Letter 31 May-June 2005

Dear All,
For the second year running, students at the Lyçée français international (LFI) of Hong Kong went to Ningxia at the end of May to visit the educational institutions and the communities whom we are helping. Nineteen students and three teachers, among them Anne-Marie Bordas, the organiser of these exchanges that are becoming regular events, were thus able to get a real sense of the problems with education and the difficult living conditions in this region struck by chronic drought.
At Wuzhong, the high school where Ma Yan is now studying, they were able to speak to students their own age in a modern school building situated in a big city. Then they went on to visit Yuwang and Ma Gao Zhuang, two rural high schools receiving support from the Association. They concluded their visit in Zhang Jia Shu, Ma Yan’s native village and the poorest of the places visited. At Zhang Jia Shu the young French students divided into small groups and had meals with individual peasant families, talking with them and discovering the simple life of these disadvantaged regions. Their visit was accompanied by important gestures of solidarity toward the schools and the families visited. These exchanges correspond perfectly to one of the goals we have set for ourselves: the goal of building bridges between worlds which would normally have no connection; and both parties come out enriched by the experience.
This trip also allowed us to check up on the progress of our ongoing projects. At Yuwang, we had the pleasure of seeing a teacher download a maths programme from one of Tsinghua University Beijing’s websites, in the computer room for the teachers, which was paid for by the Association. Yuwang College now has two computer rooms for the students, who have thus had their time of access to computers doubled, and one computer room for the teachers. And the computers work!
We were also able to inspect the computer room of the high school at Ma Gao Zhuang, the other school supported by us, which is situated at about fifteen kilometres from Yuwang. There, too, there was a kind of magic in seeing the children of peasants, who in their rural school would not normally have had any access to modern technology, handle an electronic piano, thus gaining a few more chances in the difficult lives awaiting them in a rapidly changing China. For our reception, the students had pasted English slogans onto the walls of the school buildings, reading, for instance, ‘never forget’…
The only problem with these computers is that there is as yet no internet connection. Such a connection would open up a new world to the students. The teachers at Yuwang use the only available internet connection exclusively for themselves. At Ma Gao Zhuang, there is still no landline telephone connection, although one has been promised for this year. A friend from Shanghai who accompanied us on our trip is now looking into the possibility of helping these institutions to get a satellite connection. If the costs are not prohibitive, we might be able to find sponsors – for the landline connection and for electricity required to use it, since the budget of the Ma Gao Zhuang school is so constrained that the schoold director already has to limit the time for computer use in order to save on electricity. In this matter, too, the Association could help this school which so much deserves help and encouragement.
At Zhang Jia Shu, we were able to meet the members of a Council of Elders which had been set up to tackle the problem of the well. These venerable old men with their grey beards have undertaken to identify the place where a second attempt to dig a well should be made, together with the company that is going to carry out the work. They have also agreed to look after the well once it has been dug, in contrast to the first attempt which ended in failure. Our talk with them was very encouraging.
Zhang Jia Shu’s blackest spot is its healthcare problem. Since the ‘miracle’ surgery performed on a young child with deformed feet, paid for by the Association, we have been solicited by a number of villagers who do not have the means of accessing a system of healthcare which, let me remind you, is privately paid for in China. Since that operation, each time we come through the village we are accosted by people who tell us about their untreated health problems. We are now obviously in a process of re-orientation after the Association’s first self-appointed task of helping with education has become less demanding [due to the recent annulment of tuition fees]; yet we do not have the means of resolving all the healthcare problems in the village. We will soon have to decide on a new policy in this matter: We have already mentioned the possibility of creating a ‘healthcare fund’ that could be used to provide funding in emergencies, as well as the possibility of sending a healthcare mission in co-operation with another NGO.
Finally, a big ‘bravo’ and a big thank you to those who have engaged in various initiatives to support the Children of Ningxia in recent months. In particular, let me thank the students of a cooking class of the Vocational School of Dives sur mer, western France. They have worked on The Diary of Ma Yan and on Chinese issues since the beginning of the academic year in 2004. In April, they arranged a Chinese meal and they made and sold cakes, donating the profit to the Association. And thanks also to the choir of the Conservatory of Vendée who organised a concert in an abbey in May for the benefit of the Association. These initiatives are so precious because they allow the solidarity we are showing to Ningxia actually to come to life outside China.
The Diary of Ma Yan continues on its fabulous course. On June 1st, the book came out in the United States (with the publisher Harper Collins) and it has been selected by 3000 American libraries for young people.
I wish all of you a very good summer.

 

Pierre Haski

 

 

 

 

Letter 30, April 2005

First, let me tell you the story of a real “miracle” in Zhang Jia Shu, Ma Yan’s native village. We had already mentioned the operation on a small boy with a congenital deformity of his feet, paid for at one of our members’ initiative, in a previous newsletter. Hélène had taken pictures of the boy’s feet last summer, and shown them to specialists in France; they thought that a successful operation was possible, and she collected the 700 euros required for it amongst her acquaintance. The operation took place in February. There was a perfect chain of solidarity to make it go smoothly; the Association contributed logistical support, and Bai Juhua, Ma Yan’s mother, helped the child and his mother to travel from their home to the hospital in Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia.

