VTF is back!

Most of you know that Nancy and I were team leaders for ELIC's Vietnam Teaching Fellowship (VTF) from July 2007 till we had to go back to the USA for Nancy's cancer treatment. Last year there was no VTF team but the program is back in business for the 2010-2011 school year. This year's team of 3 teachers is led by a China Teaching Fellowship alum and the four of them will be teaching a few km west of here at Lomonoxop High School where our VTF team was supposed to be placed back in 2007.

VTF is a great program for those who have recently graduated college and are thinking about serving overseas. It gives them a chance to get their feet wet and see whether it's a long-term calling. In the three short years of the VTF program, sixteen teachers have participated. Of those, four are back teaching with ELIC in Vietnam, one has left ELIC but is beginning her fifth year in Vietnam, and one has been teaching in Laos since she left VTF. Six out of sixteen is a pretty good ratio!

We're pretty happy that the program is back. Our role this year is to be "on call" for the new leader as she breaks into her first year as a team leader. I guess we're still in the mentoring business and that's a good thing.

Fall Schedule

As the sun sinks slowly into the western sky, a second week of teaching comes to a close. I've been given two reading classes and two listening classes, all 4th year students. Half of the students have had me before so I'm hoping that will lead to some good connections. I'm trying to get all their names memorized and that's a pretty big task when you have a class with four people named Ha, three named Trang, two named Mai and two with exactly the same name (first, middle and last). Fewer names to memorize, I guess, but then you have to learn who's who. Fortunately, like people the world over, they tend to choose one place to sit and sit there every class.

The classes have been enjoyable and they seem to be tracking with the material so far - even the minority students who have had much less English and really struggle with the advanced coursebook.

That's the quick version of the teaching update.

100 Things

This really has nothing to do with teaching EFL but the prospect of moving to a new house, combined with a recent newspaper article, got me thinking again about living simply. Ever since reading Ron Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger more than 30 years ago, the idea of living simply has really appealed to me. That's not to say I didn't poke at the iTouch at Best Buy this summer or spend time online to find out if you can read a Kindle in the dark (you can't). But, it has made me think more about my stewardship of the other 90%. As my family tires of hearing me say, "You can only spend it once." Living simply allows me the freedom (or maybe it's the pleasure) of deciding the best way to spend it. I like that.

Chasing links from the newspaper article, I found a 2-year-old Time magazine item about people trying to cut their personal possessions down to one hundred things. (The article, How to Live With Just 100 Things, doesn't actually tell you how.) It seems to have originated with a guy named Dave Bruno. It would be tough for me to whittle things down to 100; in America I easily had more than 100 tools! But, once we get moved I think I may do an inventory and see what I can live without. Maybe I can get to five or six hundred?

I'll be back soon.

It's been a long hiatus with the summer travel. Now life is in an uproar because, in addition to the usual beginning of the semester stress, we need to move to a new place. Soon I hope to get back to contributing substance to my blogs but it won't be for a while. Stay tuned. You might even hear about some of the opportunities we checked into this past summer.