Ein Jahr Volunteering in China

Heute habe ich etwas Besonderes. Meine Sprachpartnerin und beste Freundin Linan ist ja gerade in Korea, um ihre Sprachkenntnisse zu vertiefen. Sie besucht dort auch Englischkurse, und in einem davon muss sie einen Vortrag halten. Diesen hat sie mir zum Korrigieren geschickt. Das Thema ist jenes Jahr, das sie als freiwillige Lehrerin in einem armen Dorf der Provinz Ningxia verbracht hat. Ich fand den Text sehr berührend und möchte ihn Euch nicht vorenthalten, da er vielleicht auch ein wenig dabei hilft, die Vorurteile von den grausamen und unterdrückerischen Chinesen zu relativieren. Ich selbst verabschiede mich nun für zwei Tage nach Ningbo, da das Reisefieber wieder zuschlägt. Falls es dort interessanter ist als ich erwarte, gibt's dann vielleicht wieder ein paar Fotos.

Aber zunächst zu den besseren Menschen.

"Hello everyone, my name is Linan. Today I will introduce volunteer jobs in one of China’s country schools.

Let’s begin with a picture: I would like to ask you to use your imagination and think how it would feel if you lived together with 50 roommates and your meals consisted only of a piece of dry bread with a glass of icy water. Of course, this has no taste, so you can choose to eat it with garlic or onion. There is also a students’ dormitory: three boys have to share two beds, because there isn’t enough room for all students, and 54 students have to live together. At lunch time, four boys were having their bread - we call it “momo” in Chinese - even without any water and “proper” dishes.

This is what I saw and experienced in the last year. Maybe teaching students in a poor mountain village school in China may not sound fun to you. However, it changed my life. When I graduated from Shanghai Fudan University in 2007, I spent one year as a volunteer teacher in Ningxia Hui Minority Autonomous Region, which is located in the west of China, together with six other colleagues. Since 1997, the Ministry of Education and the Chinese Young Pioneers started this volunteer teacher program. Every year they send more than 100 volunteers from different universities to teach in China’s rural areas. As one of the most famous universities in China, Fudan university sends up to 20 volunteers to teach in the Ningxia region every year, who are assigned to different schools; seven of these volunteers are sent to Sanhe school, where I have taught junior students English.

In the past 30 years, China’s economy developed quickly. While we are proud of the huge social development and improvement we have achieved, we are constantly aware of the obvious gap between cities and rural areas, between the east and the west of our country. The larger the gap is becoming, the more volunteers work in rural areas. Today I would like to introduce what volunteers have done to change the Sanhe school within ten years, even if it’s very difficult and complicated, and introduce how the volunteering experience changed the lives of the volunteers themselves.

In the process of industrialization, every country has to face the problem how to help farmers shake off poverty. As GSIS students, we are supposed to give this general international phenomenon a lot of thought. I would be very grateful if you could listen closely and give me some suggestions.

Before I applied for being a volunteer, I was always asked the question what I could change if I only spent one year in that rural school. At that moment I didn’t know how to answer. After having experienced a totally different kind of life and finished my volunteering job, I noticed a huge change in me. When I look back to what all these volunteers have achieved in the past ten years, I can find obvious changes as well.

2004 there was only one teaching building in San He School
2005 a new white teaching building was established
2006 a new garden and cement basketball court were built
2007 the third cement basketball court was built and some buildings newly decorated

In the past five years, based on government investment, the basic facilities have been rebuilt. With an increase of funding, the government can guarantee compulsory education among elementary schools, provide students textbooks for free and exempt any tuition fees, but there is still a lack of teachers, especially to teach students English and Arts. Thus, to try ones best to be a good teacher is the main job for every volunteer

Last year in San He school, five volunteers taught English, one was a mathematics teacher, one was responsible for Chinese. Besides our main subjects, we also taught the students music and art, and sometimes also trained them to play basketball.

How can you be a good teacher? This was our first challenge. When we were in Shanghai, we spent over six months to take all kinds of training, for example, we taught in the city’s migrant school, and listened to a professional lecture by some experienced, excellent teachers. But however many preparations we accomplished, when we finally went there, we still
encountered lots of problems. It did take a great deal of time to think and discuss how to make the English class more interesting, how to raise students’ grades, how to help them to learn more. In the last year, I was a teacher, but at the same time I was also a student. So when I stood on the platform imparting knowledge, I was in the process of teaching myself.

