Letter 10: A Teacher I Admired The most

A Teacher I Admired The most

       Ding, Ding, the ring from a long distant, a man was riding a bicycle with “Save the Forest” stickers ant water bottle plastic replete with every corner of the bicycle. This was the first time I met my foreign teacher, Reynaldo, from Staten Island New York. After graduating from college, he had a dream of seeing the world for the rest of his life. Taiwan was the first place from where he initiated his dream because he got a friend working in Taiwan. His first job in Taiwan was an English teacher in a language school.

I met Teacher Reynaldo when I was in second grade. He always had a smile on his face and was a person whom you can share everything with. I remembered he always wore the same old jeans every day but never forgot to bring us surprise by delivering us different and expensive chocolate. Even though he had lived in Taiwan for many years but the difference between “up” and ”down” in Chinese still confused him for a long while.
Sometimes I complained to him about my schoolwork, and he always had a unique view about everything.” There are many options in life, and when you're done with school, you'll see you can do what your heart desires.” He said that he had studied music in school, but performing music didn’t become his priority when seeking jobs.

After the classes, Reynaldo liked to discuss environment issues with us, but the most graphic stories he had ever told were about aliens and sci-fi movies. Reynaldo volunteered in an environmental group, but a few months later, he quit, he said the big tsunami happening in Japan might affect Taiwan. Thus, he left Taiwan that year before Thanksgiving, which was also the last time I saw him. He told me he had to visit his grandmother in Philippine, after that he would go back to New York and engage in painting and street arts.

Now Reynaldo is still painting, living in an intentional community where the ambience reflected values of equality and nonviolence. When I asked him about the life there, he replied, ”It’s pretty cool here, maybe someday you shall come and check it out.” Now his paintings have been published on the local newspaper, and even his artworks have been reported in one article.

I admire him that he could accumulate so many experiences of traveling almost half of the planet. Currently, he finally got what he wanted, reaching what he regarded as utopia, and also developed hobbies he's fond of. I learned from Reynaldo that all the efforts we are making in our daily life will lead us to a better life in the future.Therefore, I keep reminding myself to take the attitude of Reynaldo, and ask myself if I can always be positive under all circumstances, like a child at heart.

“Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.”Reynaldo always says. Maybe one day I will live a simple but happy life as Reynaldo does, who knows?