Nine years ago, after Leo had died, people said to me. "I never knew he was your stepfather." You see, I never called him that. At first, he was no one special in my life. Then he became my friend. In time, I felt he was also my father.

    Leo married my mother when I was eleven. Two years later we moved into a house in a new suburban development, where we put down roots. At first our lawn was just a mud with wild grass, but Leo saw bright possibilities. "We'll plant trees there to give us shade as well as some flowers," he said. And just these little touches made our house different from all the others. More important, a real family was forming. Leo was becoming a full-time parent, and I was learning what it meant to have a father.

    Weekday mornings when the weather was bad, Leo often drove me to school. Having a father drop you off may have been something my classmates took for granted, but I always thought it was wonderful. Saturday mornings, we went to the hardware (计算机硬件) shop, then stepped into the five-and-ten, buying a sports magazine or something else. Some people might think that doing shopping together is nothing special, but I, who had ever before spent my childhood watching other families do their everyday activities, experienced them now with extreme delight. Looking back, I realized that Leo gave me what I needed most—the experience of doing ordinary things together as a family.

    Soon after we moved to the suburbs, one of our new neighbors introduced herself to me. She had already met my mother and Leo. "You know," she said, "you look just like your father." I knew she was just making a conversation--but even so... "Thank you", I said. Why tell her anything different?

Dear Kids Club Applicant：

    Thank you for expressing interest in the Kids Club.Staff members are hired twice a year: November and December for the spring semester,and April and May for the fall semester.

    November 20^th is the application deadline for the spring semester of 2017.Applications can be submitted（提交）in person to the Community Education Office,located at 1812 Welsh Avenue,during the hours of 8:00 am-4:00 pm, Monday through Friday.

    If you have any questions you may contact my office at the number below.

    Thanks again,Jana Church Program Director.(979)764-3831

    All applicants must meet the following requirements to be considered for hire:

    Available Monday-Friday,2:45 pm-6:15 pm

    Attend Training December 17,2016

    Attend Training January 4-15,2017 (we receive children January 5,2017)

    Commit to work through May 28,2017

    Rate of Pay: $8.00-$8.75/hr

Minimum Requirements:

1）.All Kids Club staff members must be currently Red Cross certified in First Aid.

2）.All staff members must be available to begin work on January4,2017 and continue through May 28,2017.

3）.Staff members must attend specified training sessions throughout the year.

4）.Staff members must attend weekly site meetings and monthly staff meetings.

Duties:

1）.Staff members assist the supervisor in performing his/her duties as necessary,such as:

a.Plan,coordinate and apply appropriate activities each day.

b.Lead group games,art projects and other similar activities.

c.Play with the children during free time.

d.Influence children in a positive manner.

2）.Participate in all daily activities. (BE POSITIVE)

3）.Assist in the daily,as well as weekly,clean-up of the facilities.

4）.Other duties considered necessary by Site Supervisor or Program Director

    During my early twenties, to make my parents stop feeling angry, and simply to escape, I decided to live in my birthplace for a period of time, something I'd sworn I would never do. My parents were thrilled. They prayed that I'd come back triumphantly with a picture－perfect bridegroom. That was the furthest thing from my mind as I packed my faded jeans, tank tops, boots, and a photo of my freckle－faced then－boyfriend who was of Scottish descent.

    The moment I landed in Seoul, I was aware of how much I felt like a misfit. All my life I had tried to blend into the dominant culture and couldn't. And finally, when I was in a place where everyone looked like me, I still stood out. I took it for granted that I'd feel a sense of freedom. I thought I'd blend into the landscape. This was not the case. People stared at me with curious eyes. I became conscious of my American－girl swaggering body movements and inappropriate dress.

    Collecting my courage, I traveled to the demilitarized zone on my own. I touched the high barbed－wire fence that stretched across the belly of the peninsula(半岛), dividing Korea in half. I visited thousand－year－old temples and magnificent palace gates that had survived modernization and centuries of battle. I met with distant cousins who welcomed me with outstretched arms into their homes and related heroic tales about my mother and Halmoni (Grandmother) during the war. How Halmoni had led her young children out of north to the United Nation－backed south. How my mother, at the age of thirteen, saved the life of her baby sister.

