Guyuan Guanxi

That 10 bucks burning a hole in your pocket? Wanna spend it in China?

Matt and I are starting up a little pet project called "Guyuan Guanxi". We want to find a small way to give back to the student community that we have grown to love. So yes, I am fishing for donations. No formal appeals, no asks for great dollar amounts, no pictures or videos on me by a garbage filled ravine ala Sally Struthers, no tax deductions (at least not yet), just that warm fuzzy feeling you get from helping out. In this case helping out a kid who is working very hard to have a future out of this poverty stricken area.

The first project is called "Home for the Holidays". Many of the kids that we teach come from poor families who are making significant sacrifices in order for their children to have a chance at getting an education in the hopes of going to a university and, hopefully, making a better life for themselves. To accomplish this, middle school students are usually boarded at the school and are in school from approximately 7:30 AM to Noon, 2:20 PM to 5:40 PM and 7 PM to 10 PM, six days a week. With additional classes on Sunday nights.

During the holidays, some students cannot afford to see their families because all of their money are going towards education. In Ningxia, you can take the bus from one end of the province to the other for no more than 70 or 80 kuai (about $9 or $10 USD) Most of our students need considerably less for a one-way ticket.

We will be working to set up a students' fund for travel where interested students may compete for travel by submitting English essays explaining why they should receive funds to go home. This is just in the beginning stages of development, so we cannot yet tell you when or how the funds will be disbursed. First, we are trying to raise a fund to disburse so we know how many students we can help. If you are interested in donating some money to this effort, please simply click this link to Matt's webpage: http://www.freewebs.com/forty4two2/guyuanguanxi.htm and you can make a donation via Paypal. Or, if you have questions or concerns, you can contact us at: guyuanguanxi@gmail.com. A website is under construction at: http://www.freewebs.com/guyuanguanxi/index.htm please excuse our dust. We will be adding to and editing this site a lot over the next year.

So, in closing, last term we had our students write about where they would go if they could go anywhere in the world. Both Matt and I got quite a few responses like the one below and were quite touched by how open they were, sharing their feelings with us when answering a simple question for their semester final.

"If I could go anywhere in the world, I would like to go to my hometown. It is very poor and some people do not think it is very pretty, but the water is very clean and I think the mountains are very beautiful. I would like to see my mother and father and brother. I have not seen them for two years and I miss them very much." Writing Assignment Excerpt From a Guyuan Yi Zhong Senior 1 Student