I have begun to fear that everything bad that I thought could happen to me in this place, and everything bad and negative that I was worried was true about this place was more or less correct. Even though there is significantly more of a city here than I thought there would be, there is exactly the amount of things to do that I was afraid there would be. We all just sit around our rooms and watch the days pass by. And it's not because we aren't trying to find places to go, because we are. We go out and wander the streets of the city in the hopes that we may find things to do, and we consistently find nothing at all. The weirdest part about it is, I never seem to find people my age. Either there's some place I don't know about, or they just aren't in this town, which would explain a lot. We asked some of the teachers here what they do in their free time, and we got responses ranging from watch TV to read, which was less than comforting for our long term well being. Our main contact here is a woman by the name of Margo, and we asked her if there were any bars or such, and she confirmed there aren't. She actually went on to say that “You wouldn't want to go to one if there was. It's dangerous, you know. They're full of fashionable young people, and you wouldn't have any fun.” I don't think she gets it.
We're learning more about how and when we're going to be teaching, and as it turns out, I'm teaching even less than the 18 hours a week I was expecting to be. Kao and I teach three classes from a textbook every weekday morning. These are the big ones, with about 60 kids per class. They're 45 minutes each, and we're rotating through all of the classes in the grade, so I'll be spending no longer than a week with any group of kids. This makes teaching difficult, and goes to further my theory that we're not here as teachers, we're here as attractions. That's the bulk of our teaching. Our arrangements are better than Miles and Vang, who are in a much bigger grade, and are only teaching two classes a day. They're cycling through all of the students in the grade as well, and it's a much bigger grade. They have no textbook, and will simply be teaching the same four lessons for the entire four month stint. I'm not sure about everyone else, but that sounds like hell to me.
We're also doing an international class in the evening. We're rotating as teachers for this one, so I'll get to teach once every four days for an hour. We're each taking a different portion of English to work on, and I picked discussion, so I'll be going in, giving an article to read, and testing comprehension and leading discussion. This might work, or it might fail miserably. We know nothing about our students, other than that there are ten of them, so their English level might be way below where we want it to be, and given that I have never been pleasantly surprised in this country, I'm prepping to do some scrambling.
I've been running again, which actually feels really good, as long as I'm not walking down stairs. It's so hot and humid here that I have to wait for the sun to go down, but it provides me with some sort of positive from this awful experience. I really hate this place, and thinking about spending four months here makes the walls feel like they're closing in. It's not pleasant here already, and it gets worse every day. I'm worried about the future, and I'm worried about what's going to happen to me emotionally. I've felt depression creeping in already, it kept me up Monday night, and I think it's going to many times to come. These next months are not going to be pleasant.
-Cooper
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