying on bunk beds. The village cares for children of all ages and they live together based on their ages. In each dorm, they have a teacher that stays and acts as their mom/dad. After our tour of the facilities, the welcomed us into a small auditorium with a little stage to watch a video that explained the purpose of the organization as I did above. After the video, 6 children had a performance for us and the other donation groups there. For context, every Saturday is a visitation day for the various donation groups that the organization has. After their performance, Jane asked if anyone wanted to play charades on stage so they could practice using their English to guess what we were doing. Most people seemed nervous to do so I told Jane I’d do it and then Alana and Jimmy decided to accompany me on stage. Three of the boys (maybe 15 years old) came on stage with us and they were going to be guessing. Jane gave us words such as elephant, cat, rabbit, and brushing teeth to use for the game. The only word that they didn’t guess was elephant, but that was also hard to show. All-in-all it was pretty fun and everyone watching thought it was funny. Jane then asked us if we’d perform something as a group for everyone there since the kids performed for us. The 17 of us went on stage and had to come with an idea since we were put on the spot. We decided to do the song and dance of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes”. This was also pretty fun, as the kids and visiting adults seemed intrigued and Dr. Li took a video of it for us too. After we were done we got to do activities with all the kids. The girls did arts and crafts which I believe was origami and the guys played sports. We tried to play basketball, but the court was being used by one of the donation groups so one of the little boys waved us to follow him and led us to 2 ping pong tables. We got to play lots if ping pong with them and one of the younger boys was one of the best ping pong players I have ever seen play in person. While I was watching others play I started to spin a basketball on my finger and one of them came over and held his finger up trying to tell me to show him. We went back and forth for probably 15-20 minutes and he would watch me and then try himself over and over. It was pretty cool that he was so intrigued with something I thought was so simple. From where he started to when we stopped he improved greatly but couldn’t quite get it down 100%. I tried to spin it on my finger and move it to his to at least give him the satisfaction of having it spin on his finger. I hope he continues to practice it because he seemed to really like it. Additionally, a few of us taught them how to throw a rugby ball and we played catch for a while before it was time to eat lunch, take a group photo, and sadly head to our bus to leave. While some may expect me to say my favorite thing from this trip would be The Great Wall, Terra-Cotta Warriors (once we go tomorrow), or something else more mainstream, this was pretty awesome and very humbling. It’s something I would recommend to everyone, I had a great time.
Our next destination was the Greater Wild Goose Pagoda. For context, this is a famous Buddhist Temple located in the city of Xi’an. Rocky told us that Buddhism came to China 2,000 years ago, which I didn’t know. Being Roman Catholic, it was a great experience to learn about another religion and try to understand it and its followers, especially at such an influential and important site like the Greater Pagoda. It was interesting to hear from Rocky that Chinese Buddhists believe in 6 stages of life, we are currently in stage 3 (human life). Unfortunately, we couldn’t go inside the Temple, but we did get to experience everything else they had to offer which was incredible. Before leaving, we all got a short class on calligraphy and got to look around the gift shop in which everything was blessed. I got gifts here for some of the important people in my life.
Following our Pagoda visit, Dr. Li wanted to treat us all to dinner which was very nice of him. He wanted to teach us how to host a traditional Chinese dinner for 2 reasons. The first being that he thought it’s something we should learn while in China and the second being that we should know in case we ever have the opportunity to host one ourselves. Something I took away from the dinner was that the host should always serve an even number of cold dishes and an even number of hot dishes. This is because odd numbers are seen as bad luck. I also learned that the host should always make sure that there is too much food so that there are leftovers. Following dinner, some people shopped in the Muslim Quarters, but I headed back to the hotel to for an easy night of working on my blog and playing ping pong with Ben. This may have been my favorite day of the trip so far. Tomorrow holds more adventure for us as we are headed to see the Terra-Cotta Warriors and bike the City Wall of Xi’an!
