Better Homes 2003 Report

Children of Bomei and part of
their renovated school

Shopping for supplies

Before being painted

Day 1: the gang begins to scrape
paper from the walls.

Rolling the first coat of white onto a
teacher's wall

Tammy Deets gets ready to roll.

Bomei Schoolchildren

The team relaxing after dinner in their host's home.
Left to right: Linda Griffin, Somwong Wangprajun, Wu Bangfu.

Pam with her trusty camera

The renmin we were serving were the Tibetan inhabitants of Bomei township, Xinlong (Nyarong) County, in cental Ganzi Prefecture, the heart of Kham. Xinlong is a national poor county, and Bomei is one of its many, many impoverished rural townships. Despite the fact that primary education in Xinlong is one hundred per cent subsidized by the government, a lot of children still don't go. Parents are unmotivated, equipment is nonexistent, and living conditions for teachers are abysmal. Teachers are soon demoralized by these obstacles. Many lose interest in teaching, hoping instead for a quick transfer out.

For a number of years, I wondered how Kham Aid Foundation could address the serious problem of teacher morale. It's not enough to give scholarships to children, or to send books. If a school cannot retain skilled, motivated teachers, the children won't learn. How to improve teacher retention? I looked at the horrible places that the teachers live in, and realized that here was someplace I could start.

But why bring foreign volunteers out here? Why not simply send cash? The answer is: if you want a job done right, and if you won't want your money to get lost along the way, you've got to do the job yourself. Corruption is probably less common in Kham than it is in China's eastern provinces, but it's still a temptation, no matter whether the official concerned is Tibetan or Han Chinese. Someone outside Xinlong told me that, in the county, the going rate for transfer to a desireable teaching post is ten thousand yuan (about $1200), payable to the ducation bureau chief. Indeed the budget I received from his office was inflated (though not obscenely). Anyway, I kept our money out of the hands of sticky-fingered officials by buying our crucial supplies in Chengdu and bringing them to Bomei myself.

Another reason to use foreign volunteers is the unparalleled opportunity the Better Homes program offers to really get to know ordinary Tibetans, and to do something meaningful for them. One volunteer, an American named John Goodman, put it this way: "You want to go to un-touristy places, but when you get there you're a martian with nothing to do. You stare at people, and they stare at you; you have no purpose. In this case, the people in Bomei were perplexed at first, but after awhile the strangeness disappeared and we all worked together."

That's what I love about this program: the distinction between foreigner and Han and Tibetan fades in the face of a common project and a common purpose. Everyone pitches in together, whether the task is scraping newspaper off the walls, or mixing paint, or locating a pair of pliers.

Like the Better Homes team did last year, we got to know local people. Which of our young workers is a crackerjack painter, and which one is "a few tacos short of a combination platter," as John put it. The latter fellow shocked everyone one day by pouring white paint into a bucket coated with blue. "Everyone gasped" said Tammy Deets, a Better Homes volunteer who witnessed the terrible deed. "So I took his roller away."The hapless offender was demoted to scraping newspapers.

On the plus side, take our carpenter. Dendrup was his name, which, in the local dialect, comes out something like Danju. As a tourist, I might only notice his snazzy camouflage outfit and his dashing felt hat. As a teammate, I learned that he was a tireless worker, even when assigned to the horrible job of nailing up sagging ceilings, a task that is neck-breaking and brings a shower of dust into one's eyes with very hammer blow. But Dendrup wasn't just a carpenter; he could do any job we asked. One day I was standing on a desk putting up wire in the headmaster's room. Dendrup stood watching from below. I kept dropping nails, and he kept handing them back up to me. Finally, I got smart, let him take over, and he finished the job in record time.

I have been talking about the school, but we also worked at the Bomei Health Center, which is where local people go for their pills and IV drips The director there was Dr. Wang Bin. He was living with his wife in a small two-room apartment next door to the pharmacy. His walls had been covered with newspaper, but cold wind still came through cracks. His stove was rusting through, and soot blackened the ceiling. It was a terrible place to live.

He was a funny fellow, Dr. Wang, because he was so sure he would be transferred soon, that he didn't care at first whether we painted his room or not.; yet he had been there for seven years. To us, it didn't matter if he WAS transferred, for his replacement would surely enjoy the improvements just as much. WIth just 3 days left before we would leave, we finally convinced him to vacate, quickly made a bucket brigade to move his stuff out, and half an hour later were ripping into the newspaper on the walls.

In all, we improved nine teacher apartments, two doctor's apartments, and the clinic's examining room/pharmacy. We stripped off newspaper, filled cracks with putty, caulked windows and replaced broken ones, painted the walls and trim in nicely contrasting colors, and spruced up the outside.

My work force was seven foreign volunteers: myself, Linda Griffin, Tammy and Joe Deets, Sheila Smyth, John Goodman, and Dr. Somwong Wangprajun, Kham Aid's first Thai volunteer. We had seven local workers, plus the doctor and the teachers themselves, who pitched in to make their places clean, new, and sparkling. We also had Wu Bangfu as cook for the foreign team. By the time we left, after ten days of work, the doctor and teachers were infused with the "Better Homes spirit" - they were painting furniture, replacing old crummy wiring, and decorating their new homes.

On the last day, the school threw a kick-ass partyfor us. The children danced, and we danced with them. The teachers sang, and we offered our own songs in return. We ate boiled yak meat and fresh-made bread, droma steeped in butter, roast duck. We toasted and were toasted, and as the evening grew late, the last boundaries that lay between us were obliterated. A grand time was had by all. See you next year!