The Kindergarten

Hmm. Where to begin today's little literary excerpt... ladi-da-di-da... let's see... I think I'll regale you with tales from "The Chronicles of Kindergarten."
Ah, yes... that glorious five story building with doors through which about one hundred asian toddlers can be found anywhere from running, waddling, being dragged/bodily carried through at about 8:00a.m. every morning. Welcome to my office...
The day starts for me at about 7:30. I (kind of) wake up, tumble (quite literally) downstairs, and eat (or rather inhale) my breakfast. Then I stare blankly at the wall ahead for a good five minutes... my mind, at this point, is still in shock... trying to somehow grasp the dumbfounding reality that it's been woken and made to process lukewarm noodles, miniature shrimp, fried rice, and soggy spinach for it's first meal of the day. I guess I forgot to mention that breakfasts here often consist of the last-three-night's leftovers.
Not that I mind! Theres actually something surprisingly comforting about a warm, savory breakfast eaten with chopsticks from a chipped clay bowl... it's just... different. Like everything else here.
And so, after I emerge from my stupor, I usually come to realize that "Oh... I guess this is real life... maybe I should try and prepare for the day?"
From then on, it's a flurry of dish-washing and panicking and suddenly I'm stuffing my bag with things I may or may not need, I'm forgetting my keys, wrestling with those terrible inventions called shoes, exploding out the door, unlocking the gate, struggling with the rusty bolt, slamming it closed, locking it...
And then I'm free! The day has begun.
So, down the neighborhood road I amble. The morning sun is usually just high enough above the general smoggy-ness of it all to appear a white-ish grey, instead of a bloody red. At about this time of day, there are a good deal of older folk out and about... either stretching sleepy limbs, or sweeping the streets with twig-brooms they've made themselves. By the time I'm within eye-shot, all activity stops. Eyes are glued to me in unconcealed interest... my face, my hair... all of it is absurd. I can almost hear their thoughts screaming, "What is THAT? WHY is it on MY stretch of asphalt? LOOK at it! IT EVEN IS BLOND!" You see, if I were living in downtown Beijing, my blondness and my pale-ness and my general non-Chinese-ness wouldn't be anything of an anomaly. But out here, in the outlying villages... it's a pretty big deal when you witness a Westerner walking down the road.
Down one neighborhood highway, across a busy street (on which I'm liable to be squashed flat upon by a marauding donkey-cart or motorcycle of these days) and down another neighborhood road lined with ceaselessly barking dogs, and suddenly... there it is. The Kindergarten.
I reach the doorway where the guard nods at me, says something cheerful (It could be anything from "Hello" to "You look like an albino carrot" for all I know of Mandarin Chinese) and opens the door. Up two flights of stairs I fly, and then I'm off to my first class. I never know what I'm going to be teaching until someone comes to inform me in broken english about five minutes before the kids stampede into the classroom and raise havoc. As an unpaid teacher... a Western unpaid teacher to be precise, I don't necessarily have the privilege (or the burden, depending on how you look at it) of running my own classroom. I'm there to be an "English Influence." Apparently It doesn't really matter if I can teach or not... that fact that I speak English fluently is frankly quite enough.
The kids arrive in a flurry of sounds... I can hear laughter, chatter... there's always someone crying. No matter what. But hey, they're what... two? four years old? The door bangs open.
And so it begins.
"A!" I shout.
"Ayee" a million tiny glorious voices answer, honestly more beautiful than any professional choir. Their enthusiasm and random joy nearly brings me to tears. Thank you God.
"B!"
"Beee"
"C!"
"SEEEEEEEE"
You see... I've never been much of the babysitting type. I'm not overly fascinated by those burbling balls of bumbling flesh called "babies." That's just not me.
Or at least I didn't think so.
The truth is, these children have become a small part of me. It took a few days, granted. At first, they were terrified... among a few of the younger ones, my appearance still brings forth tears and wails. But now, now that they've seemed to realize I'm not there to eat them, it seems to be their favorite thing to laugh and giggle with me about jokes I can't understand... And I'll be honest... for the first few days, I was pretty terrified of them too! When you're an only child and have no experience with children whatsoever, 10 pairs of black eyes staring up at you with either menace or curiosity (like I said, it depends on your perspective) can be a little intimidating.
But God's shown up in more than a few ways. Every day, every hour, every moment in the classroom is His to do what He wants with. He knows the desires of my heart, and He knows that these kids need all the love that can possible be given to them. And somehow, somehow, things fall into place, and there we are again, laughing and learning and loving one another, teacher to student, student to teacher.
Teaching is one of the greatest human capabilities. The spider doesn't have to be taught how to spin a web, and neither a fish how to swim... but we, in all our stumbling glory, have to learn something new every day of our lives. It's beautiful and terribly difficult all in one fell swoosh of an emotional life-journey.
And so I've been greatly humbled by it all. I've done more learning in my days of teaching than I thought was feasible. And I'm happy. So, so happy.
The day at school ends with lunch. I skip back down the stairs and into the teachers cafeteria, where a cheerfully round woman hands me a steaming plate of assorted vegetables, tofu, rice, and an optional dose of chili-oil. Even though I can use chopsticks perfectly well, she seems to insist in loud, repeated Chinese phrases that I use one of their 100-year-old spoons. Maybe it's because I'm American. Or blond. Or both. Either way, she's so incredibly kind, and seems to genuinely want to share her world of culinary delights with me... I recently was introduced to the joys of a fried shrimp head... and only a day ago she beckoned me over and forcefully took my plate away, left the room, and returned it to me... but it was sprinkled with something that resembled sand. I was later to discover it was ground sesame seed. (Both the shrimp head and the sesame seed powder were delicious, I might add.)
And so I finish my meal, pack my bag, and able on home again. Back down the neighborhood road, (I always stop at one house to visit some newborn puppies... we communicate thus: I stick my finger through the fence, they chew on it, and then when I can't handle the little pearly-white needles riddling my flesh, I say good-bye. They just continue to chew things... now it's each others' tails) back across the hazardous stretch of busy Beijing street, (be reminded of the scene in Mulan where Grandmother blindly crosses that insanely busy road, disappears in a cloud of dust, and reemerges, shockingly alive? Yeah, well... I always said my life was a Disney movie...) and back into my own neighborhood.
So there you have it.