Qingchuan « Sichuan Quake Relief (SQR)

Posts Tagged ‘Qingchuan’

SQR delivers textbooks and goodie-bags to village school

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

The SQR team took a long, bumpy ride to the north-east of Sichuan at the beginning of this week to deliver more than sixty backpacks, crammed with textbooks and other goodies, for the schoolchildren of Yanyan Village, deep in Qingchuan County. The school is currently being run by volunteers, coping with little or no resources, in a building that is no more than bamboo boards on a dirt floor, with no electricity.

Although for much of the way there the winding mountain roads were — at best — uneven dirt and stones, and in places ankle-deep in mud, our skilful driver Mr Tang got us the four-hundred kilometres there in about seven hours. We crossed two rivers and there was only one occasion where we had to get out and push the van out of an uncooperative muddy hole.

On the way back we were rather less fortunate. Not only did we have to wait more than three hours while an on-coming truck that was stuck in the middle of the road freed itself (with a bit of teamwork from all the other drivers that were waiting to pass), but we then got stuck ourselves in virtually the same spot — and all other help had chugged away up the mountain. By the time we had pushed and skidded our way out of this and several other points along this particularly bad stretch of road, it had taken six hours to travel a distance that had earlier taken about an hour, and it took another six and a half hours to complete the rest of the journey back to Chengdu, our shoes and clothes caked in mud.

It’s the unpredictable nature of these roads that makes daily trips to a central school in the nearby town of Qima so infeasible. For this reason — together with the village school’s current lack of educational resources — many schoolchildren are not currently attending classes at all. The central school is too hard to get to (or too much to afford boarding or renting closer to town), and the village school does not have the means to provide a decent education. (For more information on why village schools in Qingchuan are so lacking, see our earlier posting.)

In an attempt to both raise awareness and address this problem, SQR decided to use a generous donation from Chiao Hsin Chinese Language School in California, USA, to purchase a selection of the required textbooks for the sixty children we had been told were not currently attending the central school. Packed neatly alongside the textbooks, inside a brand new backpack, each child also received:

exercise books
a pencil case containing pencils, rulers, pencil sharpeners
a skipping rope
a tennis ball
a jianzi shuttlecock
an electrically-heated hand/body warmer
a woolly hat
a pair of gloves

Yanyan Village's temporary school-building and playarea

We also donated a CD player and teaching materials (chalk; books with ideas for lessons) to the school, and received a promise from the head of the village that students from nearby villages who were not present on the day would be given their backpacks as soon as possible.

And as well as the brand new books, on behalf of Sichuan Normal Junior School we also donated two large boxes of used, good condition textbooks covering a wide range of subjects including art, mathematics, English and music.

As you can see from the selection of photos below, the trip was a great success and was well worth every bone-juddering, shoe-ruining moment of the journey.

Wear them on the front or the back, the choice is yours!

A huge thank you to both Sichuan Normal Junior School and Chiao Hsin Chinese Language School for their donations, and to Jane from Chengdoo Magazine for liasing with Chiao Hsin. These contributions enabled us to not only bring essential supplies to a remote village school, but deliver a message to the people living there that organisations such as SQR have not forgotten about them.

Donate to SQR to help fund more of these important trips.

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Tags:Donation, Qingchuan, resources, school, Sichuan Quake Relief, SQR, supplies, trip, Yanyan
Posted in Education, SQR Activities | No Comments »

Village schools struggling to be rebuilt

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Qingchuan County, northern Sichuan.

After the earthquake destroyed many of the local village schools in Qingchuan County, it was decided that rather than rebuild each small school, a large central school would be built in the nearest town. Unfortunately, for many of these villages the nearest town could be more than twenty kilometres away, along roads that have frequently been blocked by landslides, or made inaccessible by local rivers bursting their banks during the rainy season.

Some of the villages that have lost their local schools in Qingchuan County, along with the nearest towns.

Download into Google Earth.

Villages such as Liping, Yanyan, Minzhu and Shuimo have all been told that their school-age children must now attend the central school in Qima Town. For some parents, this means sending their child to board at the school — a cost of 120 RMB a month; for many, it means renting a place in Lijiaguo, close to Qima, costing up to 600 RMB a month including food and utilities. That’s around 6000 RMB per academic year in a region where annual earnings are approximately half that amount. This kind of expense cannot be borne for long, and already more than half of the students from these villages are staying at home instead of going to the central school, receiving no schooling whatsoever.

