Today was a pretty average day with the exception of lunch time when we held a Meeting which all the Chinese teachers were told to attend. Our style of business the day before yesterday impressed the woman in charge so much that she basically told all the other teachers to come. Joel did a good Presentation and many seem very interested with one person at least committing herself to the cause.

On a totally different note, it is interesting to see the Chinese labour mentality. In England, the general trend seems to be redundancy because of technological improvement, ie machines getting bigger and better and replacing people. In China, however, the exact opposit seems to be true. Doubtless in some areas, people are being sacked because a maching can do the job faster or better, or both; however, here it seems that this is not the case. Examples of this are found everywhere, however perhaps the most fitting was the case today of cutting the school playing field. It is the same size as a full football field, in the middle of a proper 400m running track. In England this would take one person on a tractor style lawn mower the best part of 1h to cut and clean the cut grass up. However, here there were 5 people (or perhaps one or two more) working for the whole day to cut it. The reason was that the school had only bought one small petrol-powered lawn mower, dating back perhaps 20 years. There was one person walking this up and down, perhaps 75m 200 times during the course of the day, in the blazing heat and about 4 people walking atfer him raking up the grass into piles for 2 more people to put into bin bags and take away to despose of. This sort of thing is evident all over China: humans are cheap, but machines are expensive.