Challenge : Solution — Stories of The Big Move Overseas
It’s that time of year where, in America, students are going back to school, and around the world our teachers are headed off to their countries of service to re-engage with their foreign communities and homes. The seasons are changing, even if the weather has not quite caught up yet, and there’s a fresh buzz in the air of new things, excitement, and anticipation of what this next semester brings.
This week we want to share with you a story hot off the press from one of our returning teachers in China. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at what it can be like moving overseas, translation mishaps, finding your driver and your house amidst various bobbles and communication discrepancies, and other fun things.
Just as our short-term have returned, our long-term teachers are off, along with teachers from our newest program, Project 5.6.
Teeny, Squished, and Machine Gunning
We don’t have much time to switch terminals in San Francisco, but our flights are fine and we make all of our connections. We arrive in Shanghai a bit tired but ready to finish the final leg of our journey.
Challenge:
Locate our driver somewhere outside PuDong airport when both of our phones are out of local talk and text.
Solution:
Connect to the free airport wifi. Andy begins using WeChat (Chinese social media) to message the driver. All of our luggage arrives (10 checked bags) and we begin surveying the “taxi/shuttle bus” pick-up areas on the floor below. Challenge: how do we tell our driver exactly where we are? His English and our Chinese are on roughly the same level. Solution: use the “translate” feature in WeChat; it’s not great but we are able to understand most things.
Challenge:
WeChat doesn’t know how to translate one piece of critical information, “terminal one,” where he is circling (later he pointed out this nugget within our texting stream). We wait in a bus loading area hoping he might loop around (he wouldn’t have). Solution: approach a college-age looking couple and ask them to translate. Their English is more than adequate. We still don’t have talking on our phones so they offer to call him for us and explain clearly where we are.
Our driver parks at terminal one and walks over to find us. Our tired family hoof it back to his parking garage and locate his van. Challenge: holy cow, this van is teeny. How are we going to stuff suitcases plus 10 more ample carry-ons and 6 souls in there?
Solution:
Squish.
We miraculously fit everything and everyone inside the toaster/van and the driver begins verbally wringing his hands. After all, he isn’t licensed as a commercial driver; if he gets pulled over he could get into pretty big trouble.
Challenge:
The G20 meeting is taking place in Hangzhou, another city in our province, and there is a police border check in effect. The driver has difficulty explaining a solution to us and we begin to worry that he’ll drop us at a train station that may or may not have remaining seats. (Also, we aren’t sure why he didn’t consider this sooner…)
Solution:
We eventually communicate our dire cell phone situation and convince the driver to call our fluently Chinese speaking teammate, hoping she’s still up. We discover that he intends to take us through the checkpoint, but that we will need to provide our passports and may have our luggage searched.
We all pile out at the provincial border, our son is impressed with the machine gun-toting soldiers standing behind a barricade, and our passports are cleared.
Five hours into a three-hour drive we finally make it home and our driver earns the “Slower Than Your Grandma” achievement. Phew. We are thrilled to be back in our apartment (not in a hotel) and our own beds. Oh, and… NO MOLD! Hallelujah.
