Fudan Students Visit Migrant Worker's Kids School

Many showed interest and eight of us could agree on a date and actually make it.
Last Tuesday at two we met up on campus and took a cab to the school!
After crossing suburban living- and industrial areas, we found our way to the tiny school, hidden somewhere between big old-looking company parks and little spaces, where people grow vegetables. Far away in the North of Shanghai, down a driveway that you wouldn't call a road, there it was.

What we hadn't expected were twenty kids lined up and repetitiously singing "WARMLY WELCOME" in Chinese for us, when we got out of the cab.
Still a little overwhelmed by the setting we took group photos with the kids.
Then, in the teacher's room we talked to the head of the school and split up in three groups to visit as many classes as possible.
In the team, we had two students, who just started learning Chinese, but in every group was at least one advanced Chinese learner of us, who translated.
The teaching then was a lot fun. The small classrooms were packed with forty students and the big one with maybe fifty or sixty.
In advance we planed to give all the kids English names, so they would get a better connection to the language.
Giving the names took most of the two hours we spend teaching and we involved games (some using a small ball, which produced a sort of chaos, as kids jump for a ball in a classroom that offers just enough space to sit shoulder on shoulder). The kids were extremely excited, as you can see on the photos and we had just as much fun ourselves.
The principal thanked us at least four hundred times and is happy that his school finally gets some attention.
By the way, he graduated from university in Shanghai, majoring in English and wanted to help children, because he went through the change, that education can do himself.
So he founded that school at the age of 27. Ever since the school has been on the edge of closing and had to move due to financial problems five times.