I'm now in Lincang, a small city (about 500,000 people is small by Chinese standards) southwest of Kunming.  I arrived here Monday, spent the night, visited a middle school where Teach for China has fellows, and then headed over to Dazhai, a small farm town, a three-hour bus ride away (one hour of which was fairly harrowing, twisting along a narrow high mountain road with no thought of guard rails…).  Dazhai is what I want to write about.

Dazhai is a market town.  It is ringed by smaller villages, where people grow tea and wheat and whatever other agricultural products will bring them a livelihood.  The terrain is dramatically mountainous.  Some of the small villages cling precariously to the sides of steep, high hills.  Dazhai itself is unremarkable but it is not terribly poor.  Commerce is certainly in evidence, not only in the agricultural market that takes place every five days, but in the ATM machine (which my hosts said is usually empty) and the newly opened super market where you can purchase Coke Zero.  Yes, I can report that Coke's market penetration is pretty much complete here – it they are in Dazhai, Yunnan, they're just about everywhere.

While Dazhai, at least the center of town, is not desparately underdeveloped, poverty is certainly present.  People have to work hard for modest livelihoods, and those further away from the center of town live on the very edge of the Chinese economy.  There is no margin for misfortune.  Ill health, a bad accident, and these people tumble into irremedial straits.  This is not the China of Beijing or Shanghai or Kunming.  

The only foreigners in Dazhai (the population of which runs at about 40,000 if you count many of the outlying villages) are the two Americans teaching at the middle school.  They, and their two Chinese Teach For China counterparts, were my hosts for my one night stay – and very friendly and informative hosts they were.  The school itself sits on a small hill in a dramatic valley.  The view from the top of the steps, on the edge of the central square of the school's compound, is extraordinary: a high mountain ridge, terraced with farms and plots, topped by forests and, in the morning, a haunting mist.  Beautiful.  There are about 600 students in grades 7-9.   They are a boisterous lot of adolescents healthy and happy and energetic.  Indeed, they remind me very much of middle schoolers in the US.  The stereotype of Chinese students quietly sitting in rows, watched over by rigid teachers who brook no violation of strict rules on classroom conduct, is not true at all for this school, or the school I saw in Boshan, closer to Lincang.  Quite the contrary, the kids talked and wriggled, sometimes the boys got up and walked around (just like in Williamstown, the boys were more unruly than the girls).  Classroom management is a major issue here as elsewhere.

The young Teach for China fellows I came to observe are all marvelous.  Both the American and Chinese fellows bring a positive, constructive, energetic, creative force to their work.  They are obviously committed to doing what they can to improve the prospects of the wonderful kids they teach, kids who face serious limits on their life's prospects due to poverty and isolation.  So much of China today, and America's interaction with China, is about money and wealth.  Everyone is competing ferociously to earn more, spend more, acquire more.  But these young TFC fellows have put that all aside for two years, to travel to a remote, poor farm town to try to reach kids who have not had the kinds of advantages they have had.  It's truly admirable and, I believe, will make a difference for some of their students.

I say some, and only some, because there are hard realities here, realities that the teaching fellows know very well.  Many of the students, more than half, perhaps 70%, will drop out before graduating from middle school.  Their parents will call on them to work.  Some will drift into cities as migrant laborers.  The value of education is simply not seen or appreciated by families faced with immediate economic hardship.  Yet even facing those conditions, the TFC fellows are affecting their students for the better.  And some of them might have their life's chances transformed.  The big victories will be counted in the dozens perhaps.  But there will be many more small victories: the cultivation of a love for learning even in those kids who drop out and return to the farm or head to the city for work.

That's all for now…  I'm having some computer problems but will try to put up some pictures where I can.