They call me "big sister".

Some exciting things about Tuesday: the first day of Chi Heng 2007 Summer Camp in Shanghai, the spontaneous recovery of my keyboard, and a decently blue sky that lasted until sundown.

Went into the office in the morning, where the network was down but my computer found some wireless like the good little computer it is. Called people repeatedly in efforts to up the numbers for attendance for our dinner, ate lunch, and then it was time to find some AIDS-affected children to subject to my questionable mandarin. Walked over to their hotel, and we all headed to Shanghai GM on their bus. Everyone has Chi Heng shirts and hats (including me!) so that's fun. Touring Shanghai GM's plant was kinda cool, although I think my favorite part was getting to share with the random man from Detroit who happened to be on our tour that I have overcome my fear of welding since touring the Ford plant as a child. (The vast number of awkward conversations I have have made me very accustomed to sharing barely-relevant things in an effort to continue to appear friendly.)

Headed back to the hotel after the tour for a bit of relaxation time, which I spent using MORE conveniently-discovered free wireless and then hanging out with the kids. They're ages 12-18, which means they can talk pretty fast and have fairly large vocabularies, but they're super nice and patient with me. I talked to one of the older girls for pretty much the whole bus ride back from GM, and actually got sat down by a bunch of the boys to be interrogated about the U.S. while drinking the tea they made me. Simon called (he'd headed back to the office after the tour) to say he didn't get the things I'd emailed him so could I come to the office and jump drive them? Okay, sure. And then about halfway back to the office, he called to say he'd gotten them, so I headed back to the hotel.

Had dinner with Rose (staff from Beijing...I've talked about her before), some of the staff from where the kids live, and 3 women from Hong Kong who were there to do Art Therapy. (While chilling in the hotel I had had several confusing phone conversations with Agatha before we realized both of us spoke better English than Mandarin. Avon and Veronica are her helpers, probably around my age and really friendly and awesome.)

We headed over to the conference room of the hotel (not actually connected...and right next to where someone was setting off a ton of fireworks) for Art Therapy, which is supposedly a really fancy program for having children deal with their pain through painting and other art, but looked a lot more like Agatha telling the kids what to do and doing it for them when they weren't doing it "right". Luckily, Agatha couldn't be everywhere at once, and I still had a great time. These kids have lost a parent to AIDS, and are probably poorer than almost anyone else I've ever known personally, but there's nothing sad or pitiful about them, at least if you didn't know. They're just normal kids; maybe a little more polite or a little calmer, but that could just be a cultural thing.