A small story to tide the gap.

I know, I know. More than a month. Trust me, I've been really busy and now am in the middle of moving. I'll have a post with lots of cute pictures of Lucas and stuff, but for now I'll just relate an early story of my stay in China.

Now I have to explain about my first school. It was a crappy little community college-like affair whose leadership had Grand Ambitions. (I have to capitalize it to get the scope of it across.) To accomplish its aims it had to do a lot of renovation and upgrading. One of the most visible upgrades was an actually-quite-impressive sports field.

It was a very modern sports field, all things considered, replacing a dusty clay track with a modern spongey-rubbery sort of deal, for example. The bleachers were being completely replaced (albeit with the ubiquitous concrete-covering-bricks construction that plagues most of China's buildings). While this was going on, there was landscaping being done all across the campus as well.

It is the landscaping to which I will be turning my attention because, one day, while teaching classes, I happened to look outside my classroom window. What I saw left me baffled. Two workmen were working fastidiously in the blazing afternoon sun alongside the sports field fence.

One man, apparently the foreman, was digging what looked like over-sized post holes. He'd dig one of these holes, proceed 3m down the fence, dig another hole, proceed 3m and so on. The second man was two holes (6m) behind him, very carefully and thoroughly filling in the holes. It went on like that with mechanical precision. One man digging an over-sized post hole. An empty post hole being left in the sun. One man filling in a post hole.

I was, of course, very curious. I was new to China and I knew the Chinese had different ways of doing things. I simply couldn't fathom what the pair were doing. Was this some bizarre way to aerate soil? Or was it a way to take the hard clay and loosen it up to aid in irrigation? I set out after class, student in tow, to find out.

The workmen were just countryside enough to be positively thrilled that a foreign teacher was expressing interest in their work. They showed me their equipment, talked about the weather and such (through translation, of course) and finally I got to the point.

"Why is it that you're doing this here? You dig a hole, and he fills it in two holes behind you?"

The answer was very enlightening in a Chan (Zen) sort of way.

"Oh, our work group usually has three people," the foreman explained. "But today the tree planter is in the hospital, sick."