    I listened with such an overwhelming thirst that when I returned to the States a year and a half later, I began to ask my parents and Halmoni (who had immigrated to the States some time after we did) all about the past. The past was no longer a time gone by, a dead weight. I now saw that it held ancient treasures. And the more I dug and discovered, the more I felt myself being steered toward a future I had never imagined for myself. I began to write. I didn't even know I could write. My family helped me knit stories into a book using Halmoni's voice. As her powerful words moved through me I was able to reflect and meditate on the ridiculous life I had fashioned for myself. I could feel my sense of self rising. This sparked a newfound awareness and excitement. I became a spokeswoman on Korean culture, traveling to various college campuses across the country. “Be proud. Embrace your heritage.” I said to young Korean American students wearing extra－large, trendy sportswear. But the whole time I was lecturing, I had very little understanding of what that self－concept meant. I was merely talking the talk. I hadn't yet fully embraced my own identity.

    Lisa Pina never thought she would need the fire safety training she received during her apprenticeship(学徒期)as a union painter and dry waller(筑墙工). On Friday morning, she was thanking God she had it.

    On Thursday night, while Pina was babysitting her granddaughter, nephew and two nieces in her sister's apartment, she smelled smoke and realized the apartment building was on fire. When her 4-year-old granddaughter Ilean Garcia began saying, “We're going to die, ”she knew she had to act.Pina,39, first sealed the door, and then told all four children to get on the floor. After calling 911, she told the children to start singing and promised them all treats as soon as they reached safety. “I said, ‘OK, we're going to lie down and we're all going to play a game,'” Pina said. “We all started singing our ABCs and 123s.I was just trying to make it fun.” Pina patiently waited, and a few minutes later, Riverside County sheriff's deputies (治安官的助手) arrived. Pina, Ilean,8yearold Gabriel Parga,5-year-old Aubreyana Parga and 4-year-old Meriyah Parga were all trapped on the second floor as flames filled the first story.  Pina did the only thing she could. She opened the window and dropped the children, one-by-one, into the arms of the sheriff's deputies about 15 to 20 feet below. “I just needed to keep the kids calm so they wouldn't be afraid，”Pina said.“I was deathly afraid inside，but I couldn't let them know that.”[Not long after dropping the children out of the window, firefighters arrived with a ladder and rescued her. Ten people were treated at the scene for suffering smoke, but nobody was seriously injured.

A Language Programme for Teenagers

    Welcome to Teenagers Abroad! We invite you to join us on an amazing journey of language learning.

Our Courses

    Regardless of your choice of course, you'll develop your language ability both quickly and effectively.

Our Standard Course guarantees a significant increase in your confidence in a foreign language, with focused teaching in all 4 skill areas—-speaking, listening, reading and writing.

    Our Intensive Course builds on our Standard Course, with 10 additional lessons per week, guaranteeing the fastest possible language learning (see table below).

    Evaluation

    Students are placed into classes according to their current language skills. The majority of them take on online language test before starting their programme. However, if this is not available, students sit the exam on the first Monday of their course.

    Learning materials are provided to students throughout their course, and there will never be more than 15 participants in each class.

Arrivals and Transfer

    Our programme offers the full package—students are taken good care of from the start through to the very end. They are collected from the airport upon arrival and brought to their accommodation in comfort. We require the student's full details at least 4 weeks in advance.

    Meals/Allergies (过敏) /Special Dietary Requirements

    Students are provided with breakfast, dinner and either a cooked or packed lunch (which consists of a sandwich, a drink and a dessert). Snacks outside of mealtimes may be purchased by the student individually.

    We ask that you let us know of any allergies or dietary requirements as well as information about any medicines you take. Depending on the type of allergies and/or dietary requirements, an extra charge may be made for providing special food.

    As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods. "The woods" was our part-time address, destination, purpose, and excuse. If I went to a friend's house and found him not at home, his mother might say, "Oh, he's out in the woods," with a tone (语气) of airy acceptance. It's similar to the tone people sometimes use now a days to tell me that someone I'm looking for is on the golf course or at the gym, or even "away from his desk". For us ten-year-olds, "being out in the woods" was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.

    We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring (探索). Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today. History seemed to be mostly about explorers. Our explorations, though seemed to have less system than the historic kind something usually came up along the way. Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Indian burial mound.

    Often we got "lost" and had to climb a tree to find out where we were. If you read a story in which someone does that successfully, be skeptical; the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees. There were four or five trees that we visited regularly-tall beeches easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.

    It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end. By then some of us has reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence (青春期). In March, the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring. We climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that we really were rather big to be up in a tree. Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.