The situation is the same all over the county: students from Heping Village — some two hundred of them — must not only travel by road, but spend forty minutes on the river in order to reach Yingpan Central Primary School; Jinjiaping is three or four hours walk away from Maoba Central Primary School; Sandui is five kilometres along mountain roads from Shazhou. The list goes on.

The villagers overwhelmingly want their own local schools to be rebuilt; impressively, more than thirteen villages in Qingchuan County have won an agreement from the local education bureau that, provided they find the funding to rebuild the school themselves, then teachers will be supplied and the school will be permitted run.

The people of Liping have led the way in raising money, from within their own community and from companies further afield, and succeeded in building a 120-square-metre school — more than enough to educate all of the local children and with room to grow. But they were aghast to be told, when they applied for the permit to begin operations, the education bureau had apparently specified that village schools must be larger than 200 square metres in order to qualify. No-one had heard of this restriction while the school was being planned.

Further confusion ensued when the representatives from Yanyan — a village that had had its own school for almost fifty years before the quake — started work on their own plans for a school, necessarily bigger than 200 square metres, only to be told that it must be at least 300 square metres if it was to be allowed to hire teachers, despite being barely six kilometres (as the crow flies) from Liping. People started to wonder if the central school in Qima was having a hand in these policy-switches in order to keep as many students (and with them, more funding) for themselves.

But the people in Liping could not bear the thought of their time, money, and hard work going to waste — not to mention choosing between struggling to afford to send their child to the central school, or having no education at all. They pleaded with the education bureau to overlook the size-restriction and — thanks in large part to a relative of the community being an employee at the bureau — they were at last granted the permit. Classes will begin again at Liping Village Elementary School from next semester.

The other villages we have mentioned are not so lucky to have friends in high places, and are stuck either wondering if they should risk going ahead to rebuild a school that may not be permitted to run, or struggling to locate the funds to rebuild their own schools at all. SQR is monitoring the situation to determine if anything can be done for these other villages, collectively or individually.

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Tags:bureacracy, education, funding, Liping, map, Qima, Qingchuan, rebuilding, research, schools, Shuimo, Yannian, Yanyan
Posted in Civil society, Facilities reconstruction, Local government | No Comments »

Donation appeal. Qima township: money required for reconstruction, schools, Children’s Day, and basic medicines

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Poverty is inevitably still a huge problem, given the impact of the earthquake on areas which were living at subsistence level.

Information about Qima Township in Qingchuan obtained by SQR in the past few days.

Basic Situation

6 hours drive from Chengdu, 1 hour from Qinchuan County. The road connecting villages and townships can get rather muddy when rains but accessible.

The nearest NGO (World Vision International, which set up its office there before the earthquake) working in Qingchuan is in Qiaozhuang Township, 1 hour drive away from Qima.

There are 8000 residents, many of them are suffering from rheumatism, cholelithiasis, gall-stones, and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. The township does have a public clinic but only with limited facilities and meds, so the doctors working there are not able to treat illnesses like these.

According to the figures collected by a local volunteer, there are 600+ patients who cannot afford even ordinary medical services. This group of people consists mostly of elderly people without children or living by themselves while children are working somewhere else.

Progress of reconstruction is uneven. Better-off families have already had their new houses built and have moved in. However, many families just finished the foundation part as to claim the subsidy (the policy is that full subsidy is issued only to families that begin reconstruction before 12th May 2009). Some people, as in Caopo, have been using the subsidy or micro-credit to cover their basic necessities, rather than to reconstruct their houses.

There is one central primary school (1-9 grade), and four village primary schools, with 704 students in total. Grades 1 to 3 include 48 preschool students and 48 students from the village primary schools.

The village primary schools provide classes for one specific group only: for Grade 1 students who live too far away from the central school and cannot afford to live in a school dormitory, and each has around 10-20 students.

Students now have classes in a row of prefabricated houses. More than 400 of them live in villages far from this school. They do not pay tuition fees but do have to buy ‘meal tickets’ that are used to buy meals in the school dining room, the cost of which ranges from 80 to 200 per month, depending on the financial situation of students’ families.

Recent Activities
1. Children’s Day

Various people (contacts of SQR) are going to Qima Primary School on the Children’s Day. The school will have its own activities in the morning, and then the students have their own in the afternoon. One suggestion is for 4-7 people to visit the children to organise activities for them. The thing these people need help with is to buy gifts for the 704 students and to fund the delivery.

