What was people’s life like in the West before the great development?

Baidu home page | Login and register

News page Tieba knows MP3 picture video encyclopedia library help | Settings

Baidu knows> Education/Science

The current learning and living conditions of children in the west

2009-2-22 16:46 Questioner: toinghaihao | Reward points: 5 | Number of views: 3282 times

Now! 2009

2009-2-23 17:14 Satisfactory answer Six years later, after I left the west, as a returned scholar, I went to the west again to visit the lives and studies of the children there. I want to say , that mouthful of rice is so spicy, so spicy.

It has been six years since I left my home in the west, but the poverty and backwardness there are still vivid in my mind. What does that land look like now? From October 18th to 27th, I, who was born in the west, went to Inner Mongolia with the "Healthy Plan Western Tour" co-sponsored by the China Children and Teenagers' Foundation, the Ministry of Railways, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Armed Police Headquarters, the All-China Women's Federation and other units. , passed through Ningxia, passed through Gansu, crossed Sichuan, and entered Guizhou, covering a journey of more than 9,000 kilometers. I visited impoverished schools and families in the west. From prosperous metropolises to impoverished mountain villages in the west, my feelings are different from those of other overseas scholars. The difference is that in my eyes, the lives of some poor children are my past, but at the Jiaba National Primary School in Guizhou, I saw scenes that made me, a son from the west, burst into tears and unforgettable in my life. Children in the west are deeply troubled by embarrassment, missing school and injury, and they are looking forward to more attention.

While the children in the city throw away the whole "Big Mac" without any pity, the children in Jiaba National Primary School eat three meals a day with white rice, which is enough to make people stick out their tongues. For fear of pouring too much chili, he carefully put a little tasteless soy sauce into the rice as a condiment to deceive his taste buds. Now, the bitterness and spiciness of that spoonful of rice is still on my tongue. I think this taste may become stronger involuntarily when I think of my home in the west after menstruation.

My hands felt weak when I opened the big wooden box belonging to Wang Xian, a fourth-year student at Jiaba National Primary School in Baobang Township, Huishui County, Guizhou Province. The big wooden box was opened with the key she hung around her neck. My first impression of the things stored in the box was that there was no need to lock it at all. A small half bowl was barely enough rice for a meal for this weak little girl. A little chili sauce stored in a small can and five cabbage leaves were all the contents of the big wooden box. Teacher Li Jiaming standing next to me told me that a little more rice would be enough for one farm in Wangxian (the villagers have to go to the market to buy things every Sunday, and their week is calculated based on the farm).

Every time he goes to the market for a holiday, Wang Xian has to walk a 40-mile mountain road to carry back a week's worth of food rations from home. When I opened Wangxian's lunch box, in addition to cold rice, there was chili sauce. After getting Wang Xian's consent, I took a bite of her chili rice with a small spoon. As soon as I entered the mouth, the spicy taste quickly began to spread from the tip of my tongue to the root of my tongue. When it reached my throat, I couldn't care less and kept sticking out my tongue and using it. I fanned the wind with my hands. I don't know whether it was too spicy or excited, but I felt like liquid in my eyes was about to surge out. I have eaten hot pot in Chengdu and spicy fish in Hunan, but I dare say that the spiciness of this mouthful of rice is unforgettable and will probably stay on the tip of my tongue for the rest of my life.

White rice with chili is not Wangxian’s midday meal, nor is it dinner. This is what the 516 students of Jiaba National Primary School eat for every meal every day and every month. If you want to change it, sometimes Replace the chili sauce with soy sauce or steam rice on the pot while boiling some potatoes and cabbage without oily smell in white water to accompany the meal. I continued to open the large wooden box belonging to Wang Yanling, Yang Chaofang, Chen Yinghua, and Chen Yingfen who lived in the same room as Wang Xian. The contents inside did not change at all.

While children in the city enjoy classrooms with constant temperatures all year round and still have to be picked up in the morning and dropped off in the evening, the children in Jiaba National Primary School are huddled in three or five rolls of old cotton batting, while the children who accompany them There are no low-pitched nursery rhymes, just stars twinkling across the rooftops. I was thinking that the children on each bed may have a different dream, but during the interview, they said that the common wish of everyone is not to huddle up in the corner with the quilt and spend the night when it rains, because the next day I would fall asleep in class.

