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U.S. Foreign Service Officer headed to Wuhan, China

The mission of a U.S. diplomat in the Foreign Service is to promote peace, support prosperity, and protect American citizens while advancing the interests of the U.S. abroad. The work that diplomats do has an impact on the world as they serve at one of any of the more than 270 embassies, consulates and other diplomatic missions in The Americas, Africa, Europe and Eurasia, East Asia and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia.

The duties of a Consular Officer include to provide emergency and non-emergency services to American citizens and protect our borders through the proper adjudication of visas to foreign nationals and passports to American citizens. We adjudicate immigrant and non-immigrant visas, facilitate adoptions, help evacuate Americans, combat fraud, and fight human trafficking. Consular Officers touch people’s lives in important ways, often reassuring families in crisis. They face many situations which require quick thinking under stress and develop and use a wide range of skills, from managing resources and conducting public outreach to assisting Americans in distress.

Biblical Skits in class

This week is my last week of classes at the university. Next week my students have a week of "practical training" where they go back to their home towns and work with teachers or businesses in the fields of education, translation and international trade. The week after that they take the final exam for the course.

This week in class they presented their skits that they have been working on. Each semester I try to have a lesson in which they do the talking and presenting but it has been really difficult for me to find something that works well in China. In the past, when I have asked them do to a presentation, the students just copy information from the internet and the presentations are boring and useless. When I have had them try and actually teach or lead a class the results were equally unimpressive. When I have tried skits in the past they were just O.K. so I tried to set them up and prepare them better this time.

In the students' textbook for the European History course there were a lot of famous Bible stories. For a change, I thought that they could act them out instead of having me explain them in the form of a lecture. I let them work in groups of 2-5 and told them to prepare a short skit 5-10 minutes long in informal English. The passages in the book were written in very old and formal English. I encouraged the students to have fun, be creative, improvise and make the skits relative to today's life. Some of them were able to do this very well and others tanked horribly.

Here are the stories that were chosen by the students:

The resurrection
The nativity story
The woman at the well
Lazarus
The prodigal son
David and Goliath
Creation/Adam and Eve
Noah and the ark
Cain and Abel

Some moments that I particularly enjoyed while viewing the skits:

-A line from the "Resurrection" skit: "What? Jesus is not in the tomb? You're pulling my leg!"
-Many students made bilingual name tags for their characters and had different signs for acts and scenes
-During the "Prodigal son" skit, the younger son went and spent all his money on Chinese Mahjong gambling and going to sing karaoke at various KTVs.
-The use of props was pretty funny and creative. One of my favorites was wearing a backpack on backwards to represent pregnancy.
-While we watched one version of "David and Goliath" the actors had all of us in the audience sing a song that I remember from childhood
-Many plays included music to go along with actions that the students provided from their cell phones. Others had videos/pictures on the power point for scenery or natural disasters (earthquakes, floods etc.)

When they are in class, my students are usually quiet and shy as mice but when they get up in front of class to perform or sing they completely transform into giggling, emotional, dramatic and hilarious comics. It's a surprising change for me and I wish I would have gotten some of the skits on video. I hope they learned some of the stories or at least the morals they were trying to teach but if all else failed at least we got to do something different and they had some fun.
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    Sarah Sanderson
    I am currently in Mandarin language training as a new diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service. Sean and I depart for Wuhan, China in November 2019 for my first tour in consular affairs.
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