2. Jun 28th free-of-charge medical consultation

SQR’s contact, Yang, said he’ll notify the locals to come to the central village that day, and will bring a couple of nurses and doctors there. The consultation takes one or two days. Help is needed getting medicine for this trip.

SQR is waiting for the list, and will make it available to those who are willing to help out.

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Tags:Caopo, cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular diseases, Children's Day, cholelithiasis, food, gall-stones, meal tickets, medical care, medical consultation, micro-credit, NGO, pencil case, poverty, prefabricated, primary school, Qiaozhuang township, Qima township, Qingchuan, rheumatism, road, satchel, stationery, subsidy, village school, World Vision International
Posted in Childcare, Civil society, Compensation, Donation, Education, Health care, Home rebuilding, Living conditions, Local government, Micro-funding, SQR | No Comments »

20090218: Incentive fund for Qingchuan county teachers

Friday, February 27th, 2009

浙江在青川设教师奖励基金奖金每年４万2009-02-18 来源: 新华网

http://hongdou2.gxnews.com.cn/forumview.asp?td=0&topic_id=3351343&pagenum=356

Yesterday afternoon (2-17), officials of Zhejiang Department of Education came to Qingchuan County and set up an incentive fund with 10 million RMB that were donated by individuals and institutions of Zhejiang educational system. This fund is established in the name of the People Education Fund, the interest of which (about 40 thousand) will be used as a financial source of a yearly reward to 10 outstanding teachers who have been teaching in villages of Qingchuan for 10 (or more) years.
It is also known that besides the incentive fund, Zhejiang Province is making a 2-year plan on inviting 150 teachers of Qingchuan to Zhejiang to study and send 150 exceptional teachers to Qingchuan to teach. 5 professional counselors will be dispatched to Qingchuan County to set up 3 counseling offices for Qingchuan Middle School, Qingchuan Secondary School and Qingchuan Primary School respectively.

从今年起，每年有10位在青川县农村教学，且教龄在10年以上的老师，可获得4000元奖金。

昨天下午，浙江省教育厅主要负责人来到青川县，将全省教育系统捐献的100万元，以人民教育基金会的名义，设立教师奖励基金，每年的利息(约4万元)作为奖金，发给10位优秀教师。两年计划

记者从省教育厅了解到，除设立教师奖励基金外，我省还准备在两年半内邀请150名青川教师去浙江学习，派150名浙江优秀教师到青川任教。从下个月开始，我省还将派出5名具有5年以上专业心理辅导经验的教师，给青川县的高中、初中、小学各建立一个心理辅导站。

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Tags:counsellor, Department of Education, incentive fund, Qingchuan, school, teacher, Zhejiang
Posted in Education, Investment, Local government, Official news source | No Comments »

Update about SQR activities

Monday, September 8th, 2008

Information relayed to SQR volunteers from Lucy.

Libraries

Today we finally got the bookshelves for the first Library Project/SQR libraries. Tomorrow I will bring one of the libraries to Tumen Zhen and on Thursday I will bring the second one to Qingchuan. When I’m in Tumen I’ll try to arrange everything for the SQR soccer fundraiser. Also we’re scouting for another 20 schools to bring libraries to (we got a few in Qingchuan and Pingwu already). We’ll have pictures of the library delivery up on the blog soon.

Meetings meetings meetings and some more meetings

I talked to Walter, who is volunteering for the Chengdu Resource Center, last week and we found a few projects we might cooperate on. He gave me the wp of another NGO who has lots of funds for projects with orphans so hopefully I can hook them up with gu’egong (the project with half orphans from Gaochuan).

Also SQR is helping out with organizing another project in cooperation with CRC, two small dams in a village close to Jiangyou have been damaged by the quake. CRC and SQR are looking for 30 volunteers to go there and rebuild the dam. Also, they are looking for another 30 volunteers to catalogue a library in Chengdu for the affected area.

This week I’m meeting with Kim from the CIWC to discuss some volunteer opportunities for the CIWC ladies.

Saturday I met Charlie Chen from Digitas who after talking a bit seemed quite interested in our projects and will propose some donation ideas to his company.

Lynda Dyer, the author of Good Grief, was here this Friday, to share her experiences in the quake area with a very small but interested crowd. Two of the listeners might fund the next printing of Good Grief books (SQR gave away the last ones some days ago).

