Before summer vacation began this year, my friend Andrew Wang decided that he would spend his break teaching as a volunteer in a town called Tengyue in the city of Yunnan, China.
The residents of the town of Tengyue aren’t technically living in poverty, but it is a much more rural area than many other parts of China and the living conditions are less desirable there. A major problem that the residents face is a lack of educational resources, including teachers. Class sizes are often very large which means that the ratio of teachers to students isn’t the best. As you can probably tell, volunteer teachers are in high demand there.
Andrew went through a series of interviews with ECCHO- a student organization here at U of T that connects student volunteers with communities in China who are in need of more teachers. He advanced to the final selection of volunteers and, just as he had wished, was connected with one of these communities.
Upon arriving, all the volunteers realized that they themselves were going to have to bear with the uncomfortable living conditions as well. Sanitation, for one, was not really a priority of the locals, and thus both their living space and food were not guaranteed to be clean. “Most of us had diarrhoea at some point.” Andrew laughed when I asked him how they coped with the lack of sanitation.
But aside from this, the volunteers’ first hurdle to jump over was that the students saw them as older children to play with and didn’t particularly want to listen to them, which was why they literally had to earn the students’ respect before they could lead a class. Andrew and the other volunteers spent a lot of hours outside of class getting to know these kids, and slowly, they became friends and the students began to listen a lot more.
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Andrew, for one, led many classes such as science, music, and art. He thinks there was a visible difference between when he first met his class and when he was done with the experience. He was glad to both have made friends and a great difference in the children’s lives. When asked about his takeaway from this whole experience, Andrew said: “I came here wanting to teach something the children something, but I was the one who gained the most from this valuable experience. I felt this way even two weeks into my volunteering. During one class, I asked the children what their dreams were, and hearing all their colorful visions of the future, I was nothing but extremely touched. I hope that they will always retain the courage and determination they have now through the many points of life and never give up on the chase for their dreams.”