Saturday

We are winding down on the end of the session now and this is always a busy time, especially during the summer. Summers are our big sessions, and it's always stressful, especially at the beginning and end of the session. Yesterday, for instance, I was in charge of exit interviews, where we gauge the students progress since coming to TIP. We have 351 students and a little over 40 faciliators and interviews are a one on one thing. In order to get them all in and without taking too much class time, they are split into three rooms and sent into be interviewed at timed intervals. I had to coordinate the movement of 350 students moving in and out of three rooms at exactly six minute intervals. Fun stuff.
We have had almost forty American volunteers come for the session but virtually all of them are leaving in the next few days. A few of them have expressed interest in coming back again, one his staying for another session and one quit his lucrative graphic design business to stay here and join our staff. This means we need more volunteers for the next session, and they have been coming in, but there is only twelve of them and almost the same number of students. So next session will be fun to say the least. I've been helping with their training, but since they are fresh off the plane American, they are being quarantined in a separate building on campus. Which means that I, since I have been helping to train them, as well as other full-time staff, are in more or less semi-quarantine. I can still run around campus and run around Beijing, but I can't have any contact with the students. Yes, that makes perfect sense to me as well. Someone in the Chinese Ministry of Health sat down one day and thought "Yeah, so let's have all the foreigners be in contact with each other, it's ok if they spread it, but there should be no possible way that they can have access to 300 students, but it is OK to let them go into one of the most populated cities on the planet. Yeah, that sounds right." It really doesn't affect me too much, since I've been more administrative than facilitator this session, but still, the logic is astounding.