What about work?!?

First day of work…I was seriously a little bit nervous about this day since it decides whether I am having a good or maybe not so good time here in China.

At ten in the morning I met my program coordinator Catherine from “Roots&Shoots” at a train station in Pudong, the part of the city which is located east of the Huangpu River. The train ride took me about 50 minutes so the distance is ok. Together we went to the office of my new employer. On the way to the office Catherine explained to me that it is a local NGO so they don’t really speak English. After the first shock was over I thought about why my organization would place me somewhere I can´t understand what my tasks are.

As we entered the office (a very small one with five people working there fulltime) Summer introduced herself as my new “boss”. Surprisingly she could speak English but pretty shitty one. In a small conference room she gave me a introduction about what their NGO is doing but to be honest…I didn’t really get it. What I understood was that they are having a organic farm in the Qingpu District in the so called “Communitiy Shared Agriculture” (CSA) style. A CSA farm is practically a bio-farm where you have some “shareholders” who are paying a certain amount of money to the farmer at the beginning of the year without knowing what exactly they get. They trust the farmer that he is having a good harvest and they will get their e. g. vegetables frequently delivered or they can pick them up. The farmer will just provide the food he is harvesting. The whole work is just for providing excellent vegetable or fruits and not for any economical reasons. Sounds a little bit like Hippie-style farming (in fact it was that in the beginning) but it is actually quite environmental friendly.

But back to the essential…on this farm my organization, which is called “Green Oasis”, is providing some kind of lessons for school classes to learn more about environmental sustainability and environmental protection. I hope I got it right, if not I will tell you later.

So I got back to the office and sat down on what will be my desk for the next 8 month. After I installed all the Wi-Fi stuff I got my first task: reading, reading about what my organization is doing AND a PowerPoint-presentation about how harmful “bad” food (too much sugar, additives, with chemical fertilizer cultivate etc.) is to everybody…in CHINESE! So please if somebody knows how to say “chemical fertilizer is changing cell-structure of a potato” it’s the right time to speak up…I didn’t and I most certainly forgot it after I let my iPod translate it. As you can imagine it was kind of hard translating and verifying all the example and facts in the presentation. But I hope in some weird way it helped me improving my Chinese, if not I probably going to kill myself ;-)

At 5:30 pm usually my day in the office would and but I had to work a little longer. They told me that the working hours are from 9 to 5:30 so it is not that bad. AND for Shanghai-level an hour to get to work is pretty short timeJ

So that’s it. I could tell you some more about how my second work day was (I visited the organic-farm…it was pretty cool to see actually a little bit more green than the green of the cabs) but I won´t! ;-) BUT what I can tell you is how my third day of working was…not working! Got free the whole day. Great start in my first week of work.

As its national holiday from tomorrow on maybe won´t be able to provide information about my magnificent life here in SH. But maybe will prove different…first I gotta tell Shanghai that I am really back ;-)

Till than have a good one!

L.