TEAMMORNING DEW

2012 Volunteer Report

By Jiahang Zou

Even the puniest plant, with the help of the morning dew, can grow into a forest.

-an elementary student wrote this in her thanks letter to the team

Team Morning Dew Team Morning Dew is a volunteer teaching team composed of high school students studying abroad. Founded by Jiahang Zou and Zhening Xu in 2010 after a touching trip to Meitan, Team Morning Dew serves the purpose of providing resources to the students in need and raising global awareness to conditions of children’s lives in impoverished mountain areas. We hope our small effort can be like dew in the early morning, breeding young blooming plants in the mountains, so that one day, the stream of wisdom can flow out from those forbidden mountains regions.

Our Members

Yuanhao DongJiahang ZouXiaoyang Cui Zhening Xu Ziwei Zhou

Our Mission• Conduct volunteer teaching in rural China villages. • Bring kids resource and skills to gain further education, and hand them tools for future learning.

• Build long-term relationships with students and teachers, and spread their opinions and ideas to the world.

• Raise global awareness to the issues of education in mountain areas and the life of ”home-stay children”(children living alone with grandparents, whose parents work in cities away from the village) by websites and meetings.

• Raise funds for basic needs of children, families and schools that need financial assistance.

This year, Jiahang Zou, the 12th grade student from the Midwestern United States is again our captain due to his volunteer experience and leadership during the past three years. Zhening Xu, from California is also back to join us. We introduce some new faces too: Xiaoyang Cui, who will attend Nanyang Technological University in Singapore this fall; Dongyuanhao and Ziwei Zhou who also study in the Eastern Unites States. The best news is that we successfully invited Chengchao Wang, who has taught at high schools in Meitan as our guide and mentor. With such a wonderful team of six, great performance is expected and achieved.

Meitan, Guizhou, our destination this summer, is a rural town that lies in forbidden mountains of Southwest China. With 480,000 people, 7/8 of the population is agricultural and spread out in villages that are hardly accessible. This causes villagers to lack resources in almost every area, especially education. A school-age child there has to get up before the sunrise and walk two hours through the steep mountain roads to get to school. As he steps into a middle school, not only a long walk down the mountains is necessary, but an additional bumpy bus ride is needed. Although designed for 8 passengers, usually a bus is stuffed with 15 or more people. Even when they grow up,

they still face difficult traffic when leaving the town: The bus ride to the closest city with a small airport takes four hours and is often threatened by debris flow (usually accompanied by massive flood). It takes us 4 hour flight plus 8 hours by bus to arrive at the town (not village yet). And that was even a result of luckiness-as Chengchao Wang who travelled through the road many times described, the average time of the original 8 hours drive usually takes 12 hours or even a day. Transportation is not the only problem. Because of the lack of resources and opportunities, adults often choose to work in major cities on the east coast of China, which is good for the family’s economy. However, the children and seniors are left behind. The student’s family we visited has only a grandmother and two children at home, and all their income to survive comes from their father who works in the east. We call kids in similar situations ”home-stay kids”; even worse than single-parent families, those children rarely receive parental care at all. However, Meitan can be an impressive and friendly place if you have chance to get deeply involved with its people and environment. Its famous green tea purified our souls, and the “icy flour”(taste like jelly but made of beans and is freezing cold) refreshed our bodies. Most importantly, we saw the unquenchable thirst for knowledge and curiosity to understand the outside

Meitan and Its Difficulties

Accomplishment

We taught English, geography, math, and PE to elementary school students, as well as safety education during the summers (the summer death rate of mountain children is extremely high). We also spent several periods teaching the students how to learn with their new friends--dictionaries. Teaching was not an easy job; nevertheless, we approached those kids with game-style teaching and made sure there was always fun during the classes. We even created a fun math class- students were all eager to solve the problems, which was very impressive. We also played basketball together, had competitions in chess and had fun during outside activities we organized. We really became their friends. Before we left school, surprisingly, the kids wrote thank-you letters and made paper flowers and stars for us. Although the handwriting was cute (sometimes illegible) and the paper was from their old homework sheets, we could not be any happier as our efforts were appreciated. That was the best praise we could have. At Meijiang Junior High, we brought innovation as our gift to the class, a once very distant concept for those students who used to accept all knowledge from their

textbook. We tried to explain that every one can become an inventor, and they did prove themselves as great thinkers. For example, we gave them several paper clips and asked them what can be constructed with those clips. At first the whole class was restricted to clipping papers, but after several hints, they soon came up with fashionable designs, such as curtains and bags. During our time with high school students from Qiushi High School, we gave lessons about critical thinking. We chose critical thinking as our topic because it is one of the most significant skills we absorbed from Western cultures, which is also important for students in this period where information, real or fake, is flowing around us every second. What’s more, we believed a multi-cultural approach to new ideas would always be insightful. After the lesson we organized a debate between two classes that we taught. It was amazing that the debate ended up much better than what we expected. Students fully adopted the thinking technique and started to doubt opinions, which they once thought absolutely right.

Summary During our stay in Meitan, we went into two elementary schools deep in the village of Qunfeng and Taiping. In addition we brought dictionaries and stationery to help the students to learn (and by themselves!). Some tuition was also paid with our fundraising so that students have little to worry about when the new school year starts. We also presented our thoughts to the students in Meijiang Junior High School and Qiushi High School, discussing the education and life that we experienced and shared learning tips with each other. We also inspired them with the idea of innovation and critical thinking and donated magazines and books that we thought to be inspirational. During the weekends when schools were closed, we climbed the mountains to find out the true lives of farming families and chatted about their unique stories.