At the beginning of April, I travelled to Zhang Jia Shu and could see how successful the operation was. This child, who had until then been obliged to walk on the outer sides of his feet in a waddling, duck-like manner, is now wearing shoes and walking on the soles of his feet. He still has some minor problems with his right foot, which will be corrected in the hospital; but one only has to see the joy of this little boy who is now ‘like the others,’ and most of all the unlimited joy of his parents, poor Ningxia peasants, to understand the positive effects of this operation. For this moneyless family such an operation seemed impossible; healthcare nowadays has to be paid for in China and is therefore unaffordable for more than half of China’s 800 million peasants. Seven hundred euros to change a life - that is certainly worth it!

It was originally not the mandate of the Association to take care of medical problems, and indeed this would be an immense task far surpassing the means of our small association. But in this case, just as much as in another case also mentioned to you in an earlier letter, where the mother of one of our grant recipients had an operation paid for by a group of UK students, it would have seemed absurd just to let the children go to school but then allow medical problems to plunge their families into misery. So the idea of a ‘healthcare fund’ is taking shape; but we have to proceed with caution, to avoid raising expectations which we cannot meet.
This brief trip to Ningxia at the beginning of April also allowed me to consider the question of school fees. In the previous newsletter I reported on a recent official announcement that the school fees would be abolished for the children of the poorest families during their nine years of compulsory school education. Without being able to speak for the whole of China, I can now confirm that at least in that district of Ningxia in which we operate, this abolition of fees has been implemented in the second semester of 2005. This is excellent news and exactly what we were fervently hoping to happen for the poor families receiving help from us. And we can be proud of having made a modest contribution, by the publication of Ma Yan’s Journal, to the now increasingly vibrant debate about the dangerous gap that has opened up between the richest and the poorest in China, in the course of a decade which saw rapid overall growth. This debate has been the prelude to the recent official decision on school fees that immediately concerns us here.
For grants paid to our students starting in March, the directors of the schools we are supporting have indicated that we can reduce the amount. During the discussions we had in April, we were able to ascertain that the primary and middle schools now only require the costs of food and boarding, which still affect the vast majority of students coming from villages too far away for them to go back and forth every day.
We therefore decided, with the consent of our local partners, to modify the way in which we provide support: the Association will henceforth pay for the boarding for ALL of the boarding students at the middle schools we support, at Yuwang and Ma Gao Zhuang, which means a good one thousand students in total. The sum to be paid is reasonable: 60 Yuan RMB (about 6 Euros) per semester. And we will continue paying out grants, reduced by half, in order to ensure that the living expenses of those students whom we were helping already are covered. What remains unchanged is the grants for the Senior high school students, who continue to have to pay school fees and boarding fees, as well as of course our commitment to pay the fees for university students who will no doubt emerge from amongst the peasant girls whom we are now supporting.
The overall financial commitments of the Association will only be slightly increased compared to what they are now by this change; but the impact of our support will be so much greater, since it will now benefit all the students of the institutions supported by us. We are of course delighted about this development, which is going just in the direction we wanted things to go, and which helps us to make our support less of a privilege available only to a few, and turn it into a more comprehensive effort to give better chances to these children from disadvantaged and excluded families.
We have also just equipped the two middle schools receiving support from us, in Yuwang and Ma Gao Zhuang, with 80 more computers. Yuwang High school had already got 50 computers last autumn, but given the number of students there, this one computer room soon appeared insufficient. Now the college will have a second computer room. Also, at the request of the director of Ma Gao Zhuang High school, we will pay to have school uniforms made for his 450 students. We could see for ourselves how the uniforms and the computers gave the students of Yuwang middle school, who are at the bottom of the social ladder in China, a new kind of pride. It is enough just to go into a village on a Sunday, and see how the students keep wearing their uniform overalls bearing the name of their school.
Donations from the public, which remain important, as well as that portion of the royalties for the two books which has been devoted to the Association, will allow us to continue with this important project of providing the necessary equipment. But we must not limit our fundraising activities to this, and support from any available sources is vital. Several initiatives have been started in France and abroad to collect funds for the Association: we will report on some of these in a future newsletter.
One last point: it has now been a bit more than three years since we started our action of solidarity just after the publication of the first article on Ma Yan’s Diary in Libération, and before the subsequent publication of the book. For the sake of transparency and efficiency, it seemed important to us to have an audit. A young Frenchwoman who works as a consultant in Beijing has agreed to conduct an independent audit for free, and to indicate some avenues for future improvements in our work. She travelled to Ningxia at the beginning of April; and her assessment will be passed on to you for the purpose of information and debate. In the meantime, many thanks for your faithful continued support of the children of Ningxia.
Pierre Haski