Busy schedules means late blog posts for week 3 again. OOPS….. Will update on the craziness that is week 4 another time, and well, the week 3 which started on 20th May marked a week of lessons all over the place kind of made me very giddy and blur about the whole week. All I remember is that I had class everyday and needed to brainstorm on our main ALP project in the periods of “free time”. Well maybe it was because we were given a whole bunch of lessons to choose from by our teaching assistants but as a team, decided to go for almost all of them to try them out and have a feel for them.
Among some of the more notable things, we had a tour of some of ZJU’s amazing projects on the Wed 23rd. This included many amazing projects, but one that really stood out for me was the billboard assigning for cost-profit maximisation for a company, which considers cost of the advertisement space and traffic flow in the area. They managed to provide so much information with an easy enough to understand diagrams and ranking system such that it is simple for the user to identify, based on their company’s hierarchy of objectives to choose the best possible spots to place their advertisements.
On Friday we went to the school of special needs, Hu Shu School, to have a feel for what we as a TFI team was going to do and the environment we were going to be at for our community work, and I was impressed with what they as a school have accomplished. They are but a small community that stands for something so simple yet so important like trying to get those with special needs just the right amount of footing to at the very least be independent for just a day. They cater from kindergarten all the way to those of working age, teaching them to do simple jobs like cashiering, brewing milk tea or even car washing. It was eye-opening, and I am really looking forward to what I can learn from fully interacting with the amazing team behind this mission and the amazing students they have.
I also finally managed to squeeze out the time to go for mass that I have been missing for the last 3 weekends due to various reasons. I hope that I can keep up this commitment to go over for mass here as I have back home. Circumstances might be different and all, but I believe I should never fall out of that commitment I have to my faith formation I have had all these years. Here is to more beautiful masses at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Hangzhou, 9km away from the Zijinggang campus, but it is really worth that quiet time to just reflect.
