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I’m currently in former Summer Volunteer Program 2007 site Guozhuang in Shandong delivering computer literacy training to the villagers here. The weather now is most definitely not Summery, but the eagerness of the students to learn warms my heart.

A lot of the groundwork has been laid by new RCEF intern Guibin Fan (a former volunteer at the Yinjialin community school Sara Lam and I used to work at), moving all the computers here and setting up an internet connection. The students range in age from young adults to, well, not very young adults. I’ve been invited here by the village committee head Wang Zengling.

A little background on Guozhuang: this is by no means an impoverished village. 80% of the villagers do business, buying old heavy machinery, retooling it and selling it on for a nice profit. It’s an initiative initially led by the village committee head and has paid off handsomely.

Heavy machinery in the Guozhuang machine market

So if they’re not poor, then why are we here? Because we’re not the Poor China Education Foundation. We exist to empower those in rural communities to improve their own lives, and currently possibly the biggest thing rural citizens lack, more than food, more than books, more than housing and furnishings, is information. Young people go off to the cities to work not only because often the money is better, but because there’s more access to services and information there. It’s exciting to feel that you’re on the cutting edge. If you were young, healthy and bright, would you really want to stay where things change very little, where there is little new to be learnt?

It doesn’t have to be this way, and the village head understands this. It is because of his drive and determination to improve the learning environment for his villagers that RCEF has collaborated so closely with him in the past, not only sending a team of volunteers there in the summer of 2007, but also donating books for their libraries and reading program, as well as inviting local primary school teacher Mr. Du to our Libraries and Reading training this summer.

Through this computer training I hope to teach students how to write basic documents and reports, use the internet to research topics of interest to them, read and write emails and, maybe rather ambitiously, give them a sense of the global community that is possible by utilizing the World Wide Web.

More to follow – stay tuned.

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