Love

Service and playing with beautiful little kids! What could be better? Last weekend was one of my favorite weekends yet in China. I had the opportunity to help out with an eagle project and spend an entire Saturday at a migrant school, painting and making the concrete walls look pretty. And better yet, I got to play with these little kids and watch as they started helping us during their recess. (Which was like all day by the way, so it was awesome haha) Adam wrote a perfect explanation of a migrant school on his blog…

“Every year in China about one percent of the population moves from the countryside to the cities in search of work. In China, that one percent is 13 million people. In most cases, village men head off to cities to find work, leaving their wives behind to raise the children and take care of their land. The men often get menial jobs and send the money back. After a man establishes himself in the city he is joined by his wife and children. The long-term migrants often settle into ethnic ghettos or cramped dormitories that in some cases have two or three men sleeping together on bunks in 10-meter-long rooms crammed with 40 men. Often they move about town lugging unwieldy bundles of bedding and belongings wrapped in plaid-patterned woven-plastic fabric that somehow has become the standard for such purposes. The migrating laborers work for low pay, often under horrendous conditions, in factories, at construction sites, in mines and on railroads and roads. They work in restaurants, die in coal mines, make bricks, peddle bicycle to deliver coal and pick up trash. It's not uncommon for them to follow jobs from city to city.

The schools that are provided for the children of these migrant workers are often unlicensed and substandard, but public schools are too expensive for migrant families to afford. Even if they could afford to attend these schools, most don't have the residence and work permits that the public schools require. As a result, many children are denied access to primary education in their host communities. In the community, migrant children are also frequent targets of prejudice, as many of them speak with regional accents and dress differently than city children (cmc-china.org).”

The elementary school was far on the outside of Beijing. It was tucked away down an alley, old and rundown with nothing welcoming. There was no grass anywhere and everything was cement and brick. What was welcoming, was the children. They were happy and excited to have us there. They were eager to help us paint and help with whatever else we needed. One time that day, I was painting, and all of the sudden, there were four kids grabbing my arms and they pulled me into one of their classrooms. I presumed to give this loud bunch an “English lesson” and they were laughing and jumping all over me. They called me “Li lao shi,” (teacher Li – Li is my last name in Chinese). On our breaks from painting, we played jump rope with them, red rover, and laughed and talked with them.

I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed with love for these kids. They loved the attention that they lacked at home, when they were home that is. It was the best way I could have spent my Saturday. I barely even knew these kids, but it’s amazing how when we are serving someone, our capacity to love them grows immensely.

Friday, was also an awesome day! Zhongguo mama (our Chinese mama who helped us buy the bikes – read back a few blog posts), http://abbypaulsen.blogspot.com/2011/09/my-zhongguo-mama.html

                                                                        The new fold up bike!
                                                             

                                                           
                                                     
                                                                   My Zhonggou Mamma
  Our new bikes!

Zhongguo mamma had Tina, Josh and Anthony and I over for dinner. My friend Anthony is doing an internship in China right now, and we were so glad he ended up coming to Zhongguo mama’s that night, because he speaks Chinese fluently. So it was nice for him to help us explain to them for the 5^th time that we really couldn’t drink the tea that they were serving us. Haha.

They lived down the longest hutong (alleyway) in Beijing in a little place that’s like 150 years old! Zhongguo mama and her husband also have a feisty little dog, that barks and growls, and you think he’s going to eat you. I stayed far away from him that night.

So funny story, we were sitting around the table eating, they fed us soooo much. There was this one meat though, that had a lot of fat on it. And I looked over at Anthony and noticed that all the fat from his meat was gone, and I’m like, “Are you really eating the fatty part?” And he’s like, “Nope, I’m feeding it to the dog under the table.” Haha, no way, so that was fun secretly dropping pieces of meat onto the ground under the table, and the dog would come by and eat it.

They were so nice to us, oh yeah, and there was one time when I was sitting at the table and it was really could cause the windows were open and I didn’t have a jacket, so Zhongguo mama lent me one. (And later I tried to give it back and she insisted that I keep it)  Sweet mama.