BY JUDY LIN-EFTEKHAR
UCLA Today Staff

In the mountain villages dotting Qinghai Province in northwestern China, families eke out a meager living from plots of wheat and herds of sheep that meander along rutted dirt roads. There is no running water. No toilets.

But that didn’t stop 11 UCLA students from embarking on a 50-hour journey by plane, train and bus last month to teach the children in these remote villages English.

For Grace Jun, a fourth-year student majoring in international development studies, the opportunity to spend six hours a day, five days a week for three weeks teaching was an opportunity to offer hope. The 20 students she worked with in the village of Zhongchuan hope to someday attend college, obtain good jobs and translate their accomplishments into help for their village.

In short, the experience was “fantastic,” Jun said. “Incredible.”

Organizing the trip was Richard Baum, professor of political science, who had approached his students after seeing an ad on the Internet posted by the program’s key patron, American expatriate Kevin Stuart. Teachers were needed for children between the ages of 12 and 17 in this remote part of China with its ethnic minority Tibetan, Muslim and Mangguer population.

With $5,000 donated by friends of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, which Baum directs, and money from their own pockets, the students and Baum departed on August 1.

Accompanying them were Donna Brinton, a lecturer in the Department of Applied Linguistics, and former UCLA anthropologist Barbara Pillsbury.

The students served in pairs in six different villages, living in teachers’ dormitories and with local families.

“The people in our village were so friendly,” said Jun. “We would walk through the street, and everyone would say hello and invite us to their homes.”

The program, it turned out, was teaching much more than English. The most talented of the Chinese students, after graduating from their village schools, were attending Stuart’s advanced English classes in Xining, the provincial capital, where they also learned how to use the Internet to raise funds for poverty-alleviation projects in their villages. Nightly, a dozen or so of them gathered around the computer in Stuart’s apartment, one of the few places wired for the Web in that locale.

“It was an amazing combination,” Baum said. “First, you teach them English, then you teach them to surf the ’Net.” Thus far, some 60 projects have been funded, resulting in new schoolrooms, latrines, greenhouses and more.

The UCLA students also mined the ’Net for funding. Alex Bodke, for instance, is awaiting word on his grant proposal to drill a well in the village of Minzhu, where residents now must hike some two kilometers to the nearest river for fresh water.

When it came time for the UCLA teachers to say good-bye, they almost didn’t. A closing ceremony was held in the town of Guanting, to which many of the 200 villagers walked three or four hours. Then as the UCLA group prepared to leave, the villagers suddenly broke into wailing. “They were clutching our teachers and wouldn’t let them go until they promised to come back next year,” Baum said.
Jun, for one, is already planning on it.

“A lot of my students were incredibly bright, very intelligent and very capable of excelling at the university level,” Jun said. “If we educate them, they can help their families. They will become leaders for their community.”

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