Location: Jian’ou, Fujian Province, China

Many expats from Western countries come to China to teach. Once you’re there though, there’s quite a bit of pressure for people to do a side job. Many people like to hustle, to try to get work when it’s technically illegal under their visa requirements.

In our travels, we met average American kids that ended up as voice actors in cartoon movies, the center of a promotional campaign for clothing, or even posing as a businessperson to make a company seem more internationally connected. V and I did some work like that, but we didn’t get paid, so it was okay.

We ended up teaching kindergarten around Jian’ou, to help out our dear translator Davi and friend Suvien as they established a summer school to help younger children get more familiar with reading, writing, and speaking English. Working with the little kids is completely different from our work in the high school. They are so full of energy, and loved playing games and singing songs! We taught them duck duck goose, musical chairs, and hot potato along with their English lessons. Sometimes V couldn’t handle how rambunctious they were. A lot of them were camera shy, so they are pretty well behaved in this video.

Sometimes, even though we were the foreign experts, we had to sit back and let the master do the work. Davi shows us how it’s done in this video. He commands a classroom like nobody’s business as he teaches a lesson on numbers and counting. You educate those young minds, guy!

Since we miss you and Suvien so much, we hope you like this video, and know that we appreciate all the hard work you did.

As usual, it’s available in higher quality on Vimeo:

<3, K (&V)