We hadn’t expected to be in class during this past week.
According to the college calendar, last week was China Week. For those who don’t know about China Week, we suspend classes for a week each year in late October or early November to allow our IB1 students to travel in small groups to remote (usually rural) parts of China to engage in community service work or personal challenge activities. The work varies from group to group, but typical examples include working with orphaned children, painting buildings, teaching basic English in primary schools, helping to build low cost housing, working with mentally retarded children, helping with farm work, and so on.
Our plans for China Week this year had to be changed at short notice just two days before everyone was due to depart. The reason was the approach of ‘super-typhoon’ Megi. Megi had caused flooding, evacuations and deaths in the Philippines the previous week, and it was reported that wind speeds in excess of 200 kilometres per hour were blowing as the tropical cyclone headed straight for Hong Kong. We were concerned that our students might not be able to leave the campus safely in the typhoon, and furthermore, we were concerned about the students’ safety once they had arrived in China as the typhoon was also heading towards several of our students’ destination areas.
As a consequence, we decided to reverse sequencing of the coming two weeks, moving the classes scheduled for this coming week back into last week, and postponing China Week to the coming week. It was disruptive (though not nearly as disruptive as we had feared), and it cost us some cancellation fees (although fortunately most payments were able to be shifted to the following week). Nonetheless, this seemed a small price to pay to ensure our students’ safety and to avoid the much worse alternative, which would have been to cancel the fabulous experience of China Week for our IB1 students this year.
As a result of all the discussions I was engaged in this week about China Week and its immense value to our students, I found myself reflecting on my own China Week experiences with the groups of students I have led over the past six years. During my time at LPCUWC, I have led China Week groups to three main destinations. From 2004 to 2006, my focus was on helping leprosy sufferers in a remote village called Ma Chan in Yunnan province, followed by taking the students for a 24 kilometre trek through Tiger Leaping Gorge. In 2007, my group focussed on working with Tibetan children an orphanage in Waka (on the border between Yunnan and Sichuan), followed once again by a trek through Tiger Leaping Gorge. In 2009 and 2010, my groups worked in Majiang and Cengong, two poor Miao nationality areas of eastern Guizhou province to support an Amity Foundation project to build medical clinics in isolated rural villages. I have documented several of these experiences in my blogs over the years (such as here for 2006, 2007, 2007, 2008 and 2009).
While reflecting on my China Week experiences, however, I realised that I had never blogged about China Week in November 2005 (simply because I only started writing these blogs in August 2006), even though that China Week trip was an especially memorable experience for me.
China Week in November 2005 represented my first visit with students to an almost unknown place in outback Yunnan province known as Ma Chan. Situated about 50 kilometres from Qiaotou (itself a small, isolated town) along a narrow, steep, winding dirt road, at an altitude of 3200 metres, Ma Chan was a small village of former leprosy sufferers from several minority nationalities who had been forcibly relocated there under a Chinese government policy that required lepers to be separated from mainstream society. Of the residents, only the head man could ever leave the village. The children of the lepers (who had never had leprosy themselves) grew up in the village without access to schooling, as no teacher was willing to go there. Like their parents, the children could never leave the village. Residents of other towns knew about the village, but because of ignorance and prejudice, they were too terrified to go there – they regarded the inhabitants as ‘demons’ because of their deformities.
My aim, and that of the 15 students who accompanied me to the village, was to build the village’s first toilet block. Although the plans we were given were extremely basic (see illustration above right), this required buying the materials for the toilet (as the villagers had no source of money), laying the foundations of the walls in preparation for professional laying of bricks, digging a 5 metre by 1.5 metre pit to a depth of over one metre in the rock-hard soil, and digging a 250-metre long trench from a hillside spring down to the toilet for a water supply to flush the toilet. The water supply was needed as many of the residents could not lift a bucket or flush a toilet because of their disabilities, so a basic automatic flushing system was needed for hygiene.
The students worked hard to achieve their goals, and left a sum of money to pay professional tradesmen to finish the tasks that their unskilled labour could not perform. The students also donated large quantities of bandages, antiseptics and pain relief medicines that they had brought with them from Hong Kong, as the village receives no government assistance. The villagers were extremely grateful for the medical supplies, and also for the building materials that they could never afford themselves, as well as for the labour that they could not perform because of their disabilities.
After two days of hard physical work - digging, hoeing, trenching, shovelling, carrying - we returned to Qiaotou and, following an overnight rest, began a two-day 24 km trek through Tiger Leaping Gorge. The weather was superb and the views magnificent – a fitting reward for two days of very arduous high altitude manual labour, the result of which was the first toilet in Ma Chan.
Ma Chan today is a very different place. Largely because of press and other publicity we generated during and following our 2006 visit, government officials have now allowed the village’s children to receive an education by attending a boarding school in the provincial capital of Kunming. Furthermore, the government sends a doctor on a weekly basis to provide free treatment for the residents, together with regular truck loads of food for the residents. The residents are now free to leave the village, although almost none chooses to do so because of the discrimination they face due to their disfigurements, sadly, even from their own families.
Nonetheless, I see Ma Chan as a great example of how discrimination can be overcome and lives transformed through the determination of a few groups of idealistic and extremely hard-working 17 year olds!
I hope they will be an inspiration to our current LPCUWC students as they leave this weekend for 2010’s delayed China Week.
As a tribute to the students’ work in building Ma Chan’s first toilet, I have looked up the photos I took at the time and assembled them into a new gallery of 534 images that can be seen HERE.