Sisters students return from China trip

Ten Sisters High School students, their Mandarin language teacher David Perkins, his wife Paula, and four of their parents recently completed a journey that began more than a year ago.

After many months of planning and fundraising, they spent two weeks in China, learning about Chinese history and culture, improving their Chinese language skills, and working in two orphanages for special-needs children.

The trip began with a week at the Beijing Yucai School, a private school with an enrollment of about 4,000. While there the Sisters group lived in a campus dormitory and attended classes presented by the school's International Education Department.

The students (sophomores Shawn Horton, Ben Larson, Nila Lukens, Jenny O'Connor, Dani Rudinsky, Cheyenne Sproat, Hannah Stuwe and Langley Vogt, and seniors Meghan Connolly and Kristina Sparling) have all completed at least two years of Chinese language classes at Sisters High School.

At Yucai they studied Mandarin, Chinese architecture, calligraphy, Chinese folk music, the Chinese art of paper cutting, traditional Chinese musical instruments, and t'ai chi chuan, a Chinese martial art.

While staying at Yucai the Sisters teens also had time to shop at the local WuMart, befriend Chinese students during pick-up soccer and basketball games and mealtimes in the cafeteria, and see historic sites in Beijing. The group visited Tian An Men Square, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and the Bird's Nest coliseum and Water Cube that were constructed for the 2008 Olympics. They hiked a beautiful, steep section of the Great Wall at Juyongguan Pass, where the view from the top was breathtaking, despite the smog.

The group moved from Yucai to Shepherd's Field Children's Village in Wuqing, Tianjin. Shepherd's Field is home to 80 special-needs orphans who are placed there for medical attention. The Sisters students spent their days working with the children under the supervision of the ayis (local "aunties" who are responsible for caring for the children). They held, fed and changed the infants, and read to and played with the older children.

"Shepherd's Field was a good experience for all of us because the kids there were awesome, and we had to communicate in Mandarin with the ayis, who didn't know any English," said Jenny O'Connor. "It was also fun to give the kids an opportunity to speak some English with us." The school-aged children are being taught English in the hope that they might eventually be adopted into an English-speaking country.

The final leg of the trip was spent at the Bethel Love is Blind Project, which is located in Dou Dian and serves 35 blind or visually impaired orphans. Bethel raises its own produce, eggs, chickens and goats. The children are on a structured schedule, so the students were only able to spend one afternoon with them.

During that session the children especially enjoyed a performance of "Qing Fei De Yi" (a popular Chinese love song) by Nila Lukens and Dani Rudinsky, accompanied by Mr. Perkins on the ukulele. The rest of the Sisters team's time at Bethel was spent painting, thinning corn fields, and weeding.

At each of the places where the group stayed, they gave Sisters memorabilia, including original artwork donated by local artists, as gifts. At Shepherd's Field and Bethel they also presented the infant and child-care items that were collected last spring by Megan Schoenecker's middle-school leadership class. The gifts were sincerely appreciated.

The students encountered minor adversity throughout the trip: They experienced bug bites, blisters, air pollution, crowds, heat, humidity, squatting toilets, traffic jams, crazy drivers, torrential rainfall, an obnoxious drunk at a roadside Uyghur restaurant, chicken-head soup, and the challenges of eight teenaged girls using a single bathroom. Nothing got in the way of having fun. The students had opportunities to test their bargaining skills at places like the four-story Hong Qiao Market in Beijing and the Guwenhua Jie (Ancient Culture Street) in Tianjin. By the end of the trip, they had each found treasures to bring home.

They played cards, sting-pong, bananagram, and tested their British accents in their own version of "America's Got Talent." They spent their last afternoon in China racing on foot through downtown Liang Xiang on a scavenger hunt that required each two- or three-person team to speak in Mandarin with local pedestrians, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, pet owners, uniformed workers, etc. to find and photograph each destination.

"It was so cool to meet people," said Hannah Stuwe. "Even when it's hard to communicate, you can still just be amazed by people wherever you go. And Mr. Perkins is such an incredible person to care so much about us that he was willing to take us kids on the trip."

The whole group agreed.