Smoking in Rural China

| Posted on November 11th, 2008 in Curriculum Development, Integrative Rural Education Program, Quality Education, RCEF, Science, Teaching. Print This Post Print This Post

Over 300 million Chinese citizens are smokers. According to a study reported in the British Medical Journal, 75% of Chinese men smoke and nearly 50% of them will die from smoking-related illnesses if present smoking levels remain unchanged. The problem is especially pronounced in rural areas. According to Professor Teh-wei Hu at the University of California, Berkeley, those who work in agriculture are the most likely to smoke. This being the case, students at Guan Ai Primary in rural Shanxi Province are exposed to very few men who are non-smokers. While these men are putting themselves at risk for lung cancer and chronic lung disease (the number one killer amongst smokers in China), they also place their spouses and children in harm’s way by exposing them to second-hand smoke.

In addition to the health dangers, the cost of smoking takes a heavy toll on rural families. According to one study conducted by the Yale School of Medicine, money spent on tobacco often crowds out other essential spending. Assistant professor, Dr. Hong Wang found that money used for education is often one of the first expenditures cut in order to free up money for funding tobacco addiction. Given these findings, smoking prevention and smoking cessation programs are essential for rural communities as many families operate on incredibly tight budgets.

Considering the negative impact smoking plays in the lives of rural students, Guan Ai Primary is looking at ways to tackle this problem. We’re considering beginning a service project with our sixth grade students where they would research the consequences of smoking and effective methods for stopping. After gathering the information, students will work to educate the public on smoking. We are looking for ideas and resources to make this campaign work. Specifically, if you know of resources (preferably in Chinese) with information on the effects of smoking or effective methods for quitting, please share them.

Be Sociable, Share!
 

4 replies

  1. Stephanie Hakes says:

    Added on November 11th, 2008 at %I:%M %p

    That sounds like a great idea for a sixth grade service project! If the teachers want, maybe my sixth graders in Beijing can collaborate with Guan Ai’s and we can share our ideas.

  2. Wei Ji Ma says:

    Added on November 12th, 2008 at %I:%M %p

    The Health Interest Group has also looked into this issue but so far there were no opportunities for them to get concretely involved in a project. Maybe this is one.

  3. Kiel Harell (blog author) says:

    Added on November 12th, 2008 at %I:%M %p

    Stephanie, I will let the 6th grade teachers know that you’re interested in collaborating with them.

    Wei Ji, I’ll make sure the Health Interest Group is notified before we begin work on this project.

    Thanks!

  4. Ting Zhou (blog author) says:

    Added on November 27th, 2008 at %I:%M %p

    hey kiel,

    my name is ting, and i was a volunteer for the 2006 vp. i taught science and health in the dongbaoquan village in hebei. REALLY glad to read your post on the anti-smoking campaign in guan ai. this is something that has been brewing in the minds of several rcef volunteers for a looooong time. you may also be interested in talking to xuejing chen and nancy king, both of whom taught health for vp at some point in time.

    to be honest, hig isn’t very active lately for various reasons. largely because i just couldn’t get my act together :-P . nancy, jing and i must have had at least 10 conversations in the past on the feasibility of smoking cessation in rural china. if you’re interested to read about what we did for smoking prevention during the 2006 vp, check out nancy king’s awesome health curriculum report (which can be found on the rcef website somewhere). from teaching the health curriculum, we’ve come across quite a few number of of obstacles, most of which probably were due to the length of the vp program. but now, you’ll have the advantage of working long-term at a rural school with rural teachers, which will definitely have a stronger impact on health education.

    a lot of questions came up when we were looking over the smoking education module and talking about future projects on smoking prevention. for example, how do we approach the issue of smoking cessation in china in general, where people still offer cigarettes to their guests as a sign of hospitality? how would the “anti-smoking” message be taken in villages that still generate large portions of their income from tobacco farming? would there be any repercussions from local governments, some of whom own shares of tobacco factories. would farmers even respond to educations on the chronic effects of smoking, such as copd/lung cancer/stroke/heart disease, when most of them still don’t have insurance (or have crappy insurance that doesn’t cover day-to-day medical expenditure). and sure, we can teach children the effects of smoking. but given the void of public health education on smoking, they will still go home to a smoke-filled household. just how useful would a class on smoking be when we can’t change the environment in which they live?

    we also debated a lot on the teaching method. rather than focusing on behavior alterations, many of us thought that the most appropriate way of teaching health education is to provide the kids with the necessary knowledge, so that they would develop an interest for their own health and ultimately make the right decisions for themselves. one year, we developed a smoking module that focused on basic science and medical knowledge. even though the module did really well in some sites, we had trouble with its transferability. a couple of sites decided to scrap health education altogether because the volunteers felt uncomfortable for not having the appropriate background education.

    there was another obstacle with having short-term/overseas/college students teaching health education. our understanding of the rural chinese people are limited, and so the impact of our message would be weak. taking all these lessons together, i thought that a novel of way teaching health education to the kids would be to combine it with community research and “student teaching”. the kids can lead research projects on the effect of smoking in their own villages / communities. they can do lit search on the harmful effect of smoking, collect data on smoking-related illnesses in their villages, calculate the amount of money spent per household on smoking, etc. finally, the kids would organize all information into a presentation, which they can give to their parents / fellow villagers. this way, not only would the kids learn about smoking, they would also play a proactive part in advocating for the health care of their community.

    anyway, this is way too long and detailed of a spiel for a blog post. maybe we can schedule a skype session to do some more brainstorming. i’m sure that nancy and jing would love to get this project started again.

    ting

Leave a reply