The Amity Visit to MengCheng County, January 11, 2002

by Hugh Wire

An event at the Wa Bu Village School. We walked into the walled yard behind the primary school and were faced by rows of little ruddy faces set above bundles of color. The red when we got close we could see was the rose of chapped cheeks. The bundles did warm the little ones inside enough that they could spend the next three hours in their seats, subject only sometimes to an occasional warning look or word or threatening gesture from a teacher.

We fourteen visitors from the big city shared those three hours with maybe five hundred children and villagers in the school courtyard of Wa Bu Village, in the farmlands of north central An Hui Province. The time passed marvelously without much awareness of its length, so involved were we with the spectacle that we, visitors, children and villagers were creating together.

To begin the morning we visitors, staff, volunteers, and friends of the Amity Foundation, were introduced one by one, and then brought back to the brick stage built just for the day to receive bouquets of paper flower bouquets from the children sitting in the front row. Two of our group, singers from a Nanjing music school, brought alive both Western show tunes and Chinese folk songs. Two different groups of children, one of pre-teens and the other seemingly of kindergarten age, did lively and, to this father’s eye, suggestive dances to the delight of classmates, parents, grandparents and all. We three Westerners in the group, all male, sang in English songs from our youth that had meant something to us, and were given generous applause from the crowd and a warm thumbs up from the primary school’s principal when we stepped off the stage. A short, stocky girl belted out Chinese pop songs with wonderful presence. I thought she must have come from the middle school for the occasion, but afterward she told us she was just nine years old.

Midway through the program two girls read their stories. Dressed in jumpsuits, the uniform of the older classes, they looked healthy and at home. The first, one maybe twelve years old, read vigorously, page after page. I could hear repeated the Chinese word, “Mama.” I was told I was hearing this refrain because hers was a story of her mother leaving the village and leaving her behind, without a mother, but with a relative who could not afford her, and in particular could not afford to send her to school. She had gone at least a day’s trip into the city, Nanjing, to beg. But had come back to the village, and with help to pay her school fees from Amity was now in school. At the end of this dramatic account she was applauded and I tried to see what would happen to her next. At that age, I could not have made such a display of myself. She wandered into the audience, and then disappeared in the company of an older woman. What did they feel about the telling of that story? What did the rest feel, I was wondering.

After another song from the Nanjing singers, a younger girl, maybe nine years old, read her story. She was not a page into it, when she began to choke up. She described how she lost her ties to her parents. She began to wipe her eyes. She went to her grandparents, but her grandfather was retired and they had no money. He left the village to go to Nanjing to work demolishing buildings so there would be money to pay for her school fees. All over the city I have been watching high-rise buildings going up and I often notice the men with sledge hammers, bars, and shovels knocking apart the older lower-rise buildings, separating out wood and glass and metal, and piling up the bricks. He fell from the scaffolding, she read. She was crying. I looked around to see what others were doing. A young, very stylishly dressed teacher sitting nor far from me, was wiping her eyes. Her grandfather wasn’t killed, the girl continued to read. But he couldn’t work. He had to come back to the village. She read on, how her grandmother was ill. She needed expensive treatment. The grandmother decided that the money they had should be for her granddaughter. So the girl read, her grandmother took poison to kill herself. This time when I looked around I could see across the crowd of seated children to the standing adults I could see many wrinkled old faces in tears. And I was crying. But the grandmother did not die. And the girl is here in school, with fees paid.

At the end of the program, the fourteen of us in teams of two, gave out school bags that Amity Foundation volunteers in Nanjing had packed with supplies and named with the child who was to get the bag. These 100 bags were for the children from the village primary schools in BanQian Township whose school fees were being paid through “back to school” sponsorships that the Amity Foundation collects from friends, mostly in Hong Kong. Across China through its “Back to School Program” Amity has been sponsoring 30,000 children a year, at $25 for primary school children like these, or $150 for children in middle school.

