Letter
30, April 2005
First, let me tell you the story of a real miracle in
Zhang Jia Shu, Ma Yans 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 boys 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 Yans 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 Chinas 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 Yans 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 Yans 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
