Volunteer Education Aid, north-central China
That’s how Shan He teacher Ni Jin Hua likes it. A Shanghai native and 2004 graduate of the city’s Fudan University, she volunteered after graduation to teach high school English for a year at Shan He, in the heart of China’s poorest – and in winter, one of its coldest –places, the Xiji County area in southern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. It’s a place where you haul your own water in buckets hung from a shoulder pole. Where salaries are about $70 per month US and the fare is potatoes, except on good days, when it’s potatoes and vegetables. The wind is biting and wintertime temperatures reach minus–20 degrees Celsius, or 14 degrees Fahrenheit. Ni’s classes have 50 and 70 students compared with the average of 40 she experienced growing up in Shanghai.
“It might seem too hard here but I enjoy it very much,” said Ni, a vivacious, energetic young woman of 23. She’s one of four new college graduates assigned to Shan He by the China Student Volunteer Program. Amway China began supporting the program in 2002 and has now sponsored a total of 340 teachers from 21 renowned Chinese universities, benefiting over 170,000 students in 14 provinces.
Amway is the only corporate sponsor of the program, and has donated about $1 million to date. Donations go directly to the universities where the volunteer teachers come from, and fund 100% of the cost including the teacher’s allowance, travel, classroom necessities and scholarships for children who are unable to pay even the small tuition required.
Only 10 percent of Shan He’s 1,100 students from grades 7 through 12 live close enough to the school to reside with their parents in the valley and hillside terrace farm country. The rest are tightly packed into one-room dormitories, roughly 180-200 feet square, with 60 to 80 bunked on two tiers of sleeping platforms ringing the room. Heat comes from a small coal-burning stove. Students haul their own water. Boarding students go home monthly, weekly or sometimes more often to get food, trudging on foot or riding bicycles up to 40 km away in an area where public transport doesn’t exist.
“They are poor and their life is so hard. Sometimes I feel sorry for them,” said Ni Ji Hua, recalling one student’s composition about dreading summer because of the grueling hours he faced in his parents’ fields.
But pity doesn’t go far at Shan He and Ni and her colleagues can’t afford to dwell on their students’ plight. Nor do the students seem to want or expect it. Absolute silence prevailed when Ni opened her crowded English class one morning in April. The discipline held throughout, with students bent closely over their texts as she spoke and paced the aisles, peering over their shoulders to examine their work.
“Most of the students are very diligent,” said Ni. “They know if they can’t get into college or training they’ll have to be farmers. So in my class they listen very carefully. They know teachers are precious.”
Vice Principal Zhang Yu Liang, a 15-year Shan He faculty veteran, echoes that sentiment. Graduate student volunteers like Ni have been a blessing to Shan He. It’s a challenge to recruit teachers to the school, located an hour’s drive south over curving mountain roads from the nearest city of size, known as Xiji County.
“These volunteers solve an acute shortage of teachers, especially in areas like English, math and physics,” Zhang said, speaking through an interpreter. Equally important, he said, are the optimism, energy and vision of the outside world the young teachers bring to students, expanding their horizons, their ideas of what life might hold for them. He said Amway China’s support for the teachers program and for the school directly is greatly encouraging to him and others at the school, not least because it sends a message that someone cares, that there is reason for hope.
Ni Ji Hua and another student volunteer, Zhu Jun, 24, a junior high school teacher at a different rural Xiji County school an hour’s drive away, wax poetic about the educational, life-altering experiences they have had this year. It was deeply rewarding, they said, to learn they could survive and even thrive and enjoy life in a cold, harsh place – Ni said she had even gained weight on the limited and repetitive high-starch diet featuring potatoes and biscuits.
But neither wanted to sugarcoat the hard fact that they were teaching children who for the most part lagged far behind and desperately needed a stronger educational base than they had received. They wish the world could hear their plea, that more companies would join them in their cause as Amway China has done.
“One time, the students forgot everything I had told them the next day,” said Zhu, a thoughtful young man with a bachelor’s degree from Fudan in pharmacological chemistry. “I was very depressed. But I told myself I needed to be more patient.”
Some of his students, he said, walk two to three hours to school each way, a trip they take every two days to replenish their food supplies at home.
“They have something in their hearts that I admire and appreciate, so I decided to stay. They grew up in difficult conditions but they are happy deep in their hearts,” Zhu said. He helped a group of boys in his class who were clearly uninterested in formal school to enroll in trade school in Xiji County city.
He said that when he arrived most of his students had extremely poor English skills and failed their standard exams. At mid-year, however, half passed the final exam and many others had significantly better marks, he said.
Ni reported similar experiences at her school. “We have to spend a great deal of time on basic words and grammar – they know too little English, too little vocabulary for the level they’re on,” she said. Still, Ni noted, this year four or five will have a chance to go to college, depending on how they do on national exams. Years ago only one student per class would make the leap. “They’re really very smart and want to do the work, but they don’t know how to study,” she said.
As she discussed the imminent end of her year in the mountains of Xiji County, Ni Jin Hua grew reflective. It was a life-altering experience, she said, one that will shape her planned years of graduate study. She had hoped for that but hadn’t imagined the impact of living on less than she had ever known – or doing work that so obviously was meaningful.
“I learned a lot of things for a city person – how to plant potatoes, how to transplant rice,” she said. “I don’t think I can live without my colleagues, the student teachers I lived with. In the winter we shivered together, trying to get as close as we could to the coal stove at night in our room.”
She had always dreamed of a “white-collar job” in a Shanghai office tower, but now isn’t so sure that life would mean as much. There is so much work to be done, she said.
Zhu Jun has similar ideas.
“I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing to come out here,” he said. “I just wanted to have an experience I’d never had before. I certainly learned some things I never expected. Probably the most important part was my life with the students. I had been a student for so many years. Here, I’m a teacher – it’s such a different job. I’m telling students what I’ve mastered, what I think is important. In the city, I’m just a common person. Here, I’m special. What I do matters a lot. I’m needed.”
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