Family Visits. After lunch shared with officials from BanQian Township and the county, including the mayor, the education bureau, and secretaries of the party organizations in township and county, we went in small groups to visit some families of children sponsored.

The fields were regular long rectangles of inch-high green shoots. Wheat that begins its growth in early winter, then remains dwarfed as the cold winter advances, and resumes growth when spring comes. The sky was overcast. We were to be rained on the following day. The air was smoky and the light diffuse. The villages of Bei Yuan and Li Wei that our team visited were approached by narrow paved roads, elevated above the fields,, with plantings of trees along each edge, and trenches, “borrow” pits, paralleling the roadway. Houses were laid out in rows, mostly dusty brick, sometimes with a clearly defined front courtyard enclosed by a brick wall, sometimes not. Sometimes there would be some vegetable struggling for its life in garden patches fenced by bundles of sticks and straw. A goat might be tied to a tree. Less often a pen for a pig, and I saw three cows during the afternoon. Chickens might be in the yard, and small German shepherd looking dogs frequently came barking at us. Small stacks of corn husks and straw often were by the side of the roadway passing in front of the rows of houses. These roads were dirt, but many had fresh piles of crushed rock along their edges, and we passed several crews of villagers with a small tractor or with wheel barrows spreading the rock, insuring that for another winter their roads would be passable.

I visited five families, accompanying Zhu Yan Wei, who works in Amity’s rural development program,. With us also was one of the officials from the township’s education station or office, who wore the leather coat that seems almost like a standard uniform for officials and seems to say, “I am not going to be affected by whatever goes on.” A teacher from the primary school of that village brought along the child who was being sponsored. The teachers had the cheerfulness of our profession, but the children universally seemed reluctant participants. In our group were also four English teachers from the township middle school who seized this opportunity to practice oral English. They were from villages in the area, fresh from their teachers’ college training, seemingly still expectant that life had something new to offer them.

Each family we visited had needs that clearly justified their selection by the school leaders for sponsorship, satisfying one purpose of the visits, to confirm that indeed the schools were following a criteria of need. But in most cases the need seemed to far exceeded the simple lack of money for school fees.

None of the birth families of these children visited were intact. In two instances men were taking care of the child or children. In two others, its was widowed grandmothers, and in one, the grandparents. In all five instances, the core family had broken down, with often the problem named as “mental illness.” In the simplest account, the father had died and when the mother remarried she went to another community with her husband, leaving the children in the care of her husbands parents.

In another village where the home had a cement floor raised well above ground level, a tiled front wall, iron window sashes, and looked relatively well taken care of, the teacher told us that mother had wandered off. When the father met us, shuffling slowly because of a leg injury, he told us how this injury had left him unable to work and without a cash income, though his uncle and his brother were helping with food.

In another, poorer home, the little girl was being raised by a single man who was not her father. He greeted us with a simple dignity, though he was dressed in a dirty workman’s attire. There was washing on the line and the child was spotless. He showed his crippled hands and said as he could not work he had needed the funds being given for her. school fees. Mental illness was again given as a reason that the parents were not with their children.

One spirited grandmother, whose home had a viable patch of onions growing in a side yard, complained how the older of the two boys she was raising was difficult to manage. The township official broke his reserve and told her to just punish him. She pointed to his size, and asked him back how could she be expected to. I don’t think he made an answer, nor could anyone else in our group have done so.

Most difficult was our visit to by far the poorest home. The main part of the house seemed to be of the earliest generation of the building of the village, maybe some time in the 50s when these were organized as parts of collective farms.. Daylight could be seen through some parts of the thatch of the roof. The floor seemed to be of rock pressed into dirt, and lower than the outside, making me wonder whether in the rains it becomes a pool. Lying on a bed in the main room was a old woman. She could not get up, she said. On a table near her were lumps of what might have been dofu, and a bowl with dried, dark cereal. I think I was seeing food cooked some time before. In a side room was a stack of sawed logs. “To make her tomb,” said the teacher who was with us. The grandchild stayed near the grandmother all during our visit, hugging the edge of her bed, shying taking the candy I was given to share with the children on our visits. “Mental illness” was used to describe the condition of the parents, who I gathered were somehow still in the picture, but not of much visible use in that home. On the wall was a calendar with a red cross in the center. Zhu Yan Wei took some pictures. I just turned away. I felt I saw the township official do the same. What could we do?