Classes

Inspirations-Dictionaries, Magazines and Beyond During our teachings, there is one point we try to emphasize: students should never rely on helpers during their education and career. Of course, we understand the significance of helping each other. However, we believe it is more important to give the fishing rod to people rather than just give them fish to eat. Just as how dews breed plants-we aid students with nutrition, but students have to absorb and make use of it themselves in order to become stronger. So when we heard the urgent need of proper English teaching tools, we decided to contribute dictionaries to the students so that students could learn to study with their own hands. It ended up being an excellent choice-students not only learned how to use dictionaries, but also used them to give themselves their own English name and mastered writing basic sentences to their friends and families. Besides dictionaries, we also donated magazines such as Time, Science and National Geographic to the high school students. On the one hand, we hope that students can know how to acquire usage of the language from native English texts. On the other hand, we believe they should have the chance to see the events and thinking process of people on the other side of the world. Being surrounded by mountains, generations after generations has formed a natural niche for conformity; now should be the time for students to access different cultures and diverse ideas. We also had discussions about better learning habits and attitudes toward learning. A lot of students were actually older than we due to the various obstacles to receive education they had when they were young. They had totally different ideas about education from us. We even reached the philosophical topic of what is meant by living as a human. All those thoughts were very inspirational, both to them and us.

Financial Supports With our fundraising over the summer, we were able to directly support students and schools financially. We raised $580.63 (3658 Chinese Yuan) total via our website and other events. 2250 Chinese Yuan was spent to purchase and deliver 300 new English-Chinese dictionaries to Qunfeng Elementary School, and the rest was used to pay for the notebook fee for the students in Qunfeng Elementary

School-the only financial burden that was not covered by K-9 education system of China. Thus, students will be free of all the financial concerns next year.

Friendship And of course, we made friends with people from all age groups. We believe that it was our common spirit and dreams that tied us together. We learned a lot from each other; many personal stories were shared and enjoyed-we did not sense unfamiliarity between us at all but talked naturally like we had been friends for a long time. We felt glad to have them accompany us during our trip. Thanks to them, we brought back home not only memories but precious friendship that will last forever.

There were just too many stories we were anxious to share with you. We met so many great people that had ordinary face but with the most magnificent hearts. Mr. Zhang was one of them. He was the principal of a small village school in the mountains, where Zhening Xu and I had taught two years ago. We were shocked. The only building at the school was a wooden bungalow, with one office and one classroom for all activities. The classrooms had newspapers for ceilings; the tables, chairs and even the textbooks were older than the students themselves. It is right in this school that Mr. Zhang has worked over 32 years, in multi-roles such as principal, teacher, and servant. As the only teacher of this school, he taught various subjects all by himself and has to self study many courses. After he found that English was necessary for the education of the kids, he self studied the language with only a recorder and a dictionary (and his class has scored 1st in English in the county every year since then). This was amazing, a lot of town schools in rural China cannot even afford an English teacher, but Mr. Zhang did it with his efforts. One thing we recently knew was that Mr. Zhang actually had serious liver disease during the last few years, but he did not mention this to any of his students since he wants them to focus on studying. He did not look well when we saw him two years ago, but he never missed a day of school. Nevertheless, the school that Mr.Zhang worked so hard for was shut down because not enough kids registered in the area, and Mr. Zhang had to teach at another village school. For us, it was not the poor condition of the schools that moved us, but Mr. Zhang’s sacrificing mind-none of this was part of his duty. He did not need to get up at five every morning to go to the village school-he could just live and teach in town-where his home is. The school was poorly equipped, and not enough subjects were taught, this was also fine. English? None of those kids will probably have chance to speak English again when they are out of school. But Mr. Zhang did not think so-he put all those responsibilities on his shoulders, and regarded them as something he must do. He did not complain about his sickness at all, what he worried was that his new peers play Mahjong during the school hours instead of paying attention to their students. We had

a close look at his hands, which were extremely coarse, with dirt beneath the fingernails, but very powerful and steady as he shook hands with us. This hand recorded the difficulties he had gone through. He is a great teacher, a great man, and he became more confident after all the pain he had gone through. We saw a proud smile on his face when he talked about the students he taught winning competitions in English and music. “Those lovely kids are the hope to support me sticking in here”, he said to us as we were curious about his motivation. Mr. Zhang is just one of those who have kind hearts in this little place. Yes, they lacked everything, but it did not prevent them from helping others, taking responsibility and keeping moving forward. Words are so weak and pale in front of those people, all we can do is to respect and learn form their spirit.

Moving Story

How Can You Support Us?Well, first we thank and appreciate all kinds of help. You can choose to make contributions to one or several kids by supporting their future education; or you can join our plan that donates 10,000 dictionaries by the year of 2017; or you can just send us checks and stationary or anything you can think of that may be helpful; you can also support us just by finishing reading this and sharing this with your friends and family; even wishing us good luck would be very helpful. We are very aware of the importance of moral support-it helps when we are in the middle of the mountain roads for 10 hours without restrooms, or blocked by debris flow on our way there. Thanks again for your time and generosity, we wish you good luck in the year of the dragon.

Visit Us and Donate at http://www.tmdvolunteer.com

Contact: Jiahang Zou at zjhkk3@gmail.com

Moments Of course, besides those moving stories there was also joy. Our journey can be described as a meal that has all kinds of flavors, or as a movie that combines comedy, action and documentary all together. All those times were incredible, and we would like you to enjoy them, too.