Lulu, a Chinese Music therapist living in Australia contacted me. She has found several music therapists who’d like to start a project in the quake area; they’d be staying in Sichuan for about a month. We talked a bit and thought it would be best to focus on training music teachers from the affected area rather then only sending the therapists out there for a month. Lulu will talk to her therapist friends and keep me up to date on their decisions.

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Tags:book, Chengdu Resource Centre, dam, Gaochuan, Goegong, library, meeting, NGO, Pingwu, Qingchuan, school, Tumenzhen
Posted in SQR Activities | No Comments »

SQR update

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

Fron Lucy at SQR central:

Small update on what’s been going on lately.

The weekend before last SQR sent out six foreign volunteer teachers (from: USA, Indonesia, Germany and Singapore). I brought four of
them up to two schools in Qingchuan on Sunday where we like the time before were warmly welcomed and invited to stay the night (what we did since the drive there takes about 5 hours). Those four volunteers are back to Chengdu by now and I’m soon getting some of their pictures to upload on our wp. All of them had a very positive experience and the principles and teachers were very satisfied as well, not to forget the kids who went completely crazy for their “laowai laoshi”.

The other two SQR volunteers went to Pengzhou (they were accompanied by Annie, a HK volunteer who has helped us out before) and are still teaching in the schools. Their calls sounded as positive as the ones from the Qingchuan bunch.

John Cafasso, a hobby photographer, contacted me some time ago. His photos are being exhibited in Portsmouth at the moment and are up for sale (all the profits will go to SQR). He is also sending Mark and me a CD with all his photos and we are free to use them for any fundraising project we have in mind (which would be the postcards).

On Thursday last week SQR held another NGO meeting (topic: health care, hygiene, etc.). The attending NGOs weren’t as numerous but the feedback was very positive and we plan to hold another meeting with the topic of reconstruction soon.

Jenny from The Library Project contacted me today. They have funding for two small libraries for two of our schools (one in Tumen and one in
Qingchuan). They will send all the books asap and I will bring them to the schools as soon as they arrive here.

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Tags:book, Donation, library, newsletter, Pengzhou, photo, Qingchuan, teacher, volunteer
Posted in Media | No Comments »

What SQR has been up to lately

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Update sent by Lucy to SQR volunteers at end of July 2008. The second part of the post features an email sent 14th July to SQR volunteers.

With the help of three volunteers we were able to almost finish our NGO Newsletter (right now Bingbing is translating all the English info texts about the different NGOs). We’ll hope to send out the first edition of the newsletter this weekend.

Also we got several huge maps of the quake area as a goodbye present from their NGO, those will be very useful for the next NGO meeting.

The Library Project picked two schools of the schools SQR recommended, for their libraries (one is in Qingchuan and one in Tumenzhen).

SQR was invited to take part in the reconstruction mission of the British Chamber of Commerce and attend meetings with Sichuan, Chengdu, Mianzhu, Qingchuan, Wenchuan, Dujiangyan and Mianyang government (mayors and the like). It was definitely interesting information about future government plans (also to pass onto other NGOs) and a lot of business-card swapping. Also I met two managers who might be interested in donating some money to SQR (nothing sure yet).

Today I met with a Dutch lady who has collected over 30,000 RMB and wants help to spend it in the earthquake area, so I’m working on a plan how to split up that kind of money and use it for the tent schools we work with. The only condition she had was that she could tag along when we deliver the supplies and take pictures.

I also met with Maki from Sim’s Guesthouse, who is working on a fabulous map of the affected area. She’s going to put the SQR logo (and some other NGOs logos) on the back of the map and also is getting some help from us in proofreading some info text on the affected area for the back of the map.

Last Friday Hong, Beate and Lynda (latter is the author of the “Good Grief” booklet, of which we brought around 1000 to different tent schools) came to Chengdu. SQR had arranged a trip to two tent schools in Jiulong for them. Bingbing took them to the schools in Jiulong, since I was still busy with the reconstruction mission, and Friday I arranged for them to tag along with Rainbow project to Luoshui. Also Mark interviewed Lynda for the SQR blog. As I chatted with Lynda and her friends later we had the idea of possibly doing a fundraising event in the beginning of September, if possible in the Bookworm. The main idea was to let Lynda read her book, get some other people to do a slideshow about the affected area (I could do that or maybe we could get a professional photographer), maybe one of our volunteer teachers to talk about his experience, do some kind of raffles or charity auction, sell lots of our postcards and calendars etc. We could also make it into a welcome back to Chengdu thing (since quite a lot of expats will be coming home or newly arriving)… It’s still a work in progress. Any suggestions and great ideas please mail to me.

