Sarah Murray a local cordinator and describes how she helps volunteers settle in
Sarah Murray a local project coordinator in China. Beyond setting up new programmes and organising visits she also teaches calligraphy as part of the orientation courses volunteers take part in once they arrive in China. She describes this aspect of her work in Shanghai.
Our culture course has several different forms, such as calligraphy, Chinese painting and cooking. Since I am in charge of teaching calligraphy, I want to introduce this course first. Calligraphy is understood in China as the art of writing a good hand with the brush or the study of the rules and techniques of this art. Firstly, I introduce the basic tools of 'four treasures of study' (writing brush, ink stick, paper, and ink slab) and then I teach the volunteers how to hold a brush so that they can write characters with it. I also explain why they should not be hesitated when they are writing, because once the brush movement hesitates, a black mark is created, so speed, strength and agility is the essence of fine artwork.
After the induction course, I start to teach them the basic strokes (dot, vertical, horizontal, right and left fallings) in regular script, which is one of the five types of Chinese calligraphy. The volunteers are quite good at the basic strokes after a couple of times practising, then I make a step further to teacher them how to write their Chinese names. The volunteers become very excited when I am writing their names on the paper, and some of them can't wait to imitate my version. In order to stimulate their interest, I showed the other 4 types (seal character, official script, cursive hand and running hand ) of calligraphy to them. One of the volunteers tells me that from her perspective, calligraphy is an amazing art and she also suggests me come to Europe and spread it in western countries, for that this job will help me make a lot of money. ( a joke ) At the end of the course, each of them can finish a piece of work with their own Chinese names on it, and almost all of the volunteers want to keep their first calligraphy work. The volunteers like the work so much that they want to show their work to family members and friends as a memento in China.
Sarah Murray