Trying to survive

Is that a terrible name for a blog post? Perhaps, but that's what I feel like lately. For 2 weeks I've been sick now. Just a long, lingering kind of sickness that saps all your energy and enthusiasm for life. All I do is cough and wheeze and blow my nose and feel tired and shiver from a little fever. Today I have finished my antibiotics I got at the hospital, and I still feel about the same. Fun.

Yesterday was a pretty great day, although I was exhausted by the end. I could only sleep about 5 hours on Saturday night, but I still wanted to go to fellowship on Sunday morning. Fellowship was good like usual. Then about 30 of us (pretty much all the foreigners in Nanchang) went to a Korean restaurant for lunch to celebrate a bunch of birthdays.

I sat by Sylvie, a girl my age from Germany! We talked probably for the entire hour and a half, mostly about Germany. It just made me miss Germany and learning German so much, I almost wanted to cry. She is also spending a year teaching in China. Unlike me, this is her first and last year. She'll be returning to Germany this summer. And she said I could visit her whenever I want to! I really want to visit Germany again, especially Bavaria, where she lives.

Afterward, the rest of my team traveled to the other side of the city to visit the other team with our organization. We have never visited their university, which is a technical college. It was much smaller, but a lot more beautiful than our campus, since it was on the edge of the city. The taxi got us there by going up in the hills, which is covered with the largest cemetery you could ever imagine. It was one of the most amazing and creepy sites ever. Apparently this cemetery is one of the largest in China. Gravestones are literally stacked next to each other for miles. It looks like each person has about one square foot of land, and that's it.

Anyway, we got to their school safely, and I became rather envious of their school. It isn't congested like our old campus, and there are tons of trees and even little paths to walk and hike. The air was also so much cleaner and clearer all the way out there. AGH! I want to live there!! You could actually walk around and see some nature, and there weren't 20,000 students staring and yelling at you.

Then today I had two classes, meaning I was at school all day, until 5 p.m. It was time to give midterms, which I had painstakingly created. I think they were pretty good tests, I'll admit. But all my students, even the best and brightest, had the most difficult time with cheating! Cheating was so rampant today that I had to lift up my thoughts nearly constantly. I was just really frustrated.

My frustration increased at lunchtime, when I was grading the first batch of midterms. When I was finished, I noticed that one girl didn't turn in her exam, even though she had been in class. But I couldn't do anything about it, because I had to run to another class and give the exam.

After that class, one of the monitors managed to track this wayward test girl down. I told her to come to my office right away. She finally meandered in with the class monitor, and I just felt really angry. I asked her why she didn't turn in her test. She insisted that she was sick and couldn't come to class. Then I told her that she had indeed been there, and had an exam paper to account for. Okay, she admitted. She was there, but felt too sick to take the exam. I asked her, why on earth didn't you tell me or at least give the exam back? She said that she took the exam home with her and would bring it back tomorrow to take it. I looked at her in astonishment. One of my tests were now out there running around for all the other 150 students to see, and she wanted to bring it back the next day to take. Is it just me or is that a problem? She could not see why this was an issue, no matter how many ways I tried to explain.

So now I'm not sure what to do about the tests tomorrow. Who knows how many students saw it. But it takes a lot of energy and resources to create and print these exams. I do know that I have created a new exam for her on a piece of paper, which is much more difficult, if not nearly impossible to complete.

Oh, I don't know. Sometimes these cultural barriers really get to me. It's like we are communicating on an entirely different level with entirely different values.

Can you please lift me up? I feel very tired and sick and fatalistic, especially with dreary weather for as long as I can remember. You can probably tell that I have an awful attitude that is simmering just below the surface. I reallllllllllly need your thoughts. Thanks!