Day 7-9: Celebrating America with Loco Elvis

The past three days have been filled with food and laying around the guest house and…work?

We held English lessons for the staff on Wednesday and Friday. Now that we know where they are in terms of speaking and reading, it has been a lot easier to plan activities for them. We spent most of Thursday hanging out in our guest house and doing this. We have tried to incorporate some Dartmouth drill-like activities, which are good for increasing speaking confidence.

On Wednesday and Friday, we went to the KWAT office and continued chipping away at the extensive Seven-Year Activity Report. I won’t lie–it’s infuriating. Chunks of data are missing. Numbers from the quarterly reports we are going through contradict numbers from the six-month reports of the same year. The work is not challenging, but it is time-consuming and frustrating. There are also large gaps of time between when we get reports, during which we try to find things that could be construed as working–updating the blog, coming up with ideas to improve the website (even though we can’t do anything with that yet), organizing our email inboxes, and, if all else fails, staring blankly at the Activity Report.  Mai laughs at us because we want “a lot of work all the time,” which I guess is fair. After a few semesters of Dartmouth, the feeling of having nothing to do, nothing hanging over your head, and nothing due tomorrow is completely foreign and slightly uncomfortable. I think we will survive, though.

To celebrate the Fourth of July, we took our fellow KWAT intern and new French friend, Cecille, to go get burgers at a diner called “Fat Elvis.” It turns out that Fat Elvis is actually part of the larger Mexican restaurant and karaoke bar next door, known as “Loco Elvis.” Anyway, it was a pretty good burger and we are all very proud to be American (except Hoon because he is technically Korean). We even got to see the top half of a fireworks display (the bottom half was blocked by a building) from our guest house balcony.