With an Appreciating Heart, It’s No Longer a Lonely Journey
Postscript: book donation for Luokemu Elementary School, Ache Village, Gumu Township, Wenshan City, Yunnan Province By Yan, volunteer from Harbin
For many people, it may be a challenge to pronounce the name of the village correctly. It’s a tiny, quiet village hidden deep in the mountains of Yunnan. On any map showing more than just the province, we would not even be able to find that little dot signaling the village’s existence.
Yet in this tiny village, there’s the Luokemu Elementary School, with three teachers who are whole-heartedly devoted to it.
The place belongs to an autonomous prefecture for the Zhuang and Miao minorities, adjacent to Vietnam. Many of the villagers don’t even speak Chinese. The farthest they’ve ever travelled is probably to the nearby township marketplace.
Even so, the parents persist in sending their kids to school, because they’re convinced that their kids’ dreams should not be held back by the mountain ranges. There are only 49 students in the school; still, it’s a challenging job for the three teachers to make sure that the kids enjoy school, acquire more knowledge, and be exposed to the outside world, so as to keep up with their parents’ hopes.
The kids really cherish their textbooks. To them, the new pinyin and texts they get to learn every day sound even better than songs. However, they have hardly any extracurricular books to read, so they don’t know whether the ocean they read about in the textbooks is any different from the lake in the mountain. They don’t know whether the “birds made of steel that carry people and fly” need to eat corns. They don’t know how many steps people who live in skyscrapers need to climb each day and whether those steps are as hard to climb as the winding mountain trails.
What they do know is that there are many warm-hearted people outside those mountains striving to help them fulfill their dreams, just like their teachers. That book you donated may just be the right ingredient to help these kids outgrow the mountains.
June 17th is quite an ordinary day to most people, but it’s a very memorable one for the kids in Luokemu Elementary. Within one day, OCEF’s Internet Book Donation Team accomplished their goal to raise 150 books through the WeChat Book Donation Group. Not only is the speed a new record, but the optimized donation process gained support from the donors, thus greatly improving efficiency.
The enthusiasm of the donors is a great encouragement to the volunteers. Even though we can’t accompany the kids every day in their growth, the books can help them identify the best approach to make their dreams a reality and develop the courage to overcome all obstacles they may encounter. This is truly the belief of every volunteer and the motivation for their continued effort, and the only expectation behind the selfless offerings from the donors.
One day in the future, maybe one of those kids, now all grown up, will carefully pick out a book for a longing kid in a remote area, just as you did today. The selfless love from you will be carried far into the future.
第25期（2016年6月）/No. 25 (June 2016) 组稿：杨敏 翻译：何雪炀 编校：汤柏 Compiled by Catherine Yang Translated by He Xueyang Edited by Tang Bai
