Day one of teaching (5/6/2013)

I woke up early in the morning at 4:30 am so that I could get to the shower first, it took ages for the water to get warm but eventually it did and I was super happy. When I was done I went back to the room and continued reading the book that my neighbor at the monastery had given to me, “what makes you not a Buddhist”… it’s a very good book, actually I’d probably recommend it if you want to start learning about Buddhism; anyone can read it. I’ve got whole piles of books that monks have come and brought to me during breakfast and lunch; An Introduction to Buddhism, the Essence of Buddhism, English-Japanese-Tibetan Conversation Handbook, Say it in Tibetan ect. ect. Really, these guys are amazing.

Anyway, at 6:00 am is Pooja, I just realized that I haven’t written about Pooja at all! Basically it is an hour of chanting in Tibetan, it’s like a prayer but with instruments (drums, horns, these shell things, cymbals ect.). During Pooja the atmosphere in the room is awesome, so far I’ve been to every single one (there are two every day, one from 6:00 am – 7:00 am and the other from 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm). The monks think I’m crazy but I love it. I attempt to meditate (which is verrrrry difficult for me, but inshallah it will come) but either way it’s very calming. I think that today I’m not going to go to the evening one though because during that hour the sun sets and I really want to watch the sun set over the mountains at least once.

Some of the students in my youngest
class showing off their ID cards!

Okay, focus Charlotte, I came here to write about my first day of teaching! During Pooja we were told that a Guru was in town, so the two older classes would be cancelled. Before I came here I was also told that this monastery was very relaxed and easy going with schedules and that things could easily be interrupted like this, so I was mentally prepared. At 8:00 am I was all excited and headed down to the class, I had everything prepared and was anxiously awaiting the students. Then a little monk came in and told me that I was an hour early… typical Charlotte. So I did the walk of shame back to my room and waited till 9:00 am. When 9:00 am came around I walked back down to the class and it was already full! The young monks were so excited. The previous day I had gone to the village with Chelsea to buy paper and coloring pencils, and I had spent some of the day cutting out little rectangles; I had a plan. I decided that we were going to make ID cards, a fun way to get to know each other. Everyone was so excited about it, and the young monks were all super quiet and focused when they were working on their cards. I really hope that I can incorporate a lot of creativity into the lessons. When they were done we read them out to each other and discussed the difference between saying is and are. Then the hour was already over! I must say though, the class was a little tough. Because they don’t speak English well the monks and I barely communicated and I couldn’t make any jokes… hopefully this will get better with time. Also, I was expecting to be teaching little kids (something which I have experience with) but it actually turns out that I’m teaching teenagers. The first class are aged between 10-14, the higher class between 18-22 and the middle class between 15-18… so yeah, so much for learning all those nursery rhymes…

I was busy packing away when an older monk came in and sat down… turns out the classes were back on! Meeting the Guru took less time than they expected. Thank God that I had enough cards with me because I didn’t have anything planned, so I just decided to do the same thing with my oldest class. It was so much fun because with this group I can have conversations and they all have a really good sense of humor. When they were done with the cards I told them to put them all upside down in the middle of the circle. I then told them to pick a random one and say all the information except the nickname and then I had to guess who it was. Laughter of course ensued because I was terrible at guessing. I did the same thing with the middle class. At the end of the lessons of the two older classes I asked whether they wanted to do story writing, letter writing or song writing the next day and both chose song writing; so that’s what the next lesson will consist of!

AND I’ve been given a nickname by the monks. They all have trouble pronouncing my name so during dinner time of the first day we were talking about nicknames. One monk, Sunny, said that I say ‘crazy’ way too often. And oh my, I think he’s right, I bet if you re-read my blog posts it’s everywhere… so YEP in addition to over using exclamation marks I also over use the word crazy. So he actually wanted my nickname to be ‘Crazy’ but we decided that was probably not appropriate. Then we had a great idea; Zizi could be my nickname, because crazy ends with the sound ‘zi’… and so my nickname was born. All the monks, young and old, call me Zizi here… it makes me so happy!

And can we please just take a moment to appreciate how cool
the cook looks when he goes grocery shopping...

Charlotte x