Why bother at all? It was hard, dirty work, and, after all, the homes didn’t even belong to us, but to utter strangers. It wasn’t long before we were meeting these strangers, and learning their own life stories.

At Larima School, there are eleven teachers, of whom all but three are Tibetans. One of the newest teachers is Miss Yang Ming, a Han Chinese, tiny, with bobbed hair, and barely five foot tall in heels. She teaches Chinese language. On the third night, as she helped me cook up a pot of noodles for the team, I learned that her family is from Suining, one of the poorest places in Sichuan, and the source of hordes of workers that are found throughout the province doing the lowest-paid hard labor. Yang Ming said

"My father got a job with the Xinlong Forestry Bureau, so he was able to transfer my household registration to Xinlong. I went to Xinlong County middle school and then to the Kangding Guza Normal University to be a teacher. My father’s retired now; he’s gone back to Suining to be with my mother and younger sister.

"Suining is over 1000 km from here. Since I came to Larima, I’ve cried so many times, I’m so terribly homesick. I’m the only Han woman teacher. There are two Han men; the rest are local people.. I don’t speak Tibetan, so I can’t talk to the local people very easily. The children don’t understand even one word of Chinese, it’s very difficult to teach them. I have to work very hard. I’m not yet 20 years old, I’ve been here almost two years. My mother worries so much about me, alone in this place so very far away."

While some might feel that Han teachers like Yang Ming have no business in Larima, I think that her Chinese lessons are among the most useful and important skills the school transmits to its children. How to retain teachers like her in this remote and forbidding area? Meeting her and other teachers, seeing the conditions under which they work, and especially hearing them thank us again and again, drove home the value of the Better Homes program.

On day 3, which was Sept 27, Tina Millard told my video camera how the work was progressing

"The highlight yesterday was, after all the negotiations and discussions were finished, going into the rooms and starting to scrape off the paper. Then, I think, one by one, all of us started to think, oh my goodness this is going to take a very long time! Then, one by one, all the little kiddies came to where we were, and after about a couple of hours, we had swarms of children helping us… Some of them were turning up first with chopsticks, then a little later, then a piece of glass - not too sharp - and they were scraping with that, and as the day went on there were more children with more ideas.

"We had to do the caulking, filling holes in the wall, and we didn’t have enough caulk. There was all this paper coming off the walls, creating great clumps, and we decided we could stuff the wall with this paper mache, so we had children using fingers and screwdrivers and all sorts of implements to push the paper mache into the wall. As they got more confident they were actually calling across, saying ‘Tina’ - they discovered my name as they did all of us and then some words that meant ‘is this okay?’ And I would say, yes it’s okay, or no, push it a little bit deeper. So that was a really good day, because we started off thinking, oh my goodness how are we going to do this? And then with was so much excitement and so much good will we really accomplished quite a lot."

Meanwhile, in the classrooms, the relentless daily task of education was going on. One afternoon I copied down a portion of the academic schedule. The following applies to Monday only:

where T=Tibetan, C=Chinese, M=math, Mu=music, A=art, and Pe=Physical Education. The rest of the week was similar, and included some laodong (physical labor) which consisted of cleaning the classrooms and campus.

I observed that both in Larima and in Shadui (our second project site), the teachers were hard-put to lure the children to school, even with all costs paid by the government. The Shadui headmaster, Zhao Chengtao, told me, "in Han areas, it costs 300 or 400 yuan to attend school; if it was free, the schools would be overflowing. But here I have to visit families to persuade them to send their kids."

Yet, full of faith that our work will make a difference to these kids, we carried on. We asked for an electrician to be sent from the county town to help Mike, but they couldn’t find one, so he trained a teacher to assist him. No matter what the obstacle, the team was unflappable. On Sept 28 my journal records,

"Everyone is working terribly, terribly hard, maintaining a mountain of good cheer, and even chowing down delightedly on our terrible rations. Today we went to a local’s for lunch. All she had was noodles and lard and spices. So poor! She’s a retired teacher with a pension of 700 yuan/month, one yak and a dog, and a 90 year old mother on the porch, turning a prayer wheel, staring blankly. I went back afterwards with some vegetables to give her turnips and cucumbers. Her milk tea was good. The team downed it all with nary a complaint."

