Reviving Wayao Village Primary School

NVIDIA, Dragons, and the Snow Spider

July 31, 2007

Kham Aid Foundation has been working in Wayao Village since last year to preserve the rare and wonderful fall paintings found in some of the village houses and the small temple, and to restore one ancient manor home.  Working closely with the villagers, Kham Aid staff learned that the village desperately needed help to give their children an opportunity for basic education.

The reason they needed help was that two years ago, the Wayao Village Primary School was closed by the government and the teacher withdrawn.  The government did this because of a new nationwide policy to close small village schools which had been costly to operate and inefficient in their delivery of education, and to encourage children to attend larger, centralized schools.  At Wayao, the nearest central primary school is about 5 km away – too far for young children to walk.  Parents simply did not want to send their tiny tots walking so far on the muddy dirt road, to be looked after by strangers.  As a result, the little ones are being kept at home, and no children have started first grade for the last two years. If this continues, a whole generation of young people in Wayao is at risk for growing up ignorant and illiterate.

Kham Aid contacted NVIDIA Foundation, the charitable arm of NVIDIA Corporation, a large manufacturer of digital imaging devices in Silicon Valley.  NVIDIA agreed to provide a small grant to Kham Aid to hire a teacher for the Wayao Village Primary School for one year. Thanks to NVIDIA, a teacher will come to Wayao this fall.  But what of the school itself? It has been empty and neglected for two years, and the condition of the building had deteriorated.  The roof leaked, windows were broken, and the teacher apartment was black with smoke and full of garbage.  No matter how high the salary, it was likely that Kham Aid would be unable to find a teacher willing to live in such appalling conditions.

Enter an anonymous donor, someone wishing only to be known as “The Snow Spider.” He pledged to raise the material costs of repairing the school, IF volunteers could be found to do the work.  Problem was, the month and a half before school starting is the peak of the mushroom season, and many villagers are away from Wayao gathering mushrooms, which are an important source of cash income for Wayao families.  Kham Aid Foundation president contacted old friends at Where There Be Dragons (www.wheretherebedragons.com) who agreed to send a group of eleven American high school students at 3 teachers to Wayao. These intrepid travelers would stay in village homes for five days while they worked hard to clean up the abandoned school and make it useable again.

Two Dragons students have sent reports about their experience, Candace Graff and Jason Cohen.  Their accounts follow.

By Candace Graff (Student)

We Dragon Students have been working hard for the past two days.  Yesterday, we spent the whole morning carrying sand from outside of the school into the courtyard.  We made an efficient assembly line and carried buckets back and forth, transporting the huge mound of sand from outside to the inside of the school.  The courtyard also has a water drainage problem.  When we cook, or wash our hands, the water goes everywhere.  So in the afternoon we picked and shoveled rocks and moved them into the courtyard where we created a path for the small creek to flow.  Today we are moving more sand into the courtyard and another group of us are scraping newspaper off the walls inside the school to prepare them for painting.

We look unusual in our Chinese army caps and Tibetan flip flops and our fashion style is becoming less importance the more we get used to village life. We are cooking all of our meals which initially took 3 hours and we now have that down to 1.5 hours of preparation.  Potatoes have never tasted so delicious.  The boys who have never been in a kitchen before are learning all about the eighth wonder of the world: food.  In our endeavors we have had both successes and failures, but regardless, our stomachs are full. 

We are doing many other things besides work every day.  We are all staying with Tibetan families.  Everything is so different than anything we have ever experienced, including our home-stay in Kunming.  Cows and yaks greet you as you make your way upstairs, angry dogs bark at you, and the daily shower is to wash hands, feet, and face.  But above all, we are amazed at how hospitable and friendly our home-stay families are.  They may not speak a word of English, but they manage to make you feel right at home.  Even when we run into other locals, we are greeted with huge smiling faces.  It is a nice contrast from the vacant stares we usually receive around China or at home.

On top of the home-stay families and the school project, we have almost forgotten about the beautiful landscape around us.  So, it is so nice to have a beautiful view of the lush mountains and winding rivers when we use the bathroom.  Many of us live on the top of the mountain and the walk to and from school is out of this world.  It is refreshing to think about the unusual place we are in even for a couple minutes out of our day.  We are glad to be working with the local people and Kham Aid, and cannot wait to see our progress on the school in a couple of days.

By Jason Cohen (Student)

We arrive in a small village of three story stone houses, home to a minority of a minority, the Minyak. It seems that the dialect changes every valley, making communication with the elderly difficult. We are greeted by the chief of the village and the local communist official, and we sit in one of their homes waiting for the district director of Kham Aid to hand us over to are home stay family’s. The time for me comes and I am greeted by an elderly Tibetan woman who leads me to her three story house of stone, the first floor is inhabited by a squealing piglet, some cows, a herd of yaks, and a lot of rams. Upon arriving home they feed me a vegetable soup, we sit around and laugh nervously. Her two daughters and grandson come home and luckily they speak a bit of Mandarin. I show them pictures of home, they gaze in wonder at the Miami skyline from the ocean, gasp at a picture of my mum (they think she is very pretty), and give me the thumbs up at the pictures of my girlfriend. I present the grandson with an inflatable globe that I brought from home, I show him Miami and Kangding.

       The first day of working for Kham aid is tough, we haul rocks and sand to the courtyard, and the locals make cement while the director shows us where to place the rocks so that water doesn’t pool up. Throughout the day I escape from the group to talk to the carpenter (who speaks no English). I help him hold the wood as he skillfully saws and uses a hatchet to make doors, beds, and chares. I plaster, and listen to them talk to each other in their local dialect; it sounds like they’re singing, it’s a very soft language. The rest of the group complains a bit (hauling stones is not much fun), and the Tibetan next to me laughs a lot.  It dawns on me that nether of us are getting any payment or status from this; we’re working here because we want to, just two people from opposite ends of the earth trying to make it a better place.