Nanhua

All great ideas run into snags and this second day of the trip was one of those days where nothing worked out.  It's always a goal of SYA to get students to meet and interact with locals and we got lucky this year.  There is a start-up NGO (which I thought meant it was some big international organization, but turned out to be what apparently turned out to be some really eager and well meaning college graduates) who have started a rural outreach program and were willing to allow SYA to use their connections in a small town west of Kunming where they are running some English language courses and other things which I didn't really find out about.  The idea was to divide up our students into small groups of two and three and spend the afternoon with a family, interviewing them and just getting a feel of the thoughts, feelings and general life issues of a rural, small town family.  The intention was excellent.  And now you are waiting for the but...........

The information given to us stated that the town of Nanhua was just a couple hours west of Kunming.  Therefore the idea was to leave Kunming at 830AM, be in town by 1030AM.  Greet the town and vice versa, have lunch, spend some time with the families, have a big activity, get on the bus back to Kunming, eat dinner and get on the train at 845PM.   Nope.  The town of Nanhua was a 4.5 hour bus ride and there was a half hour bus breakdown where we needed let a bus have a water hose repaired..  We didn't get to town town until 130PM.  We had to leave by 3PM.  Our interview time was literally 25 minutes.  However, we didn't let those precious minutes go to waste.

Approaching the village of Nanhua west of Kunming

Entering our family's home

Our family's home

Our host with her second child.  Her husband was away and her 8 year old was lives at school about 10 minutes away by motorcycle.

Our students asking questions.

The inside of the family home.

Need jot down a number, scratch it into the wall!

 So the woman we interviewed is 31 years old and of the Dai minority.  She earns about 5 000-6 000 RMB (just under $1,000) a year raising cows, chickens and pigs.  The food she grows if for her family's consumption.  The government gives her about 1,000 RMB a year and she doesn't have to pay taxes, which I believe is because she is either a farmer or because she is from an ethnic minority.  (Remember we were going through an interpreter because our host spoke a dialect that we didn't understand.)  We asked her if she was happy with her life and she said she was satisfied.  We asked what her dreams are for her children and in a typical answer that most mothers would give, she wants her kid to do well in school and if he/she can go out and move to a city and earn a better living.  However, if things don't turn out for her school age child, the kid is welcome back home to work with the family.  She's been to Kunming but never out of Yunnan province.  We wanted to ask about her youngest child, the three year hold she holds in the pictures, as he was clearly malnourished and/or born with some disabilities, but we simply hadn't established enough of a relationship in the short time we had to broach that subject.  Some of the students were wondering why the family had decided to spend so much money on a nice new television but still had decrepit furniture and dirt floors, but I likened their decision to our modern day lives where there are things we would forgo to simply have internet.  It's a stretch of an analogy but I thought it apt.  It's too bad we only scratched the surface, the time crunch made for a missed opportunity, but I have to state that the time we did have was worthwhile.  It made the many hours of bus riding worth it.