Trudging all the way through the rain to Vanserg
I woke up at 8:22AM cursing. “Oh shit!” I had planned on waking up at 6AM to start studying and finishing problem sets because I had not done any work yesterday or the day before. I know. This is horrible. Horrible planning. But the thing was, I planned on doing work, but I had no motivation and no drive whatsoever. I know I should have just started on work and get into the working mode, but I was so weak-willed and decided instead to watch a string of movies. Not all the movies were great either.
Anyway, I volunteer through a program called HARMONY to give a private 1-hour weekly piano lesson to a local student. After I finished getting up, I had a sudden thought that my student may have forgotten about the lesson. After all, it was early on a Sunday morning and no one really wants to get up on Sunday; we all want to sleep in, especially in high school. So, I called her up and realized she did forget. Instead of being disappointed, I was ecstatic. I had extra time to start studying! So, sleepy-eyed as I was, I cracked open my physics textbook and started reading through it.
Soon enough, by 10:30AM, I had to get ready to started walking to Vanserg, which is a twenty minute walk from Dunster. It was pouring outside too, but I had to trudge to Vanserg because I volunteer for Chinatown-ESL, a program where I teach recent Chinese immigrants the English language for two hours each week. I teach level 1 Chinese, which basically means that the people I teach have no introduction to English so we start from the very bottom up–from pronunciations and such.
All the while I was walking to Vanserg, which is this weird building in this small alleyway a long way from Dunster, I was thinking about how much I regretted signing up for Chinatown-ESL, especially on a Sunday. I was too busy–I should have more time to study.
But when I arrived at Vanserg and went into the overly stuffy room–the window was closed and the heater seemed to be on too high–I realized why I signed up again. As I was teaching, I just thought it was so fun. I love interacting with the old immigrants as they tried very hard to grasp a new language after living half their lives in another country with another culture. They were so eager to learn the new language; some even traveled one and a half hours to come to class every week.
My heart just melted at the devotion the students showed. Sure, there would be students who may not study at home, but when I told them to study and that we were going to have dictations each week last week, I was so happy when I asked this week if they studied and they all replied yes.
I just love enthusiasm. I do not care if I am volunteering and not getting any monetary compensation; if I see enthusiasm for something that I can help with, I want to help.