In addition to attending classes and eating together, Wang Xian, Wang Yanling and Yang Chaofang cannot sleep separately. Because the school dormitory is too limited, the three of them have to squeeze into a wooden bed. This has a history of more than 20 years. The old house has long been exposed to the wind and rain. The average altitude of Baibang Township is 1,408 meters and the average annual rainfall is 1,100 millimeters. The old house cannot block the rain that comes every now and then. Wang Xian and the others have no choice but to Move the bed to the side with less leakage. When I opened their wooden box, I found that it had become somewhat rotten due to long-term rainwater soaking. Facing the same problem as Wang Xian and others, there is another boys' dormitory of less than 20 square meters. When I walked in, it took my eyes a while to adjust, but the little heads protruding from each bed scared me first. People with snotty noses, shy faces turned away, and suspicious eyes crowded together. They had to climb over the bed when they went out. Finally, I counted clearly. There were three or four boys sleeping on each bunk bed, eating white rice, covering them with old cotton wool, and falling asleep counting stars at night.

Teacher Li told me that there are 62 boys here, ranging from the second grade to the third grade. If there is a rain, it is more difficult for them than the king's line. Sometimes everyone has to huddle in the corner with their own quilts and spend the night. There is no fire in the houses in Baibang Township, where the annual average temperature is 13.6 degrees Celsius. Another advantage of having three or five children covered with a black quilt is that they can use each other's body heat to keep each other warm.

I found four other girls under the stairs of the only teaching building in the school. The four little girls Li Ruizhen, He Guiju, Tang Min, and Tang Qun could clearly see their nutrition from their faces. Bad, they are already in the third grade of junior high school and are obviously much shorter than the children in the city, but even so, they still have to bend down extremely low when entering and exiting this so-called hut, but when you tell me about the hut, they still reveal themselves. With a satisfied smile, Li Ruizhen quietly told me that compared to other students, the biggest advantage of the hut is that she doesn’t have to hide around in a hurry when it rains. This is also what other students envy the most. At this time, they were frying rice with chili sauce that had not been drained of oil. I couldn’t bear to watch this any more, but Yousheng was afraid of hurting their self-esteem, so he just asked them to buy school supplies and hurriedly took them out. The only 100 yuan they had was stuffed into their hands and they quickly left the stair dormitory. Wang Yue, an overseas scholar from CCTV, couldn't bear to take pictures any more and took off his cotton-padded clothes to keep out the cold and handed them over.

When children in the city are addicted to exciting video games on the computer and their parents are having a headache, the children in Jiaba National Primary School have to quickly finish copying the writing on the blackboard, because after a while the fog will come. Will completely devour it. There are only seven children admitted to high school in this school this year, but only three are actually going to report. The families of the remaining children are really unable to squeeze out tuition fees. Like other students who failed to pass the exam, they either farm and herd cattle, or go to other places to start their careers. work to earn a living. Although I haven't seen them, I can deeply feel that they chose something called hopelessness when they had no choice.

I didn’t find any remnants of the teacher’s blackboard writing on the blackboard of Jiaba National Primary School. I couldn’t figure it out. Teacher Li Jiaming’s explanation helped me solve the mystery. The high cold and rainy weather in Jiaba has caused them to be shrouded in fog all year round. Teachers must seize the limited sunny days to come to class. In foggy days, one of the main tasks of the students is to quickly copy the writing on the blackboard. After the mist droplets condense, the chalk words will be washed away and blurred, and the teacher will have to erase the words quickly. It will be extremely difficult to write on the blackboard without water.

No matter how difficult the learning conditions are, teachers and children can overcome them with willpower, but what makes teachers sad is that children are out of school. Teacher Li told me that generally in the first semester, the children arrive at the same time. , but some people disappeared without a trace in the second semester. What makes them even more sad is that this year, 7 out of more than 80 students were admitted to high school, but only 3 signed up, and the remaining 4 were unable to do so due to family difficulties. They gave up because they couldn't come up with money. Like many children here, their ultimate fate was to farm at home and herd cattle or work outside the home. According to statistics from Baibang Township, there are currently 415 school-age children aged 7 to 12 who have dropped out of school due to financial difficulties. Over the past 50 years, only 5 people in the township have college education and 39 people have technical secondary school (high school) education (accounting for 0.05% and 0.4% of the total population respectively). Traveling all the way to the west and listening to the introductions of local leaders, I realized that this situation was definitely not the case in Paibang Township. While mothers in the city are worried about whether to wear a bikini or a one-piece swimsuit in the future and decide whether to have a caesarean birth, mothers in impoverished areas in the west are feebly picking up a pair of rusty scissors and reaching out to The umbilical cord connects her to the baby. Although the baby may die of tetanus before seeing the world clearly, the living baby will grow up with the piglets and calves in the pen. I was deeply hurt by those big pure eyes. At this time, I could no longer judge normally whether Xiao Jiaqing was lucky or unlucky.

