Hello! and welcome to Ying Pan, my school location for the year. I am now in Nantou County, at the school which will be my home for this next year. I arrived yesterday evening, after flying into Taipei from Matsu Island, and taking the bus from Taipei to Nantou city.
The Matsu camp, which we just completed last Friday (8/27/04), was different from any other camp that I had worked this year. There were several reasons for this; the first was that we were teaching Jr. High students instead of elementary school kids. This created a whole new set of challenges, the most difficult being getting the kids to break out of their shells and participate.
The second reason why Matsu was different was that the focus of the week was not just an English camp, but a drama English camp. This caused quite a few challenges as well; as the week progressed, it became increasingly tough to teach both English and drama. Matsu also differed from the other camps in the fact that it was held on the island of Matsu, not on Taiwan. We were delayed in flying off the island because of weather. In the past weather didn't matter because we always traveled by ground.
Wednesday of last week, a typhoon came through Matsu as well. This was rather fun because I had never been through a typhoon, I was tucked cozily away in a nice, comfortable hotel, and we didn't have to teach that day. Instead we played games with some of our students who were staying in the same hotel as we were.
Saturday morning we toured some of Matsu Island. Matsu has been a key military stronghold in the past, and is still considered an important military base (8,000 troops are stationed there). As a result there are quite a few interesting fortifications formerly used by the military which we were able to visit. One of these was a man made cavern; it had been hollowed out of solid granite using blasting powder and picks, shovels and drills. It could hold about 100 small landing craft inside, and opened right into the ocean. I was able to go inside for a ways; it was pretty incredible to envision all the work that had gone into the place. It was pretty fascinating.
We flew out of Matsu on Saturday, but we had to take a later flight than was originally planned because of the weather. From Taipei Isaac, Mai, and I said goodbye to the rest of our Matsu team, and took the bus to Nantou. Joel and Daniel were still there from the camp that was held in Ying Pan this week. Right now there are five of us here in Ying Pan, but Daniel will be going to Jiji next week, and another girl, Christina Moody, will be joining us here.
That will round out our teaching team here for the year.
From Ying Pan,
Chase