Being volunteers, apart from teaching, we also had other responsibilities. Like distributing scholarships to excellent students and allocating donations to poor students, all money received from education foundations, which have been cooperating with Fudan University for a long time. Last year, the US enterprise Amway donated money for the third cement basketball court, “Chen San Mei” and “Tong Yeye” education foundations donated more than 10 million dollars as scholarships.

Besides raising money for students, we also collected books and clothes for students, sometimes organised social assistants for students who were in trouble. I would like to share a story about a little girl named Huanhuan, 4 years old. In Chinese, “huanhuan” means joyful and happy. But this little girl had to suffer a tough life, since she was born with a serious heart disease, but her family is too poor to afford her operation. It’s such a pity we were not rich enough to pay her operation fees. At that time, we had a special visitor, Zhaoming, who graduated from Fudan University in 2001 and worked as a journalist for the Shanghai media group. Due to his efforts, Huanhuan received a huge sum of donations from a foundation and was successfully operated in the best children hospital in Shanghai.

In addition, with ten years of developments, volunteers are becoming increasingly concerned with the mass media. In the last year, we have given lots of interviews, like for the Japanese NHK TV station and local newspapers. When society started to focus on us, the students also had many chances to interact with the outside world. Generally speaking, the more interviews the students gave, the more people will know about their work and give them the necessary help. Last year, my German friend Wolfgang visited this small school. He was not the only foreign visitor, and students there can have opportunities to talk with foreigners because we worked there. Through this kind of communication, we hoped to open their eyes and impart the concept of globalization onto them, stimulating them to study English as well as they can.

Furthermore, we helped the school to organize arts activities, not only as directors to rehearse the students’ performances, but also took advantage of our free time to practice singing songs. This was a good chance to enforce communication between villagers and volunteers. All of these made our lives more beautiful and interesting.

How to get accustomed to village life as soon as possible is another big challenge for every volunteer. All of us grew up in cities, the dry and cold weather in the western part of China seriously affected the volunteers who came from Shanghai with its warm and humid climate. This region suffers from shortage of water, so the first lesson we needed to learn was about saving water. There was no bathroom in this village, so if we wanted to have a bath, we usually spent two hours to take the bus to the nearest town. When we were busy or completely exhausted and wanted to do nothing but rest, we have experienced taking a bath only once a month. When winter was coming, the cold might weaken our health, but even minus 20 degrees could not freeze our enthusiasm to work and live in this peaceful country. Since all of us are the only children in our respective families, this was the first time we learned how to care for friends who were sick, how to get along well with people of different characters, and how to overcome difficulties through team work.

The boys behaved like gentlemen and were in charge of all hard work, carrying water and coal; the girls mostly prepared delicious and creative food, like a birthday cake made of potatoes, portraying everyone’s face on the rice with tomatoes. Although the meals were without meat, the dish where most of the nutrition came from was called friendship. There we were, far from the prosperous city life, with no cinema, park, supermarket, or business districts. However, thanks to the internet, we still had contact with the outside world, thanks to nice friends we still had a lot of fun, thanks to our common dreams, we could enjoy every day happily.

Around us, there were only diligent students. No matter how cold it was, they had gotten used to getting up early to study, No matter how dark the evening was, they lit a candle to continue to study. No matter how difficult English is, for the pursuit of their dreams, they never gave up. On the weekends, I often went to my students’ homes. I wanted to see what their lives were like, what kind of help they would need. They are villagers who live in deep poverty; but at the same time, they are the most optimistic, most friendly and strongest people whom I have ever met. I was deeply touched. The more I experienced, the more I changed. Being a volunteer taught me the importance of cherishing time and opportunity; being a volunteer let me notice how happy you can be if you can help other people; being a volunteer granted me precious friendships and unforgettable memories; being a volunteer showed me the meaning of life, to be “the salt of the earth”. Just as the salt’s mission is to permeate, season, and purify things on earth, it’s our duty to make active use of our intelligence, our principles, and our faith, for the seasoning, the cleansing, and the saving of the world."

(Reproduced with friendly permission of Li Nan, 05/2009)