Tomorrow night, we will have been back home for a full week. Wow. It's funny because pretty much any other time, someone could ask me to sum up the last 2 weeks and it would take about a minute. I think our 2 weeks in China would take 2 months to recap. This week I couldn't manage to talk intelligibly about the trip but slowly we are in a sense decompressing and hopefully sounding less shell shocked.
We have heard about and seen pictures of the kids in the program for about 4 years now and so it was wonderful to see them in person, talk to them and hug them. They are not the same little children from pictures but have grown and matured. Their personalities and lives are no longer 2 sentence summaries but full and 3 dimensional. I can't describe how wonderful the experience of meeting them was.
These children live up in the mountains and are part of an ethnic minority group that is very much discriminated against. They have been pushed to the poorest farming land and struggle to grow enough to feed their families. Families are broken, fathers and mothers are missing, siblings have been lost, abuse in all forms is rampant and divine forgiveness is unknown. Through a sponsorship program, the children in the program (69 total but only 23 at this winter program) are able to attend school, sleep in a warmer bed, be fed 2 or 3 meals per day and have an opportunity to reach above subsistence farming.
We visited the school before the children arrived and I was immediately in shock. It is a privilege for them to be in school. It is expensive and puts a lot of strain on the family and pressure on the child. If they don't make grades, they don't fail and repeat, they leave. At 5 or 6 years a child begins school, which often means living in a dorm and completing 8, 9, or 10 hours of school each day. Jake would leave next year, live in a dorm, sleep on a bed like the one below and sit in class for at least 8 hours a day.
The girls' dorm building entrance. Everything is open-air and without heat or air conditioning.
This is a hallway in the girls' dorm.
One of the girls' rooms, 8 to a room. No closet, no dresser.
And the bed...
The classrooms are not heated or cooled, but the accomodations are far better than their mud hut high in the mountains.
When our Nosu students arrived, it was a joyous reunion for them with Mark and Yvette but we quickly noticed their shivering and chilblains on fingers. The lucky ones had thin jackets and the unlucky had no jacket and some no socks. Emails were sent back to the US asking for sponsors to buy the children socks, hats, gloves and thermals. Here is a quick video just after they received their gifts.
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