Saturday I hope to go to Qingchuan to bring up two foreign volunteers and supplies to a new school and a kindergarten.

Ashley Murray got me in touch with a school in the states who would possibly like to fundraise money for us and since they’d like to get their students involved I suggested they could do some drawings and cards for the kids in the affected area, which the next foreign volunteer teachers could deliver. I’m still waiting to hear back from them.

Next Thursday we’ll have another NGO meeting with the topics healthcare/psychological help/ hygiene. We need one or two volunteers to take minutes and also translators (the translators I can find easily but somebody to take useful minutes might be harder to find) – anybody interested?

Email to SQR volunteers 14th July 2008

We gave Leo 10,000 RMB to buy basic supplies for villages around Yingxiu. He was supposed to go there tomorrow but had to delay his trip due to heavy rainfall, as soon as he goes he’ll give us the receipts for the supplies he bought with our money and will also give me some pictures from his trip.

On Friday last week I went to Tumenzhen with Wenbo, Lydia and two filming guys from Shenzhen (George and Yimin). We delivered a whiteboard, toys and teaching material for several schools and then dropped off Lydia and Wenbo at two schools to stay there as volunteer teachers. Unfortunately Lydia twisted her ankle and so had to come back to Chengdu before she actually got to start classes. She is okay and back in Beijing now.

This Thursday I went to Qingchuan to bring the first couple of hundreds of our “back to school kits” (backpack filled with “good grief booklet”, pencil case, pen, pencil, eraser, pencil sharpener, two notebooks, candy and a small toy) and two foreign teachers (James and George) and one Chinese translator to the Huangpin Primary and Middle school. By the way those schoolkits are sponsored by a Belgian University who I’m in touch with, they generously donated for educational projects. The teachers were extremely grateful for our help and gave us a warm welcome (lots of baijiu included). James will stay in Qingchuan for 2 weeks George for 1. There were no roadblocks and the streets were in pretty good condition but one way takes about 5 hours (yes it was a long day).

On Saturday I brought an American doctor, his two kids and a Chinese counsellor and a box of toys up to one of the tent schools we are in touch with (in Tumenzhen- close to Mianzhu) to stay and teach there for at least one week maybe even two. We had to register at one of the local “tent offices” which unexpectedly only took 5 minutes, the whole trip went well. Wonderfully we didn’t have to pay any driver, since I talked to Leo about how expensive our driver to Qingchuan was and so he hooked us up with a very nice volunteer and his super comfy car, who brought us there for free (even insisted on paying the toll fee) and who made me promise to call him any time we need a free lift to the affected area (I already called him on this today- bet he didn’t expect to hear from me so soon).

Yesterday a volunteer teacher, called Saima, from Beichuan called me and I met with her and another teacher the same day. They are in charge of several tent schools in Beichuan and told me that the kids have literally nothing at the moment, they especially asked for books so I let them fill out the form that the library project gave me and I’m going to visit one of the schools on Monday (one day trip with the volunteer driver from Leo). They also asked me for 250 back-to-school kits and possibly some toys (I’ll send another project proposal to the funding committee about that).

I’ve been emailing back and forth with Jenny and Tom from the library project and sent them infos about six schools that might be good locations for a library. They are very eager to get the project started so I hope to send you guys some news in the next week.

Lynda the author of “Good Grief” and Hong, her manager,have sent us almost 2000 copies of “Good Grief”, a booklet for kids that deals with the topic of how to cope with loss (translated into Chinese especially for the earthquake kids). I’ve been delivering those books to all the tent schools I’ve visited in the last week and also put one copy in each back-to-school kit. Lynda and Hong will be coming to Chengdu between July 25th and 27th. I’ve already arranged a trip to Luoshui with the Rainbow Project for them and will probably also take them to one of “our” tentschools in Jiulong or Tumen.

The “back to school kits”, have been a big success so far and we’re going to buy some more for the school in Qingchuan and Beichuan.

Rebecca has been working tirelessly on getting in touch with all the NGOs so our first NGO Newsletter will hopefully be sent around soon. So, that’s pretty much all (not enough space for all info about the many other meetings we have had).