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March 22, 2002
Dear Friends,
Snow China Notes #3
I (Don) am just back from a week visiting schools and Amity
teachers in Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, so here are some impressions
from this trip.
Shanxi and Inner Mongolia
A generalization frequently made about China is that the eastern
half is relatively wealthy while the west is much poorer. So when
you find Shanxi on a map of China and note that it is definitely
in the eastern half, you might naturally assume that it is among
the relatively prosperous areas in China. However, this is not
the case. Shanxi is a plateau surrounded by mountains, and its
arable land leaves a lot to be desired, so it is actually one
of China’s poorest provinces. Ironically, because it is geographically
in the eastern part of China Shanxi has tended to be overlooked
in current government efforts to assist China’s poor west.
Looking north from Shanxi to Inner Mongolia, the first thing
you would notice about Inner Mongolia is that it is huge, and
as one would expect in a province that covers so much area, the
land has great diversity—desert, grasslands, forests, and
mountains can all be found in its borders. However, much of the
land is relatively arid, and over-grazing has caused an increasing
problem of soil erosion, with much of Inner Mongolia’s land
literally blowing away during large dust-storms each spring. I
was privileged to participate in the first big
dust storm for this year, taking off in the midst of it in Inner
Mongolia and landing in more of it in Beijing. This particular
storm was big enough to dominate China news for two days, and
even to make it on to the ABC Evening News.
Amity has long had a variety of development projects in Shanxi
and Inner Mongolia, and beginning this year Amity’s Teachers
Project has also begun to place teachers here during the academic
year—one team in Shanxi and two in Inner Mongolia. (Caroline
Sunquist, one of the teachers in Shanxi, is sponsored by the PC(USA).)
The project
Most Amity teachers work in teacher training colleges, helping
train future English teachers for China. However, the teams in
Shanxi and Inner Mongolia are involved in a somewhat different
task, providing in-service training for middle school English
teachers who already work in middle schools. Throughout China
there is a great need for more and better trained English teachers,
especially now that elementary schools have all recently been
required to start offering English courses for students in grades
3 to 6. However, the problem tends to be more serious in poorer
provinces because not only is the number of English teachers there
especially low, but the level of training of the English teachers
also tends to be especially poor. (The better qualified teachers
are often hired away by schools in wealthier places.) This leaves
schools in poorer provinces at a significant disadvantage in preparing
their students for competition for university places.
One obvious solution—and the one we are trying in Amity—is
providing in-service training in poorer provinces to enhance teachers’
skills, especially the speaking and listening skills teachers
need to cope with the demands of China’s new middle-school
English curriculum. However, the catch-22 is that the schools
with the fewest qualified English teachers— i.e. those most
in need of help—are also those who find it hardest to release
a teacher for a semester or more of further training.
So the bad news is that recruitment has turned out to be something
of a headache in all three of the new programs we have set up
in Shanxi and Inner Mongolia. In fact, the difficulty faced by
our program in Shanxi was so great that they had to adopt one-month
terms because this was as long as schools could afford to let
an English teacher leave. While the situation in Inner Mongolia
is somewhat better—so far, the programs in Baotou and Hohot
have always been able to fill the classes—even there recruitment
has not always been easy.
The good news is that feedback on the programs themselves is
good, so when schools do allow English teachers to attend an Amity
program for a semester or even a month, the impact of the training
program is quite obvious to both participants and their schools.
In fact, many of the new students who joined the programs in the
second semester did so because they had heard by word-of-mouth
that these programs are effective and worth attending. The challenge
now is to work with local officials to find ways to surmount the
recruitment and financing difficulties so that more teachers can
benefit from the programs.
For more about these particular projects, see the Amity Newsletter
article "Ma, Why Can’t My English Teacher Speak English?"
by Ian Groves. This can be found at Amity’s web site www.amityfoundation.org.
Churches
Our time in Baotou included a Sunday, so we (myself and Zhang
Liwei from the Nanjing office) were able to attend a local church
with the Baotou Amity teachers. There are quite a few churches
in the central part of Inner Mongolia, many established a century
ago by missionaries from the Swedish Covenant Church. The one
we visited was quite large and newly rebuilt. In fact, before
the service we heard a rather detailed report from one of the
elders to the congregation about the current state of finances
arising from the rebuilding of the church. (If I had been taking
better notes, I could tell you precisely who donated how much
to the effort, who loaned how much, and how much remains to be
repaid.)
The service started out with a half-hour hymn practice, as is
common in Chinese churches. This not only familiarizes the congregation
with the hymns but also helps those who do not read well to improve
their reading skills. Then we had congregational prayer and a
rather long sermon focusing on evangelism. We sat through the
first hour of the sermon, but then had to depart early because
of another appointment, so I’m not sure how long it eventually
went. On the way out we wound up having a brief conversation with
an elder about Amity’s support of some church-run social
welfare projects in Baotou, and were able to encourage him to
consider doing more along those lines.
East Asia Retreat in Japan
I should also mention that during the last week of February,
all of the long-term PC(USA) mission personnel in East Asia met
outside Kyoto, Japan, for a retreat of several days. This was
the first time such a retreat has been held, and it was an excellent
opportunity for PC(USA) missionaries in different countries to
get to know each other and learn about each other’s work.
The joy of the occasion was dampened somewhat by news of the increasingly
severe budget crisis that will impact the work of the Worldwide
Ministries Division (and other GAC divisions), but we were especially
appreciative that even in a time of tight budgets Worldwide Ministries
was willing to demonstrate its faith and commitment to its missionaries
in this way. This retreat did much to renew and strengthen our
sense of being a PC(USA) community striving to serve God in Asia.
Well, that’s probably enough for today. God’s peace,
and I’ll write more as opportunity presents itself.
Don Snow
The 2002 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 179
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