The Walmsley Family - Mike, Tracey, Sophie & Matthew
Mike and Tracey are based in China where they have established a consultancy service. They seek to provide professional consultancy services for a number of disciplines, via teacher placements, cultural exchange programmes, training & development seminars and evaluation services for projects.
Tracey is a dentist and works in an international clinic one day a month in addition to work at the consultancy.
They have two children – Sophie and Matthew.
For more information please visit www.mingchuanconsultancy.com
Updates from Mike and Tracey:
Latest News: April 2010
"As you may know we started a company called Ming Chuan Educational Consultancy Ltd. This has been running for 1 year and although it is not making a profit yet, it still has capital, so there is hope for the future. I (Tracey) am very busy with many things. I'll breakdown my monthly schedule:
2 days in Tianjin working in the Ai Chi Dental Clinic. 90% of my patients are other expats, but 10% are local Chinese that don't trust the local dentists. I'm trying to rebuild their trust in a few trustworthy dentists.
1 day a month at a dental hospital, acting as a dental consultant in the morning on each of the clinics (all departments) and then give a 2 hour lecture in Mandarin. This is probably my biggest stress, but encouraging me to study more.
1 day a month I visit a local orphanage and do free dental treatment on the resident 50 children (from 6 months to 18 years old). Hoping to do similar thing at a disabled school soon.
The rest of the month, I'm in our office either doing English with a Chinese home-school group - 5 children aged 3-5 (which is rare in the UK and even rarer in China!) Matthew is part of this group. Or I'm doing cultural and language consultancy with young people either wanting to study abroad or visit abroad. This usually involves exam preparation for an English exam called IELTS. It is a tough exam, which I believe some British people would struggle with. I have opportunities to speak about deeper issues and challenge them to think for themselves instead of what they have memorized from text books.
At the end of April and beginning of May we have 3 British dentists coming (one being (Nick Adams from CDF), who will do a sightseeing and lecture tour in 4 different cities in China. This is a logistical nightmare, because I have to download big files and translate the powerpoints. Working in China requires flexibility! The flights are still not booked and we have less than a month to go! So you can see life is different.
We are also planning English and football summer camps in 1 (maybe 2) schools in August.
Mike is getting busier with Management and Leadership consulting. He has done 2 separate days with the Government bureau in Beijing. Things only change if you start at the top, so this is where he is aiming. He has also done some management training for 2 disabled schools in other parts of China. One of these he will return to next month.
As well as this we have normal life. Sophie (6 years old) goes to the "big class" of the local kindergarten. She loves it, but they did ask her to do 30 pages of homework during the Chinese New Year break. So educational pressure begins at an early age. Matthew goes to the home-school group. He is a very normal 3 year old boy. Loves to run and climb and sword fight with dad! Both of them are well known in our community. There are only 6 foreign children in a city of 8 million - so they are special.
Thank you all for your support over the last 10 years!"
Mike and Tracey
