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Hand-in-Hand: Fostering equality
Mao Shunjia, a 10-year-old pupil of Jingshan School in Beijing, never expected to learn much from the four-day summer camp to a rural community in July.
But what shook the city girl to her foundation was the poverty she witnessed in her visit to a village. She used to take for granted that children of her age lead the same carefree happy life she enjoys, until she entered the home of Li Xiaomei, a sixth-grader at Wangdawan, Xinyang in Henan Province, about 700 kilometres south of Beijing. Noticeable in Li's big house were peeling walls and old and worn wooden tables and chairs, with some held together by linen rope so that they would not fall apart. There was no sofa, no Coca Cola, and no telephone to chew the fat with friends on. A black-and-white TV set seemed to be the family's only luxury. Li Xiaomei's father is a migrant worker at a construction site in Ningbo in East China's Zhejiang Province. Her mother takes care of the farming at home. Their annual income is around 1,500 to 1,800 yuan (US$181 to $218), about the same as Mao's monthly consumption. Li has never been to the county seat, let alone other cities or provinces. She has never seen a film as there is no cinema in her village. Nor has she even played a computer game. What she plays with her pals after class is hide-and-seek or jump-rope. While alone, she likes reading. She has a collection of five books - all short stories or composition guidance. Mao and Li, two girls from strikingly different backgrounds, became pals in the Hand-in-Hand Summer Camp in July, which is an annual event co-sponsored by the China Children's Press and Publication Group (CCPPG) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) that has been running since 1994. Each camp involves around 200 participants, mostly primary school students, according to Lu Qin, deputy editor-in-chief of the CCPPG. "By bringing urban and rural children together, we hope to usher them into a new world where they can find out what they lack and lend each other a hand on the road to growth," she says. "The Camp is aimed to span the gap and forge a friendship between them." Such a friendship has lasted for eight years between Hua Ye from Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu Province and Zhang Jinrong, a rural girl in Henan. Zhang, then 12, was on the verge of dropping out of school in February 1996, when she was asked by the schoolmaster to write down a wish on a sheet of paper. Harsh weather had reduced the family's harvest and Zhang's mother had fallen sick. Seeing the Spring Festival, or China's traditional lunar New Year, was drawing near, Zhang scribbled: "I want to wear a new coat and read a new book on Lunar New Year's Eve." A few days later, Hua Ye, also 12 at the time, appeared in front of Zhang with a sweater and several composition guidance books. "I was more surprised than delighted. Never in my wildest dreams had I expected to make friends with a girl from Nanjing who could help me realize my wish," recalls Zhang Jinrong eight years later. Hua had been brought to Zhang by the Hand-in-Hand programme. In the following years, the two girls have kept in touch and exchanged presents from time to time - Hua sent Zhang stationery and sometimes money for her tuition while Zhang returned her kindness with homegrown peanuts and homemade rice cakes and cloth shoes. In her letters, Hua would tell Zhang about interesting goings on in the city, and encourage her to work hard to make a change for her countryside. "It was her letters that made me determined to be a teacher. I wish I could be helpful to more children, just like how my friend Hua Ye has helped me," says Zhang, who is now a sophomore at the Xinyang Education College. Although in the Hand-in-Hand activities it appears that urban children are more on the giving side, Hua Ye says she has actually learned a lot from rural kids. In her association with Zhang Jinrong, for instance, Hua says she was struck by her simplicity, warm-heartedness, sincerity, diligence, and stronger sense of responsibility to her family, which "are traits often missing in children growing up in big cities." Mao Shunjia has made the same observation. In the latest camp, she found rural kids are not "bumpkins" as she used to believe. In a game called "treasure seeking," in which a group of children are supposed to compete to discover many of the "precious articles" dispersed by organizers on the campsite, rural children always got the upper hand. "They are bolder to try the places that urban children are unwilling to search," says Zhu Wei with the CCPPG and organizer of the game. And Zhu Mengyuan, Mao's schoolmate, found rural children "so knowledgeable that they could distinguish so many different types of crops and poultry," she says admiringly. Fostering sense of equality The older Hua Ye is more philosophical. After years of association with her rural pal, she concludes, "They (rural children) are just like us." This is the very effect expected of the Hand-in-Hand project , says Lu Qin. "We just want the urban children to realize that children from the countryside are in no way inferior to their counterparts in cities, so long as they are given equal opportunity." Unfortunately, however, many rural kids still live in closed communities with limited opportunities, and are likely to copy their parents' lifestyle- marry and have children at a very young age, travel to cities as migrant workers or remain at home toiling in the fields. The latest statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics showed that there are 768 million people living in rural areas. Among them, only about one third attended high school, contrary to their urban peers. Meanwhile, among the 952,000 illiterate teenagers aged between 15 and 19 nationwide, 87 per cent lived in the countryside. In regards to this reality, Xu Weicheng, a former deputy head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee who masterminded the Hand-in-Hand programme, says its significance is beyond a mere "give-and-take" between urban and rural children. "As the process of urbanization is speeding up, an increasing number of people living in rural areas will flood to cities," he observes. "But a great number of them find it hard to be identified as equal with urban citizens, which could result in a series of problems." By bringing urban and rural children together, he hopes to instill in them a sense of equality by deepening their mutual understanding. He also expects the programme to open a window for rural kids to gain a view of a more colourful world at an early age, which may help them adapt to life in cities more easily when they grow up. Upon her departure, Mao Shunjia gave Li Xiaomei a stationery set and several books. She swears she'll keep in touch with her new pal. Although Li still has no idea what occupation she will take up in the future, she is determined to go to university. "We shall meet in Beijing," she replied firmly.
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