Saturday July 8, 2017
My name is Moya Cross. I am 17 years old and I attend Trinity High School. I’m also a 2017 student ambassador attending the Chicago Urban League’s Mission Trip to China. Today in Hangzhou it was 95 degrees but it felt like 110!!! In this raging heat, we attended several seminars regarding Chinese Culture and History, China’s Economic Development and the Chinese Language. We also attended two cultural workshops that were based on paper cutting and dough sculptures.
During the seminar based upon culture and history, Dr. Tianzhong Deng taught us about Pangu, who was the legendary creator in Chinese mythology, Chinese language, its different names and Chinese cuisine. After an hour and thirty minutes of this seminar, we took a fifteen minute break to regroup and prepare for the next seminar taught by Dr. Qiao Lui. She explained China’s economic growth: China’s population was 1.373 billion in 2015, China had the second highest gross domestic product at $10.865 trillion and lastly, it is the third largest country with 9,634,057 km squared. China is growing rapidly and the United States has a lot of work to do if we want to keep up. After her lecture was over, we had lunch and a little free time until our last seminar.
My name is Raven Ramsey. I just turned 17 years old on Thursday, I attend Muchin College Prep and I am covering the second half of this day. There was one class on the Chinese Language; another class taught us about paper cutting and the last class taught us how to make dough sculptures. Even though today was very continuous and back to back, it still was fun and exciting to learn new things.
During the Chinese Language class, we reviewed the basics of the Chinese language, which most of us already had knowledge on from previous sessions and the Urban League’s pre-trip curriculum. Today’s cultural activities were very different from others. Each individual had to be creative during the paper cutting and dough sculpture workshops and through the different types of art, each person showed their own personality. For example, when we made dough sculptures we had to make a panda and everyone’s panda looked totally different and their personality showed in their art. Overall, today was a long but informative and fun day.
~Moya Cross & Raven Ramsey