That evening, there was a parting banquet with the education, and township, and party leaders. This was our second gathering. Zhu Ai Min this time did not let the group segregate itself into English speakers from Nanjing at one table, Chinese speakers from Nanjing at another, and local officials at a third. He got us all mixed together, and there emerged some interesting exchanges. The mayor of the township had once served at a submarine captain. When he came home he had been an English teacher in a middle school for many years before becoming mayor. One of the township officials asked me when I thought Nanjing would equal or pass the development of cities in the United States, not a question with a simple answer, because in some ways Nanjing is already a better place to live, and in another way is linked to the underdevelopment of the rural areas in ways more immediate than are the urban centers in the US.

What did we think of what we saw? After the banquet there was a long and spirited debriefing among us fourteen visitors. All of us were grateful for the grace we had experienced, and struggling with how to deal with the problems we had seen. This I gathered more from the tone and body language than from being able to follow the content in detail in the conversation that was carried on in Chinese, though Zhu Yan Wei would try regularly to give me clues about what was happening.

An academic economist traveling with us feels the region has no prospects for development. The flat fields look so much like California’s rich central valley that I find this hard to accept. But I have not lived through the decline of its small towns, as agriculture became more mechanized, and the need for settled human beings reduced, and I know its prosperity depends still in part on migrants from Mexico and from urban settlements..

A seminarian spoke of her discovery of the power of knowing God, by implication, I think, saying that this is the need and the answer to what we were seeing. The problem is the small size of the church, even in the province of An Hui which has a relatively high number of Christians, and the restrictions it experiences on any sort of mass or public evangelism.

A friend of one of the regular Amity volunteers, a person who works in a government agency in Nanjing, feels that there is no way voluntary assistance can deal with the needs we see. That government alone has the resources. The problem is the shortage of resources available to the local government. There is little industry in MengCheng county. State run businesses that once were there have folded. Efforts to build new businesses failed. The roads through township centers are lined with rows of empty storefronts, looking like New England inner-cities, but with newer building fronts, as this boom and bust has all happened within the last 15 or 20 years.

What about grass-roots development, through some kind of community worker? Clearly something more is needed in most of the homes we visited than what the schools or Amity now is providing. Can not the resources of the community be better mobilized than they are now? I think of the role of “animators” in many community development projects in Latin America, or of workers in public health in the United States over the last century. There is no Chinese tradition for “community,” I was told. What exists is either based in the family, or in the relationships organized around the work unit. What about the school, the sense of community we experienced that morning? See how there is a wall around the school, I was told. Inside the school, maybe, but the school does not have presence outside its walls. Once there might have been family temples. Once before collectivization there might have been a well or some other place people gathered as part of their day. It seems there is no place from which to begin building as sense and practice of community.

What about strengthening education, beyond the effort made to help with fees for the poorest? Zhu Ai Min tells that another 1000 scholarships will be given in Meng Cheng county. That seems like a significant influx of new money into the county, another $20,000, equaling the salaries of 15 to 20 teachers. The middle school English teachers seemed bright, eager, and sensitive. Could one build a real capacity in education? If children have to leave the area, they would go to good jobs, not just to work at minimal wages in demolition or as a waitress in the city. They would send home money. The communities could grow. But would any teacher of real capacity want to stay, was the question, if they could teach, or get a better job in the city?

How does one imagine the future for these people in this place? I am left with a sense of God’s presence in community, but also with little hope for that community. Something to really ponder.

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