FACES




These are the faces that greeted me everyday at school and sometimes out and about town on the weekend .

These are the faces that couldn't sit still, the pressure of their enjoyment being just too great, whenever we sang BINGO. You know, "There was a farmer had a dog....>clap< I-N-G-O!"

These are the faces that enjoyed catching me alone as I walked across the campus so that just the two of us could recite our little dialog, "How are you? Fine, thank you. And you?.... What are you doing? Nothing much. Etc."




These are the faces, calling greetings as they ran past me on my way to the office, that could lift my spirits.



These are the faces in groups of sixty who challenged some of my formerly held notions of teaching. For example, I still don't know their names...and it doesn't seem to matter!

These are the faces that laughed and laughed at the monkey business in "Caps For Sale."




These are the faces that loved to write their names on the board under the star.



These are the faces that sometimes paid no attention in class and then beamed at me on the playground.





These are the faces in groups of sixty that nearly gave me a hoarse throat keeping their attention and occasionally evoked less than happy thoughts, ie wondering where they had sent all the quiet orderly Chinese students that you hear about.


These are the faces that more often brought smiles and laughter to my day.

These are the faces so proud of the English they have learned.

These are the faces.....

How Cold Is It?

People from home ask me how cold it is. It's cold. But not as cold as family and friends in Oregon and Washington are experiencing this winter. This past month AccuWeather.com was predicting temperatures ranging from -2C to 10C, or 28F to 50F, most days. I haven't known what the actual temperatures are on any given day, but as I walk around town I see....

It's not too cold to exercise mornings in this corner of Ankang's largest square. And it's not too cold to dance every evening in the same square. The dancing seems to be a favorite activity for several hundred people. The dancers can step with the line dancing and the couple dancing which take place in a lit area nearer the arena. My two left feet have not wanted to join the dancing or the exercise. They still enjoy walking the best. So I join the hundreds in this town who walk.

It's not too cold for businesses to continue their open door policy. Or for a son to complete his homework on a cold glass counter just inside one of those businesses with the open door policy.

It's not too cold to bake bread. All this baker did was add several layers of clothing and some earmuffs and she was ready to proceed. I've decided she and her husband make the best muffin style bread. And they are on my street which is so convenient.

It's not too cold to take the baby, all bundled up, out for a stroll. There are more babies out in the afternoons than in the mornings but you still see them all times of the day....well, sometimes it's difficult to actually see them in their mutiple layers.

It's not too cold to have your fortune told. I've just recently seen a variety of men set up shop along the sidewalk on this street. They sit on stools with a small bit of paraphernalia spread at their feet waiting for someone to stop for a consult. When a patron does sit, the talk becomes very earnest.

At school it's never too cold for these second graders, their bodies clad in multiple layers of clothing and emanating the only heat in the room, to sing "Ten Little Fingers," the wiggling of their fingers adding to their warmth.

Back at home I am getting used to living with cold. I now hardly ever dread sitting on the cold toilet seat. Five layers on top, two or three on the bottom and three pairs of socks are natural, and adding a coat, gloves, scarf and hat when I go out second nature. I now get warm water from the shower when I don't want to wash my hands in cold water one more time. And hot chocolate has become my new favorite drink.

So, yes, somewhere between -2C to 10C is cold , but it isn't too cold.

Well....Perhaps....I Don't Know

The question of pollution in Ankang comes up now and again from foreigners here and at home. We have all heard of the horrible air pollution in China. What is it? Thirty-five of the top twenty smog polluted cities in the world are in China?

The Ankang locals will tell you the air and the water in Ankang are clean. I tend to agree. Doesn't mean I drink the tap water unboiled or swim in the river, and, yes, I wonder about seldom seeing a deep blue sky. Our blue skies here, until this week, are generally quite pale. Many days the skies are like the one in the picture. (You are right. That is a church steeple. It is the steeple of the Catholic church in Ankang.)

There are those who think the cloudy skies are smog. Those foreigners come from hometowns where they see deep blue sky everyday all day. I come from a hometown that is often cloudy and foggy. So I point out that Ankang is in the mountains and it is on a river. The weather prediction is often for fog. Doesn't that mean fog, not smog? I look at the evaporation off the river, as in this picture, and think fog not smog.



On the other hand, I have seen and smelled some terrible exhaust fumes in city traffic. Once I rode my bike behind several big trucks and I wondered if I might pass out. The exhaust was ghastly black stuff. But, for a city of this size, we have little traffic. And, as you see in this photo, not all of the vehicles are spouting fumes. So how could the traffic possibly be making all those gray skies?


The Internet tells me that the charcoal used here for heating and cooking emits poisonous gases. You only have to be in a small enclosed area with one of these burners to smell the toxins and feel the poisons in your lungs. But are there enough of them being used to create the clouds we have? We have some manufacturing outside of town that puts out some fumes. Again I wonder if it is enough to make the type of smog you can see in Beijing or Xi'an which truly are industial areas. In Ankang I don't smell or feel poisons and toxins out in the open, on cloudy or noncloudy days.

We do have dust. Everything is covered with it. We don't get enough heavy rains to wash it away. I tend to think the dust is from the large amount of construction going on. Whole blocks are being torn down and large complexes rising. Everywhere. So is that dust graying our skies?








I am puzzled by the amount of phlegm people hawk here. The sidewalks, stairwells, streets, and sometimes floors are littered with it. What makes that necessary? Other than a belief that one must rid their body of an evil spirit. Why do they have that phlegm to begin with? I don't think I could find that much mucus in my lungs if I tried. However I do sometimes think the circles around my eyes are darker and the bags under them greater since coming here. Can I blame this worsening condition on bad air? It's not what I blame it on at home. One of the foreigners here says when she rides her bike the air stings here eyes. I've heard people talk of that in my hometown and there we know the air is clean. I also know that my eyes have never been red or stingy here as they were years ago when I lived in LA for a short time.

On an afternoon like yesterday, yesterday when I took the picture of the evaporation off the river in the morning, when the sun came out in the afternoon I took this picture of Ankang with probably the bluest sky I've seen. No, the blue is nothing like in Tibet. But on this day it looked pretty good to me. Yes, I see the haze....in the distance.