Yes, We Can!

“Failure is the Mother of the success.” We comforted and encouraged each other by iterating this ooooold sentence and a wry smile. This was the first time that we, service team “iKid”, went to a children’s house to teach madarin, and this two hours was AWFUL. Everybody felt dispirited. What’s more, we are going to run this service for two more times.

“How do you know failure is not the Grandmother of the success?” said Qizhi subsequently. He certainly “enjoyed” a big beat from all of the rest. But thanks to him, all of us laughed and the atmosphere turned more relaxing.

Oral presentation, poster, final report, post-test... Even though we had many things to bother in this intensive week, we still got together and spent a lot of time in preparation for the service with a great passion and the affection on children. We arranged several sections—telling the legend of Nien beast and introducing Chinese New Year, playing tatoo (How to spell? Forgot… It should be the similar game of “guessing the word”) of Chinese version and learning Chinese folk songs. We prepared everything well and imagined how wonderful it would be and how welcome we would be among these lovely angels!

However, the fact was a complete contrast. Their ages range from 6 to 12 years old. Considering little kids, we slowed down our speech; however, the elder ones felt too simple and boring. One 11-year-old girl next to me even sighed and murmured “one more hour left…” and I could clearly see her bored look. Then I constantly talked with her to encourage her to speak Chinese and she was shy but still willing to communicate with me. Girls were relatively better, as they didn’t disturb the class. However, the little naughty boys were not easy to deal with. Some shouted “so boring” again and again, but he didn’t want to leave when the local teacher asked him to go out. Some didn’t listen to the speaker and sat on the floor bumping each other. There were 11 of us and 12 kids, of which the ratio was almost 1 to 1, but we just could not make it smooth. Sigh…

The local teacher told us we lacked some skills of management and we should be stricter, otherwise the kids would not listen to us. But how could we bear to be strict faced to such lovely and naïve faces! Thinking back about our childhood, we behaved more or less the same as these kids did. Kids want to be cared about, therefore, they do some things to raise the attention, even though they appear to be annoying sometimes. They love something but would refuse just because of shyness. That’s the nature of kids. We all have experienced, involving many subtle emotions which we could not tell clearly but just felt. What a kid needs is just a little bit care and a little bit encouragement.

We need to cheer up and bend down our body to listen to them, pouring in more patience and passion. Failure can be the mother or the grandmother or even the great grandmother of success. As long as we do not give up, as long as we strive to make it, the first clear cry of the success must be heard.

I believe we can do better next time, next next time and next next…time. Yes, we can!