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A Visit to Baojing, China

by : Judy Pietsch

To understand this service learning opportunity, you must know that in order to attend a university in The People's Republic of China you must speak English.

Our visit to Baojing in the western part of Hunan, was prompted by an opportunity for The Wo International Center to 're-engineer' the China Summer Study Program scheduled for the summer of 2004. Hope Staab was exploring the possibility of working with the Luke Center for Public Service to add a Community Service Learning opportunity for our students during their bi-annual travels to Bejing and Shanghai. I was asked by University Of Hawaii Professor, Kate Zhou to help develop a college-counseling program for the school as well as help recruit English teachers.

In our previous meetings with Kate Zhou we learned that there was a great need for English teachers in this region and that classes were often with 70 + students for each teacher. If we were able to bring Punahou students to this village, we could help reduce student teacher ratios and give more Chinese students a chance to speak English with a native speaker. With this goal in mind, we traveled to Baojing in March of 2003.

River in Zhangjiajie

We flew to Zhangjiajie and then traveled by car for nearly four hours through beautiful mountain villages. The rural land all around Baojing is pretty and mountainous with the area south of Baojing appearing less rocky and more fertile. The roads are primitive and unpaved much of the way. However, new highway construction is evident everywhere with many new and beautifully designed bridges nearly completed. Clearly, soon Baojing will be less isolated. (An alternate travel route is to travel to Jisou by train from Bejing or Shanghai, and then 2 + hours by car to Baojing.)

Welcomed at Gate

We visited two schools in Baojing. The first is Baojing Ethnic Middle School, a magnet school founded in 1938. While it is a public school, students are admitted to the junior middle school and senior school as a result of high test scores and nearly half of the 2500 students live at the school because they come from farming families that live 2-4 hours from Baojing. In China 80 percent of the population is Han, while the other 20 percent are ethnic minorities that comprise nearly 50 different minorities. Virtually all students at this school are minorities, 77 percent Tujia and 17 percent Miaozou. For this reason, this school gets special funding from the Chinese government. (Even in the Chinese test oriented university admissions system, the minority Chinese get 20 points added to their test results.) Even with this help, these children currently have difficulty learning English as there is no English spoken in the village and to date only two foreign teachers have taught at this school and they arrived in late February 2003. As a result, there is a real opportunity for native speaking English teachers to make a real difference for these children.

Welcome with Buloons

The other school we visited was Qianling Primary School, which enrolls nearly 1500 students, the majority of whom are Tujia and Miao. While English is taught, there have been no native speaking teachers here. We observed classes filled with enthusiastic and well-disciplined students. We saw dancing, singing and calligraphy classes. Everywhere we sensed high morale, pride and enthusiastic students.

We learned several things during our brief, but memorable trip to Baojing.

The school leadership is professional and responsible and is eager to support English teachers who come to Baojing. We feel confident that our students and any teachers that we recruit to teach here will be safe and well taken care of.

Evidence of this is the spacious and recently remodeled teacher apartments. Each teacher has a cook and the teachers are very well looked after. Their only complaint is that the Chinese take ˇ§?too good care of us.? One teacher has just convinced the leadership that she can cook for herself and the two teachers now venture on the short walk to the village unaccompanied by the Chinese teacher (usually the English teacher), who has been assigned to them.

The school has a strategic plan to raise monies to construct a new science and gym building as well as new student residential facilities. There is also a plan to build a bridge across the nearby river gorge to expand facilities and also create more green spaces. The principal certainly has a can-do attitude.

The school has already begun remodeling apartments and dining facilities so that they might attract and keep foreign English teachers. Their enthusiasm, organization and ability to ˇ§?get the job done,? was evident throughout our trip and give us the confidence to partner with the leaders in this village.

Baojing is isolated and we were impressed with the sense of community here. The men usually farm or build roads and the woman often sell in the open air market, while grandparents usually live with their children and take care of the babies. The woman and children are quite beautiful. Most people who live in Baojing have never been anywhere else. There is no exposure to English and only Chinese television here.

While this is a poor region with an annual income of $200-300, people are well dressed and well fed. The open-air market was filled with every imaginable vegetable and fruit, all displayed beautifully. Everything is incredibly cheap and it is important for the students and foreign English teachers to respect the purity of the environment and not upset the balance with American spending habits. Currently there are no hawkers or hard ?sell merchants and we saw only one beggar.

The main road through the village was only recently paved and the street scene is quite peaceful. Children walk down the middle of the street in groups or with their parents as they head to school and they appear again at the middle of the day scampering to find their parents for the noonday meal. Goats, water buffalo and cute dogs appear on the street with bicycles, three wheel carts, a few cars and motorcycles. A feature unique to this region is the basket backpacks in which everything from babies, to chickens to bricks is carried. Virtually every adult has a full backpack and everyone seems busy and productive. Most people appear to walk everywhere and it is easy to walk to and from the two schools to the village.

The village appears quite beautiful, not because there is no trash, though the streets are swept several times a day, and the buildings really are quite ugly, but there is a real sense of pride, warmth and enthusiasm among the people. This village has a surreal quality about it, a place whose culture has been protected against the rapid change seen elsewhere in China and in some ways, not unlike one of Margaret Mead's villages. There is much to learn here as this place has a rich and vibrant culture with a real sense of community.

We had an opportunity to interview nine students and were impressed with their personal qualities. The students ranged in age from 16 to 18 years old. Their English shows promise and will improve rapidly as these are bright and motivated students. Though the students generally had trouble with why questions, their admiration for their parents was palpable. It was apparent that most had not been far from Baojing, but dreamed big non the less. Most are the children of Tujia farmers and want jobs that will help other people and the majority said that their mothers were their heroes! They talked openly about being poor, but never did it appear as a bad thing. They understood their reality, but all expressed happiness about their lives and their relationship with their parents.

This is a unique opportunity for student-to-student learning and we are optimistic about developing a relationship between Punahouˇ§as Wo International Center, the Luke Center for Public Service and the two schools in Baojing. We believe that this is a unique opportunity to make a difference and we know that our students will learn much through this service learning opportunity. Each year at graduation, our students are told, ˇ§?To whom much is given, much is expected,? and the students who participate in this program will have a significant opportunity to practice this guiding Punahou principal while in Baojing.

Other ideas that we brainstormed during our visit: We hope to help recruit Punahou alumni and others who might want to teach here for a bit. We know that there are opportunities for younger students to develop Internet pen pal relationships with the children at these schools. As tuition, room and board at this school is approximately $ 350.00 a year, homerooms could easily fundraise and offer scholarships to students at this school. As the first group returns from Baojing, we imagine that the enthusiasm to help the people of this village will escalate and that other teaching and learning opportunities will spring from this initial visit.