Teaching

Well, everyone, I've completed my second week of the 15 week semester here at KUIS. At first, I was terrified, because Dr. Aliponga and Gerald are watching my every move. I was supposed to take over the class this week for Gerald, but I had a problem last weekend: food poisoning. Apparently, I ate something that was a little off. It started with stomach pain for about 3 days, but not severe. Then it went to my intestines. At that point, I called my advisor, Dr. Aliponga, to tell him I hadn't been feeling well. He contacted the International Affairs Office, and they took me to a local clinic. I was in and out in less than 30 minutes, WITH my 4 prescriptions for food poisoning, and the doctor was wonderful and even spoke Enlgish with me much of the time. And, even if I didn't have medical insurance, the cost would still only be about 34 bucks, with the medication. Because I do have insurance, it is only about 30% of that. So, it is cheap, fast, easy, convenient, and foreigner friendly. Could we say the same about any medical facility in the US? Not under the same roof, I don't think! And this is a country that is coming out of a market crash only now.

Now that I am recovering with the help of the drugs, I am little more dizzy and sleepy than normal. I am sleeping easier, which is nice. I was a little surprised that the drugs for cleaning me out aren't giving me any kind of digestive troubles, they are just making everything run smoother, from what I can tell. I was afraid they'd give me drugs to flush my body out in painful or inconvenient ways, but apparently that isn't the approach to treating food poisoning here.

I start fully taking control of Dr. Aliponga's Oral Communication class on Monday, but supposedly we'll switch on-and-off for that one by the week and I start taking over Gerald's fully on Thursday. Dr. Aliponga is really carefully research-based, and Gerald is research based but really chaotic. He's super charismatic. Even when he does something student centered, he is the driving force behind every class. Sometimes his playing on words confuses the students, and he does have fun picking on them sometimes, but even so, I do not feel I could compare to him! He's really quite good at everything he does here.

So that's it for now. I went through a "commencement" ceremony here, and talked to the President. He seems like a nice enough of a guy, but someone is pulling strings behind everyone's backs and setting him against alot of the lower-ranked (foreign) teachers in our department...not me, but all my supervisors. The people near retirement controlling our department, which I have NEVER seen near my own supervisors, apparently are avoiding mine like the plague. I don't know too much else. All I know is that blame is being moved somehow. I'm not sure if it is even wise to talk about it. In any case, I hope Gerald and Dr. Aliponga stay, at least til the end of my time here. It would be very hard to have almost no guidance in times of need throughout the rest of this quarter.

In other news, Sean is coming out to see me at the end of February. It looks like Mom and Nicole are coming out at the very beginning of April, and Enoch, well, I'm not entirely sure yet. I've got one bottle of wine for Mom, and one for Enoch though when they get here. Brian, well, no word from him yet! Hopefully he can come sometime in March.