Eric's Beijing Diary

This week in Langfang, I was sharing a story with the students about a young man who recently graduated from medical school, and turned down a research position in Shenzen so that he could join a volunteer program in Inner Mongolia sponsored by the Communist Youth League.

I asked the students how China would change if every one who graduated from University decided to volunteer for a year. Several of them said, "Maybe we would be more powerful than America!" I have shared several times, with several groups of students, my interest in setting up an NGO to do development work in rural China. The response to my idea is always positive. Students always tell me it's a good idea. But their own ambitions seldom include going to the countryside. Their dreams are always about establishing a comfortable home in the big city. I have had the same conversation with many of these freshmen. I ask them which province they are from, and the name of their home town. These kids come from all over China, so their answers to the first questions are not predictable. But after that, it is pretty much the same thing:

"Do you like your home town?"
"Yes, I love it very much."
"Will you go back there when you graduate?"
"No."
"Where will you go?"
"Beijing or Shanghai."

I pressed the idea of volunteering:

"If volunteering is such a good idea, why don't most university graduates do it?"
"Because we're too selfish."

A couple of weeks ago I was sharing another story, this time of a school teacher who went to the coutryside as a fifteen-year-old girl. I was interested in this story because of my own experience teaching in a country school in North Dakota, and in Yunnan Province during the fall of 2001. My teaching experience in the countryside in China was only for a week, but even that was long enough to bring home the reality of how remote some communities are, and the sacrifice one would have to make to do something like this.

"What would you have to give up if you went to the countryside to be a teacher?"
"Everything."

In that tiny village in Yunnan Province, we asked the school principal what was his greatest challenge as a school administrator. He said the most difficult thing was keeping teachers. They would come for awhile, but as soon as they found a job in the city, they would be gone. The government is trying to encourage development in Western China. Part of this push for development is an attempt by the government to make business investment in western China more attractive. But there will always be a need for a crew of volunteers who are willing to give up some of the conveniences they have taken for granted, at least for a brief period of time. Western China represents an extraordinary opportunity for charitable organizations that are interested in doing development work in an area where there such extraordinary need.