Sarah's travelling blog

I’ve been a bit slack with this blog lately, partly because things here have been progressing in more or less the same way, and partly because I’ve been busy looking for a job. I tend to get a bit obsessive about things (you’d never have guessed that would you), so it took me two weeks to write a new CV profile of four sentences and a covering letter. I thought it would be easy to find an EFL job in Brighton in the summer. It is. It’s very easy to find a summer job, but not so easy to find one that will last through the autumn which is what I was really looking for. Now I’m also looking for something in or close to Zhengzhou as well, something that would enable me to be in Chen Jia Gou half the week and teaching the other half, because now it’s almost time to go home I really want to stay. It wasn’t my intention to look for EFL work in Asia again, but I’m not getting a good feeling about things in Europe at the moment. Every time I scan the headlines it’s all about the Euro crisis and double-dip recessions and it’s not very encouraging! I’ve not been to the Shaolin Temple, but I’ve been told that it is now quite a touristy place. Chen Jia Gou is most definitely not such a place….. yet. A huge tai chi stadium (yes, such a thing exists!) complete with an enormous hotel complex is being built about 5 minutes’ walk from my school. I have ignored this for the entire time I’ve been here, despite the fact I can see it from my room, but last week I walked through the building site and was shocked at the scale of it. It’s supposed to be finished by October, but that seems unlikely considering the fact that most of the hotel buildings are grey shells propped up by rusty scaffolding with shredded sheets of netting flapping in the wind. According to the glossy computer-image billboard, there’s going to be some kind of water feature, gardens and space for hundreds of guests. It’s an ambitious project and it raises some interesting questions. Litter, for example. At the moment, there is no organised litter-disposal system in Chen Jia Gou that I can work out. Most litter is dropped onto the street and left to fend for itself. I once saw Shifu pick up an errant ice-cream wrapper that had strayed into the school, take it out to the street, hold it at arm’s length for a brief period of observation, then release it back into the wild. The wheat field opposite the school is full of litter, and before the wheat grew really tall you could see multi-coloured plastic bags bobbing through it like alien animals. There are some bins at the school and someone comes in a three-wheeled vehicle (complete with incomprehensible megaphone advertising) and collects rubbish from time to time. I had naively supposed this rubbish was taken to Wen Xian where there might be a municipal tip, but instead it is all dumped by the side of the road at the end of the village; food waste, unwanted clothes, broken glass and crockery, and thousands of plastic bags. Once I even saw a dead puppy there. Oh, and it’s all dumped right by the crops! Let’s suppose some big international tai chi competition is taking place and the hotel is full. It’s apparently going to be 5-star, which means it will produce vast amounts of waste. What’s going to happen to it all? Is it to be dumped somewhere, or will the hotel be organised enough to send its rubbish to a rubbish tip? (Is there a rubbish tip?) Has anyone thought of that, does anyone even care? And what will all these 5-star international tai chi competition-entering people think of the refuse that litters the village and surrounding area? I guess maybe they won’t need to leave the cleanliness and sanctity of the hotel, so long as it has a gift shop, but you’d think someone in local government might think about it! And what about water? Henan is very dry and already has a water problem. Not that this seems to bother people too much; everyone uses a twin-tub to wash their clothes and they are insanely inefficient. Not only do they not clean very well, my sheets were noticeably cleaner the time I washed them by hand, but they use a bathtub’s worth of water with every wash. Where will the water for the hotel come from? Will they have water recycling? I doubt that very much. And who is really going to profit from this hotel at the end of the day? Possibly the owners of the many tai chi clothes shops in the village. Possibly the restaurant owners, maybe the tai chi schools might pick up some new students. But what about the old guy who walks past my school twice a day with his flock of sheep? Does he get anything? Heating in his house? A bit of extra cash in his pocket? I suspect not. Okay, there’ll be jobs in the construction and running of the hotel which is all good, but I reckon most of the profit will go to someone in a company that is not based in Chen Jia Gou. And for a fraction of the money that must be being spent on this elaborate project, so much could be done to make Chen Jia Gou better for everyone. Like; educating people NOT to throw rubbish everywhere, or that having piles of stinking refuse right next to a group of houses is just not a good idea, especially with little kids running around. Or helping people with irrigation so they don’t water their vegetable patches by leaving a hose running all day while losing a third of the water because the hosepipe has holes in it. Or maybe even helping people set up a composting system so the piles of rotting vegetables are put to some use. When I’m next here, whether that’s in September or January, the hotel will be open and there will be big tai chi competitions happening. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens to this scruffy, friendly little village and how it deals with the influx of Western money.