Education blog

It was Australian volunteer teacher Jiang Chao who taught 13-year-old Wu Shengqiao her favorite English-language phrase – “Never give up”. But 18-year-old Jiang says that it was Wu and her classmates, who are growing up in one of the country’s poorest villages, that taught him what that really means.

Jiang says teaching in Anhui province’s rural Yangshan has shown him the power of perseverance when facing adversity.

“I’ve learned that life’s a challenge but you can pull through if you persist,” he says. “The kids here are poor, but some of tvhem have amazing English.”

Jiang says this realization became even clearer when he met an elderly rice mill operator who lives near the school.

“He has a lot of kids and animals to feed, and machines to pay for, and he’s old. But he keeps going and doesn’t even think about retirement.”

What hardship – and overcoming it – means is one of the lessons NGOs Roots & Shoots and American Field Service (AFS) hope their 30 Chinese and foreign volunteers, aged 16 to 34, get from their experiences.

The volunteers teach summer classes for 50 of the 140 primary school students in Yangshan, a subsistence farming settlement where the average annual per capita income is 1,200 yuan ($177) – and that is a sharp increase from just 700 yuan three years ago.

Yangshan Village Primary School principal Qi Jiaquan says the paving of the village road in 2005, the tourism development of nearby Tiantingzhai National Park and expanding tea cultivation have elevated local incomes. In addition, mobile phone reception became available last year, although there’s still no Internet.

But despite improvements, local earnings still hover around a fifth of the national average.

Consequently, one-third of Yangshan’s 3,000 inhabitants – almost everyone of working age – have left to labor in cities, mostly in Shanghai and Jiangsu province.

Yangshan’s poverty, Qi explains, has mostly been caused by what villagers call “The Three 100,000s”.