The purity of a pair of big eyes can also make people feel frightened and uneasy. I came to this conclusion outside Dongzhou Chunlei Primary School in Huqiao Zhulingou, Zhang County, Longxi, Gansu. In the crowd, a little boy climbed on his father's back and looked at the people coming and going without blinking. I kept teasing him with the camera, but he didn't react as he should have. The mother on the side was timid. He timidly told me that the official name of this child with big, pure eyes was Hu Jiaqing. He had cerebral palsy and could not speak or walk at the age of three. He might have to live with his father for the rest of his life. How could a kid with eyes like that shake hands with someone with cerebral palsy? I grew up in the west, but in my memory there were very few such children around me. After asking the leaders of the local health bureau, I learned that the cause of Xiao Chaowen's cerebral palsy was that his poor mother gave birth at home. The old aunt from the health bureau told me that a candle or kerosene lamp, a pair of rusty scissors, and a worn-out bed of cotton wool are all the tools mothers in poor areas in the west use when giving birth. After the child is born, she holds the scissors tremblingly and cuts them off. The umbilical cord is worn by the mother who is already exhausted. In this case, in all likelihood, both mother and baby will die in case of miscarriage. And the mortality rate of newborns infected with tetanus under such sanitary conditions is also alarmingly high. After passing the life-and-death barrier, , the children will continue to suffer. In some places, women are not allowed to give birth at home. They can only endure great pain silently in cattle pens and pig pens.

According to survey statistics from the health department and the China Children and Teenagers' Foundation, in impoverished areas in the west, the neonatal mortality rate is generally 160 per 10,000, or even as high as 250 per 10,000, resulting in this alarming figure The fundamental reason is that about 73% of mothers in poverty-stricken areas in the west give birth at home without professional doctors to accompany them. Faced with such a set of numbers, I can no longer judge whether Xiao Chaowen, who has cerebral palsy, is unlucky or lucky among them.

Before the "Ankang Plan Western Tour" set off, Secretary-General Cheng Shuqin of the China Children and Teenagers' Fund told me affectionately about an encounter she had during her inspection in the west that still makes her eyes water when she thinks about it. When there were 30 classmates in a class, each holding a pencil that could no longer be sharpened, still immersed in listening carefully and writing pictures in the dark classroom, she couldn't bear to look at it anymore, turned around and ran to the only one in the village who probably took out a pencil She bought a large bundle of new pencils from the canteen that could buy all the goods for 300 yuan, and solemnly distributed them to every student. But then she was surprised to find that no one in the entire classroom threw away the miniature pencils in their hands. They all quietly put their new pencils into the depths of their schoolbags. Now, the secretary-general also treasures one of the pencil stubs. When she is tired from collecting donations for the children in the west, she will take out the pencil stub that cannot be held and look at it. After thinking about that scene, she will start again without stopping. Running around.

Although I was born and raised in the west, I was once the protagonist in the "Pencil Head Story", I deeply experienced the meaning of poverty for a child, and after listening to the story of the Secretary-General Afterwards, I was mentally prepared, but I still couldn’t calm down during the whole process of Ankang’s trip to the west. I observed everything around me from the perspective of a pure overseas scholar, and sometimes I couldn’t help but be involved in the events. At the same time, I also saw that every overseas scholar accompanying me was not completely calm about this news event, but was more or less mixed with personal feelings. In Chengdu, because before the trip, the low temperature in the western region was taken into consideration. Overseas students only had one down jacket to wear, but the temperature at that time was 20 degrees Celsius. Li Jianying, editor of Qianlong News Network, spent more than 100 yuan to buy a T-shirt. After seeing the difficult study and life of the children, she felt She quietly told me, "I feel like I am committing a crime by spending so much money on clothes." During the trip summary meeting, CCTV's Yu Chaohui burst into tears in front of more than 30 people when he talked about the emotional part. I believe I am not the only one. Perhaps no overseas scholar would be able to face or interview calmly in front of those eyes as pure as the western sky. At this time, I wondered whether the description of an overseas scholar from the west could be transformed into a kind of power, even if it was very small, to change the fate of even a child or a mother.