Visit to Sponsored School

In 2003, a group of young people who had just stepped out of school established the Qianxin Qianyi Educational Aid organization, and Kaikou Middle School was also the first school that was "discovered" in need of funding. Before you know it, it is already the 20th anniversary, and it is also the first year that Connect & Learning and Qianxinqianyi have joined hands to let children from the United States and China give love to children in impoverished mountainous areas. Under the arrangement of Qianxinqianyi organizers, we visited Kaikou Middle School and witnessed the current situation and great changes of the middle school in the past twenty years.

Forty sponsored students in red uniforms were already waiting for us in front of the classroom. The height of these junior high school children is mostly 155-165 cm. When I first saw it, I felt that the living conditions have improved and the nutrition of the children has kept up. Then later found out that most of the children are over the age, and several students are already 18 years old and just graduated from junior high school. We held a small symposium in the classroom. During the period, Xiaoqi told everyone about her own growth experience, and encouraged everyone to work hard to improve themselves and go out of the mountain village to see the big world. Several children introduced their high school entrance examination experience and their destination after graduation, and expressed their gratitude for the funding. One sponsor was a little bit moved, and told everyone how he also started from a poor family with four children in rural Shanxi province, and after working hard to travel around the world, he settled in a big city to encourage everyone. And it is a win-win process, students do not need to repay and be grateful, because we have received more love ❤️ feedback from the activities of student assistance. Perhaps because they have never been out of the mountain village, the children's dealings with others seem relatively immature and sincere.

During the lunch, the ex principal tol us that because of the decrease in population, the government is gradually shutting down the schools in the village, and many children in the town are going to Duyun City to study in junior and senior high schools. Although according to national regulations, half of the children can enter high school, but in fact there are very few places in public high schools, and children who do not enter public high schools can only enter private high schools, and the tuition fee of private high schools is astonishingly 50,000 yuan (USD$7000) a year. Here If the family only farms, the family's annual income is only 5,000 yuan (USD$700), which is completely unaffordable for ordinary families.

In the afternoon, we visited the homes of four sponsored students. Most of the sponsored children are girls, one reason is that girls are not valued in the family as much as boys, and the other is that girls tend to mature earlier and work harder. The four interviewed students were all girls. Among these four girls, only one family has four daughters, two families have two children and one family has only one child, but what they have in common is that all of them are left-behind children, and their parents go to work in Jiangsu and Zhejiang province. It turns out that about 80% of the children in Kaikou Town are left-behind children. There was a girl whose parents had gone out to work two months after she was born. Cheng Huan’s parents had very little time with their knees, and the children almost never went to Jiangsu and Zhejiang to visit their parents, and they had been living with the elderly in the mountains.

The first family we visited originally lived in the mountains with little flat land so that barely survive. In the past two years, the government has implemented a special targeted poverty alleviation policy for each family, and gave her family and her uncle's family a piece of flat land to live in, and they built a house together with all they had. The four girls are in daycare, elementary school, middle school and college respectively, all of whom are in nursery school or live in school. The parents of the two families all went to Jiangsu and Zhejiang to work, and they only came back during the Chinese New Year. Normally, only the grandma took care of the children who returned home on weekends. The girl I visited in the fourth family was an only child and there was no elderly person around. She went home alone every weekend and lived even more deserted. In contrast, the second and third houses are more lively with old people and children. The children’s homes hardly had decent decoration and furniture, because they have no money left for decoration. The third child’s home had to be built on two floors, the uneven bottom floor was used as a duck pen and pigsty, and the flat roof was used as a house for people to live in. There is no running water at home, but fortunately there are still some water resources in Guizhou, and artificial streams flow slowly to the homes of the villagers. The water glasses given to us by the children are ordinary at first sight, but compared with the furniture in their home, it feels like a different world.

At the end of the one-day visit, the enthusiastic Xiaoqi sent me back to Guiyang, and flew to Shanghai early the next morning. I was a little dazed when I saw the colorful advertisements and event promotions in the city and the subway plane. I feel that the help I can offer is very small. Most of the children in the mountain villages try their best, and their life may still quite different from the children in the metropolis. But as long as there is an opportunity to receive education, there is hope, and life will be a little bit better than yesterday, isn't it?