My China Week Experience
My China Week Experience
I have just returned from an amazing week away in China with 17 students from the College. Last week, I described our plans for the trip. As often happens in remote parts of China, the reality varied somewhat from the plan!
When we arrived in Qiaotou to begin our service work in the lepers’ village, we found that our “go-between” with the village had been called away to Lijiang urgently to be with a seriously injured person. Many attempts failed to make telephone contact, so our group was forced to improvise by arranging new accommodation and meals, arranging our own transport to and from the lepers’ village (one and a half hour’s drive each way from Qiaotou), finding and buying all our own supplies of paint and equipment, and so on. The students were brilliant in rising to the challenge, and by that evening we had made all the necessary arrangements and secured all the supplies we needed.
When we arrived in the village the next morning, we were surprised to learn that the main need for which we had prepared (painting the insides of the houses) was not the main need that the villagers had expressed to our “go-between”, and they were actually expecting us to arrive and repair their leaky roofs. As the surplus cement we had supplied last year when we built the toilet block in the village had all been taken away, repairing the roofs was impossible in the time frame available, so it was agreed that we would paint the interiors of as many houses as possible. This was still valuable work as the villagers spend all their time indoors during the freezing winter months of this location at 3000 metres altitude, hence the need to create a healthy environment.
The work was arduous, as the flats had not really been cleaned for many years, and the walls and ceilings were totally black with thick layers of soot from the wood-burning stoves that burn continuously during winter months for heating. The photo shows one of the rooms we painted before we began our work. After removing everything from the rooms to be painted, the soot was painstakingly scraped away, a physically demanding job that left the students covered in a thick covering of a fine powder mix of soot and plaster.
Then came the job of painting. One frustration was that the white paint turned a bright pink anywhere there was a trace of remaining soot. We applied several coats of paint to minimise this problems, but some pink tinge remained. However, the villagers were ecstatic about the result, and the the head man commented that the five units we painted were ten times better than anything they had ever had before.
One of our priorities in going to the village was to make arrangements to renovate the school house and provide a teacher for the village children who had not been educated for the past three years. We were surprised to discover upon our arrival that the village children had all been sent away to Kunming for schooling and had been studying there with the support of a Macau charity for the past 9 or 10 months. While it is great that the children’s educational needs are now being met, we were extremely frustrated that we had not known about this, especially as we had been working and fundraising towards for almost a year here in Hong Kong. The village head man agreed that it would be better if we communicated directly with him in future to avoid such embarrassing misunderstandings.
Because we had to make all the extra arrangements to work in the lepers’ village, our itinerary for the week was delayed by a day. This meant that on the same day as we completed our 25 kilometre trek through Tiger Leaping Gorge, we returned to Lijiang to catch an overnight bus to Kunming and then fly back to Shenzhen the next day (today). Needless to say, we have all returned to the College tonight exhausted but exhilarated. Tiger Leaping Gorge contains some of China’s most spectacular scenery, and we were able to enjoy it in both bright sunshine on the first day, and in mists reminiscent of a Chinese water-colour painting the next.
Excitement continued right to the end of the trip. At about 11:30 pm last night as we were on the overnight bus trip from Lijiang to Kunming, our bus burst a tyre, requiring an emergency repair job. As the bus was doing a three-point turn on the highway to turn around and go to a repair shop, we looked out the window to see a truck rapidly approaching us with another truck overtaking it, flashing its lights furiously, with nowhere to go except into our bus carrying 40 passengers! Fortunately, the driver managed to move the bus off the road just in time to avert a major disaster that may have become headlines!
Less likely to make the headlines, but hopefully still to make the newspapers, we were privileged to be accompanied on one of our days in the lepers’ village by a photo journalist from the South China Morning Post. Hopefully you will have a chance to read about our experiences there before too long in the paper. In any case, I will post some galleries of our trip on this website when I have caught up with my other work.
P.S. - I have now added three galleries of images of the trip. The galleries can be accessed as follows:
Images of the work in Ma Chan lepers’ village can be seen HERE.
Images of the Tiger Leaping Gorge trek can be seen HERE.
Images of our short stay in Lijiang can be seen HERE.
Sunday, 12 November 2006