weekend retreat into insanity

2:32pm Monday, Oct 22

so i just moved to my new host family, and they are very nice people. it's a french family, but they speak english. my host mom's name is chantal, my host dad is renald, and their 21-year old daughter is named Laura. the nice thing is i'm still living in downtown moncton, so i don't have to travel that far for work at rogers.

i'm doing a lot at my work placement. james is fully trained on camera, so we can go out and do our own shoots now. this morning i went out and did a street piece. and this weekend i think i'm going to cover a new skatepark reopening. tomorrow, i'm reporting for another roger's producer on elderly health care in new brunswick. the only sucky thing is that i'm not allowed to drive any sort of mortorized vehicle during CWY, so i'm limited as to what i can shoot unless i can arrange a car ride to carry all the camera equipment. i know, right? right?!

i've also started freelancing with a few local newspapers. doing interviews and profiles. i've got two cover pieces lined up for next week. i'm also in negotiations to get CWY a regular column in one of the newspapers. suffice it to say, i'm a little busy. but it's a productive kinda busy. which is nice after spending two years sleeping at my desk/toilets in japan :-P

on the flip side, my relationship with my counterpart amy has hit a new low. our entire group spent the weekend at a retreat. we did some reflection, group bonding, re-evaluation, etc.

one of our activities included drawing up a contract with our counterparts. we did this exercise called "start, stop, continue" where we were supposed to tell our counterpart what we wanted them to start, stop and continue doing. you guys could probably guess i had quite a long list drawn up.

anyways, i told her what she could start doing. ie. be more independent. take more initiative. etc. then it was her turn. she told me she wanted me to start teaching her english. Our supervisors made it a requirement that we had to spend at least 4 hours a week doing language lessons with our counterparts (2 hours english, 2 hours mandarin). I told her okay, i agree to teach you at least 2 hours a week. And she said no, i want at least 4.

I told her that because this would be going into our contract, i didn't want to commit to anything I might not be able to fulfill. I said, if i have time i'll teach you more, but on paper we'll just write two. and she basically freaked. she said that she came to canada to learn english, and it was my job as her counterpart to teach her english. i told her, you might have come to canada to learn english. but i didn't come here to teach english!

eventually i compromised and said i would teach her at least 3 hours a week. but she wouldn't budge. she said at least 4. and when i still said no, she went to talk to our supervisors Ben and Cash to complain. Of course they sided with me, and she threw a tantrum. she told cash that if she didn't get what she wanted, she would quit the programme. and cash said, go ahead, quit! and she got SO pissed off. taaaantrum!!! she ran away, and didn't particpate in the rest of the evening's activities.

anyways, that was on saturday afternoon. we haven't talked since then. for me, the difference between 3 and 4 hours is trivial. but it's symbolic of our relationship. she think i'm in this programme for her, and that i should be catering to her needs. that's how she acts with all the people in the group. that we're all supposed to be taking care of her. but i want her to know she can't get away with this behaviour. she needs to own up to her responsibilities. she can't be so demanding all the time. especially when she doesn't give anything back.

anyways, like i've already said, i'm just taking this one day at a time. i don't know what it will be like living with amy's family in china. but i'm curious to see how she is at home.

i have a small group meeting tonight to plan a educational day for wednesday. amy and i will have to play nice. thought at this point, i'm at the threshold of my patience.