That night, out of hunger and desperation, I assumed the job of expedition cook more on that in another report..

October 12

Midway through our stay at Larima we got some stuff delivered from town. It took teacher Tenzin Dolma three hours to phone in my shopping list, because the phone line kept breaking, and when the stuff appeared the next day, it was like a miracle 140 kg of white paint, many rollers, brushes, and buckets. Tools had been the principal bottleneck, for laborers were plentiful, although the quality of their work gave us fits. It seemed like few of them had ever seen or conceived of a neatly painted room. One fellow we dubbed "The Mad Painter" got as much paint on himself as he did on the wall.

Above: painters Kim Gaskill, Jen Wilking, and Tina Millard. Right: yellow trim on teacher quarters at Shadui.

Ceilings were neck-wrenching to paint but quickly finished. The walls turned out to be very time-consuming because the rough boards needed two coats, paint worked into the cracks and crevices, and they soaked up three times as much as we had planned on. Yet our team of master painters Jen, Kim, Tina, and Linda carried on. More than once, after a long day of painting, they worked an after-dinner shift, continuing until late at night. The rest of us speculated that they were addicted to paint fumes, but the gals insisted that they just wanted to see a few rooms done really, really right..

Over the course of days, we taught our workers their tasks, or they figured them out on their own. By the time The Mad Painter was painting his own room (he was the school cook), he did a pretty decent job of it.

The clinic, to the east of the school, was going rip-roaring ahead. They bought a tractor- load of roof tiles, and workers quickly repaired their badly leaking roof. Other workers dressed up the front of the building with new red and yellow trim. Mike called them "the hello ladies" because that’s what they would say to him, over and over again, while they were slopping paint over his freshly stripped wires. He chased them out of the room he was working in, but that didn’t in the least dim their spirits.

The electrical situation in Larima has improved a lot, thanks to a solar power generator donated by the Bridge Fund, and later to a new hydroelectric plant. In the last couple of years the Larima school switched from wood stoves to electric heaters. But if you jiggle some of the heaters, wires touch and sparks fly most alarmingly. We found live and neutral mixed up, taped splices instead of junction boxes, and live, bare wires within easy reach of small children. The people just had no idea how to use electricity safely. It’s not that they’re stupid. It’s that they’ve never seen or imagined anything better.

Left: Tenzin repairing windows.  Above: dormitory at the Larima School

Tenzin was very concerned about the children at the primary school. We weren’t planning on fixing up the kids’ dorms, but he found so many broken windows and the rooms unheated and winter now coming on that I ordered new glass so he could fix them. One day he found a broken pane that had fallen into a dormitory bed - no one noticed that the children were sleeping on it.

By the end of our six days in Larima, we had accomplished an enormous amount. We had a carpenter going for four days, replacing rotten and missing boards, plugging holes in the walls. Tenzin installed 60 panes of glass on one day alone. (he had a crew of little helpers who follow him around with silicone, chisel, nails, hammer, and caulk-gun, and handed him what he needed instantly). We had a crew of 12 locals who now know how to caulk and paint. We were still working on teaching them the finer points, like how to mix paint so that the color is consistent, and how to soak tools in turpentine at the day’s end, but our work at Larima was basically done.

The county health bureau sent a truck to carry us into town. We rested and washed and feasted for one night, resupplied with brushes and scrapers.and paint. Then we headed to Shadui, where we enacted another transformation. We took a day off to hike up the south side of the Yalong River valley, where we viewed Kawa Lodri, 5992 meters, a sacred peak.

When Shadui was done, the county sent cars to take us to Dawu, where we delivered teachers Jen and Kim to their new posts, amid much feasting and dancing and fun. By this time the Better Homes team was like family, having shared the same road, food, songs, germs, and belly laughs for 18 days straight. Everyone agrees, it has been fantastic fun.

Some children at Shadui Primary School.	Tenzin getting in touch with his roots.	Khata presented by grateful school headmaster.

Better Homes will continue next year, and it needs volunteers - YOU! - to be a success. The location of next year’s program has yet to be decided, but I plan on choosing one spectacular rural locale, and will schedule in more time for exploration. If you’re interested in joining us, please check back on this website, and stay tuned for more announcements coming through the Kham Aid mailing list.

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