Playing together:
Hong Kong youth volunteers play with students to maintain a good relationship with them and increase their interest in learning.
Life experience:
Three volunteers live together in a small hostel to experience the simple life in the remote area of Shaoguan.
Joyful sharing:
Volunteers in four schools gather every week to share their work and life experiences.
HK youths befriend Shaoguan students
November 20, 2011
About 500km north of Hong Kong, four schools nestle in the hills in an underprivileged area of Shaoguan City, in Guangdong Province. About two months ago, 15 adventurous young volunteers from Hong Kong chose to put their lives on hold, to head for these hills to enrich the children’s education.
The volunteers joined the Home Affairs Bureau’s Service Corps Programme to help teach children from poor families for six months. Chief Executive Donald Tsang announced the service corps in his 2010-11 Policy Address, to promote youth development and volunteerism.
The schools are surrounded by farmlands, and are spread far apart. The volunteers split into four groups so they could each serve one school. Due to a teacher shortage, the schools provide only fundamental lessons, mainly Chinese, English and mathematics. The volunteers injected new options, including art, music, computer, integrated science and geography lessons, to arouse students’ interest in learning.
In their spare time, with little to do in these remote parts, volunteers got to know more about their students’ lives outside the classroom. Sarah Chau, a volunteer who had studied in the UK, spent her weekends exploring the nearby villages and visiting her students’ families.
Basic necessities
Adapting to local life was a challenge for the volunteers. Hung Hiu-wai, a volunteer at Huaping Experimental School, must carry 25 litres of water 2.5km from the hill to the hostel where he lives once every three to four days.
He uses a bamboo pole across his shoulders to carry the two buckets, but they are heavy and shake so much that he finds it difficult to walk.
“This is really a good training for me. In Hong Kong, we can easily get water when we turn on the tap. But the children here need to carry water in this way on a daily basis. Their lives are really hard.”
The volunteers live in small hostels close to their students’ homes, and share household chores such as cooking and cleaning. Zoe Lo, who lives in the Longgui Primary School’s women’s hostel in Wujiang District, recalls the October night it flooded due to heavy rain.
Pitching in
“When I was busy cleaning the water, several Primary 5 students living downstairs came and said ‘Let’s help our Hong Kong teacher.’ They are well-equipped with spades and buckets, and worked so hard to clean the water in my room,” she said, adding they mopped it up within an hour and she was grateful for their help.
Inside the hostels, it is hard to find a piece of furniture which is still in good condition. Most of the beds, chairs and tables are second-hand items, made of cast-off materials from the classrooms, such as wooden desks and metal bars, and assembled into basic furniture.
The living room walls are decorated with colourful cartoon pictures and birthday cards from their enthusiastic students. Although the drawings may be crude, with incorrect spelling, the volunteers consider them precious gifts.
Susan Ng, who also volunteers at Longgui Primary School, says some students are so poor they cannot finish their studies. Others refuse to continue their studies since the income from farming is about the same as that of a job they might find after graduation.
Instilling values
Her goal is to let them know that an education is important to build a better future. “They may have a chance to make a change of their lives, not being farmers always.”
Desmond Tse, 27, is the volunteers’ leader. He has spent three years as a Correctional Services Department welfare officer, helping to rehabilitate teens. He took leave from his post so he could learn more about the way teens think and behave, to help him develop in his career when he returns.
His experience serves him well in Shaoguan. He knows if teens get into trouble, it takes a lot of effort to get back on track.
“Education is important. Same as in Hong Kong, teenagers in Shaoguan also encounter temptations and all kinds of problems. My aim is to teach them with correct sense of values,” to prevent them from taking the wrong path.
Team effort
The volunteers are motivated by a desire to give back to the community, to learn more about different cultures and societies, and to develop their own career paths. They are not rewarded financially: Many of them took unpaid leave from work to participate, and receive a meagre monthly allowance of a few thousand renminibi to cover basic necessities such as food and furnishings.
Every weekend Mr Tse gathers the volunteers together for dinner, to share their experiences and release work pressure. Before this mission, they were strangers, but now they are close friends.
“We are neither 15 individual volunteers anymore, nor four groups of volunteers teaching in four separate schools. We work as a good team,” Mr Tse said.
Secretary for Home Affairs Tsang Tak-sing visited the volunteers in Shaoguan in early November, and was happy with their work.
"The programme not only brings students warmth and care, but also helps broaden their knowledge. For the young participants from Hong Kong, the programme provides them with a valuable opportunity to develop their tenacity, increase their understanding of the motherland and cultivate a caring spirit," Mr Tsang said.
