First Report from Robin Laing - working with Preschool children in rural area of Yuxi in China

Nimen hao! Hello everyone wherever you are & greetings from China.

I arrived in Yuxi just before a national holiday, which was good timing in the sense that I had the chance to adapt to being in China and catch up on the work of Yuxi Institute of Development (Humana´s school for Chinese Development Instructors, in short “YID”) and the different projects.  Some few students remained here during the holiday, so I made some new friends and had help finding food etc

I have just returned from a week in a project area where together with four from the September team and some other project leaders we visited a number of villages in a mountain area, each time visiting and spending time with preschool children and primary school children.  In one of the villages a new building has just been completed for a preschool, so we were involved in moving to the new building and making it a nice place to be for them – making colourful posters, decorations etc

The Daxi mountain area – home to ethnic minority groups – mainly Shansu and Yi people.  These people mainly do not understand or speak Mandarin Chinese; they have their own dialects but can read Chinese script.  So, for the Chinese DI’s as well as for us foreigners, it is not so easy to communicate.  Every village that we visited had its main income from the selling of tobacco.  Each family owned a large tobacco drying tower where the crop dries before selling.  The other money crop is Maize and long strings of drying corn were attached to the walls of all the houses offering a colourful aspect to the villages.  The people do not eat the corn as they consider it only fit for pigs, which is a bit of a shame as they could certainly use the fibre and vitamins that it contains. 

So, the villagers exchange the corn for rice – the going rate of exchange is 100kg of corn to 50kg of rice.  The remaining corn is fed to the pigs.  Incidentally, every village is full of animals, all for eating – I often wondered if the animals are aware of this!  The pigs are often kept in awful conditions, left to wallow in inches of mud and shit and the whole village is a mess of mud and shit wherever you go.  The only sanctuary from this is to enter one of the village houses.  The modern form of building is of an entrance leading to a courtyard and living room with bedrooms upstairs.  Some of these houses are quite beautiful and practical.  We also saw one of the few remaining Shansu houses, which are different in that they did not have an entrance and central area, but rather everything on two levels with the kitchen area downstairs not even having much ventilation.  The example we saw was perhaps one hundred years old.

The villages all have a different character to them and we were told and could also see that the higher up the mountain we got, the more practical, self-assured and inventive were the people.  This is exhibited in the fact that in some of the villages, the average income is 400 yuan a year, while in the further villages, the income can be around 17000 yuan per person.  This higher figure can also be attributed to the fact that higher up the mountain, the villagers are maintaining forest areas, which they can sell every 30 or 40 years.

We saw a traditional Shansu graveyard in which the tombs were fronted by a small column of stones with an arch of earth falling on the drop side.  It was a peaceful and interesting place.  I was told that in Shansu tradition, if the person had died from an accident or from certain illnesses, then the body is burned rather than interred.  The Zhan people, another minority people in this area are quite different in their approach.  After death, the body is cut into many small pieces, put into a bag and thrown away somewhere or else the pieces are scattered for the birds to eat – (this is common practice in the Himalaya region, possibly suggesting the origin of the different peoples from either South or North in the distant past).

One of the projects has been to install dry toilet systems.  These have been financed by the German government and work on the basis of separating the urine and the feces.  The urine can be collected in a separate can and the feces can dry to a soil over a period of time and can be used as fertilizer on the fields.  Only problem at the initial stage is that the people consider human waste to be dirty and the usual practice is to mix pigshit with vegetable and plant matter.  One of the tasks now is to teach the people that the dried soil is infact clean to use on the fields.  The other reason is really that it might be better that people stopped using the landscape as a toilet and collectively used their waste as part of a complete cycle. 

Some of the villages have also started getting used to the idea of Biogas.  We saw the covered holds where all forms of shit and household waste can be put, which decay and produce gas that can be used in the house for lighting and cooking purposes – seems sensible to us, but think of it in their terms, that to change thousands of years of doing something a certain way takes a bit of consideration time!

The most impressive village for me was Benpi.  Right at the top of the mountain – a four hour climb up the muddy mountain from Daxi village.  This is the end of the line and as such, the villagers rarely travel down the mountain and seem very at peace with their lives.  They are now more used to seeing foreigners with the coming of quite a few Europeans and others since the project started, but Im told that at first, the villagers were running away to hide, even from the Han Chinese!  In the village, but clearly pre-dating it was an ancient well, cleverly constructed full of deep clear water from deep within the mountain.  The sandstone blocks were actually worn away where many people over time have knelt to scoop the water – that is a long time!  One can only imagine when the well was built and who it was built by. 

We spent time with the preschool children, which was really nice.  Shyness disappeared fairly fast and I played a rainfall game with them in their little quaint classroom which was so fine and then together we played the snake dance game and then spent a long time around the fire (it was really cold) singing songs mainly led by a beautiful little girl and her brother, who looked like a Llama, very at peace with life and somehow aware beyond his years – I will never forget them.

In the village of Xiangshang further down the mountain on the way back, we had an art lesson that transformed from 2-D mirror painting to 3-D painting of pinecones and other plant material – it was a productive session and I enjoyed watching the concentration and attention on their faces as they worked.
Yang Dong who was our very good guide throughout most of the week told me that he thinks that the preschools have been a great success.  He has observed over a two year period that the kids who have been through preschool and are now in primary school are more alert and open to new experiences than the kids who did not attend the preschool.  You have to remember that in China, the government supports that all children attend primary school, even in remote areas. 

In fact, the government goes out of its way to support the minority tribes and this can be seen in the quality of the school buildings, the teachers and the materials.  The preschool is not supported, so the preschools here have mainly been started or supported by Humana.  It seems that the people are getting used to the idea of sending their kids to preschool even if it costs a bit extra.

Part of the work in all of this is to ensure that there are teachers for these schools and that they are good teachers, so training is given to them in the attempt to get them to treat the kids in a more effective way.  It is common for the preschool teacher to get up and go to another area or to demand higher wages.  This of course is a huge problem.

I have also the job at the weekends of teaching English to some students from outside.  This is usually a fundraising job for the DI’s, but in my case, it gives some of the more advanced students, (whose English is better than most DNSers), the chance to work with a native speaker.  So I like the challenge of devising ways in which I can assist them.  They are really nice kids with hopes of attending Universities in the West and establishing themselves in the modern and expansive China.

Soon, a November team will arrive and I will be teacher for them also.  I can say that I am quite enjoying being here although for sure a foreigner will never be accepted by the Chinese people.  You get used to all the staring and long looks– its best to keep an open mind as it would be such a shame to destroy a moment of poise and appreciation by imposing a false and negative interpretation and the more that I catch the language, I can say that we are really something that inspires their interest and curiosity and if that itself can help one to push past limiting beliefs then surely it is a step forward for humanity ikke?  I am also greatly enjoying eating quality food – I can say that I am eating a healthy vegetarian diet, which was one of the great fears I had about living in China.  One old lady who has an evening barbecue house knows very well how I like my chow mien and we are becoming great friends.  It is a novelty for her and her family when I turn up and it is so nice to eat in a place where you are respected!

Zai Jian, Robin.