How are you? 你好吗？

by Hyunseung Lee, Tae Young Ko, and Jangwon Suh

-胡 力婷-

•Hu Li Ting (Elisa Hu), P.E office assistant•

At SISS there are many extra-curricular activities, including camp. There are also some sport teams like basketball and badminton. Most SSIS students will think teachers plan all of these extra-curricular activities. However, there is actually a person behind who helps all kinds of extra-curricular activities to be held in SSIS. Do you know what her name is? She is Hu Li Ting (Elisa).

Elisa was born in Suzhou 23 years ago, on October 22nd. When she was a child, she liked to play badminton. She received such a hard schooling like other Chinese people in her age. She was forced to study very hard just like the other students of her age, and she did study hard. Her high school made her take exams nearly every day. It was so hard that it remained as the most memorable time of her life until now. She’s not married, so she is still living with her parents. She graduated from Suzhou University and found her job at SSIS helping Mr. Fowles and Mr. Bonar with their paperwork and translation. In December 2009 she started working as the P.E. office assistant. She comes to school at 8 o’clock in morning, and finishes her work at 3:30. She usually takes the school bus to come to school and go back home. She likes the environment of this school. She says there are good facilities in SSIS that allow her to play badminton and experience a lot of things. She is working hard to gain experience and improve her English skills, especially in speaking and listening.

As a person who has lived in Suzhou all her life, she can see big differences between Suzhou today and the Suzhou of her childhood. She remembers how SIP was ten years ago—it was just a small rural area, and of course there weren’t any big buildings. But if you look at SIP now, it’s totally different.

We don’t have close relationships with every single worker in this school. However, this doesn’t mean we have to be careless about them. Many people like Elisa are working for our school’s development, so it’s good to have some communication with them.

Are you still afraid of speaking with them because you can’t speak Chinese very well? Actually we do not need to be experts at Chinese to talk with them. We just need to know three words. They are:

‘你好’ ni hao，‘再见’ zai jian，‘谢谢’ xie xie.

The last word is the most important one.

Who Is Elisa?

by Jeremy Chew, Sam Dooms, and Todd Okeson

Well, almost all of you should of course know who Mr. Bonar and Mr. Fowles are. But do any of you know who Elisa is? Elisa is also known as, 胡 力婷 (Hu Li Ting), which is her Chinese name. Elisa is the other person in the athletic director’s office. Whenever we see Elisa in her office, she is always working on her computer. She began to work for SSIS in December of 2009, to make it possible for us to have large sports events, for example, the ACAMIS track and field meet we had on May 8, 2010.

Every morning, Elisa wakes up to the challenges of being the ayi of Bus #1. Starting from 8 a.m. till 3:30, she is working in her office to create a better area for us to have fun in. Then at 3:30, her final, and hardest, challenge of the work day . . . is again, Bus #1.

Elisa was born in Suzhou on October 22nd. Being raised by her parents and as an only child, she has always enjoyed having large sports events that would have been hosted by their local school. Elisa went to school here in Suzhou.

Now as an adult, she is one of the people here at SSIS who organizes the events that happen during the school year.

During her spare time, she enjoys going to KTV, going shopping, and watching movies with her friends here in Suzhou. Elisa also likes to listen to pop music and sometimes classic music. Elisa has not yet read any English novels, but she is able to read a lot of the English magazines.

On our Middle School and High School sports day, Elisa was in her office helping Mr. Fowles and Mr. Bonar create the spreadsheets for scorekeeping, and creating schedules for the teachers. Even though she does not like playing sports, Elisa has fun helping Mr. Bonar and Mr. Fowles prepare for these kinds of events. As said before, some of Elisa’s favorite high school memories are when her school would host large sports events.

She doesn’t mind any type of food, but she does prefer to eat Chinese food over western food, most likely because she was raised eating this kind of food.

Elisa, during her work day is able to finish up all of her work so she can have free time at home.

Elisa is also trying to work on making her English better so that she will be able to communicate with other English-speaking foreigners. Speaking better English will help her with her current job because another part of Elisa’s job is to translate for Mr. Bonar and Mr. Fowles.

Her message to SSIS is that she would want everyone to know is that she is always happy and would like get to know you.

View or download the colorful PDF version of Elisa's profile: