Zhuhai Daily-GLV helps needy Guizhou schools
ByBettyLin《珠海特区报》
2009.10.19 FIVE Zhuhai Gateway Language Village (GLV) teachers and staff including Kelly Morine, English Programme Teacher Training & Development administrator from Canada, went to the Pingzhai and Shazi primary schools in Suojia Townlet, Guizhou Province, from September 21 to 24, to donate a large number of books for a library in each school and provide training sessions for all English teachers in a middle school. The severe scarcity of text-books and extracurricular reading materials, teachers of English, teaching aids, sporting goods, caring, nutrition, water and road facilities upset the donors. A lot of primary students have no textbooks let alone any extracurricular readings. They know nothing about the 5,000-year Chinese civilization, and they don't even know who Zhou Enlai was, the first premier of the People's Republic of China. There are no more than four teachers including the principal in a 300-student school. Four additional volunteers from various parts of the country share all the classes. The only middle school in the townlet has more than 1,000 students but merely eight English teachers, two of whom majored in English in college. The average score in English is below 30 percent. In response, GLV has promised to provide any necessary help for English teaching and learning at the school and has given English training for all the volunteers free of charge. Teaching aids and sporting goods are in urgent need, according to Eileen Peng, a 29-year-old initiater of the volunteer project. Children meanwhile are left without care. Almost all adults have migrated to work in Zhejiang Province. Therefore, some two-thirds of the students are unattended. Some of them meet with their parents only once a year, some have forgotten what their parents look like, and some have been parted from their par-ents since birth. When Executive Principal James Yi asked a first-grader what his dream was, he replied, "My dream is to be with my mum and dad." One cannot imagine that some children have only one meal a day without breakfast or lunch. They're normally undernourished so that some 13-year-olds look like 8- or 9-year-old kids in urban areas. Lack of water is a key to poverty. A black bucket sits in a corner of the playground of Pingzhai Primary School in Suojia Townlet, which holds water carried from the mountain by teachers to meet the needs of all the teachers and students in the school. A 13-year-old and her 11-year-old brother, whose parents are migrant workers in a city far way, take care of themselves. Too young to carry water from the mountain, they use rainwater from the roof and boil it to kill the worms. Pingzhai and Shazi primary schools, which have the best conditions, are open to motorized traffic, whereas it takes at least one or two hours to walk by the nearest mountainous road to other primary schools that are dispersed in remote areas. Ten kids in Pingzhai Primary School use a dangerous bridge every day. The bridge is supported built by tightwires and uses irregular planks and no guardrails, and the original four-line steel ropes have only two lines to sup-port the floating bridge over the torrential river. Breaking of any of the steel ropes is very likely to throw the passersby into the river. Moreover, it's very slippery in the rain. Literally the ten children are at life threatening stake every day. Apart from teaching, spending time with the students and paving a road leading to the inner town-let, Eileen and her volunteers are seeking more investors to build factories in the area so that the mi-grant workers can come back to their hometown, children can live with their parents, local people can earn higher pay, and promising students can afford schooling. They also hope that more volunteers join them to make a difference in local education. 《珠海特区报》原文链接：http://search.zhnews.net/tqb/text.php?ud_key=39675&ud_date= 编辑：李兵Lewis Lee 相关报道：
|
