Peace Corps Volunteers in China – Stories
from china.drupalgardens.com/content/background , uploaded at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/98531730@N02/9556483068/
Address:
Peace Corps China
C/O Sichuan Unversity
Mailbox 278
No. 29 Wangjiang Road
Chengdu, Sichuan 610064 PRC.
Email: PcInfoChina@cn.peacecorps.gov ; Phone: Tel:86-28-8608-1871 ; Fax:86-28-8541-7152
The longer I am in China the more I realize I am not some “other” person, now a PCV in China, but very much myself. At home my family is the most important thing to me and in China my greatest challenge is to be away from them. I am lucky, however, that I have been accepted into a wonderful family that I now consider to be very much my own.
My host family and I have dinner together almost twice a week, every week. I have a Didi (little brother) and a Meimei (little sister), two relationships I never had in the U.S. as the baby of my family. When I first arrived I could see they were interested in getting to know me, but were very quiet and reluctant to talk with me. They were both also incredibly insecure. The more I got to know them, however, the more I saw how excellent their English was (or could be) and how wonderful they were at so many things. When I arrived my Meimei was preparing to enter her freshman year of college and my Didi, his last year of middle school. Though they both have families that love them deeply, they were living unhealthy lifestyles that left them constantly exhausted, and were so focused on school that they didn’t have time to enjoy it. My Didi felt the growing pressure of studying for the Zhong Kao (the high school entrance exam) and my Meimei was extraordinarily stressed about her physical image before entering her first year of college.
Before our classes began we climbed the mountain in town several times and practiced our English almost nightly. After Meimei went to school and we lacked her translation abilities my Didi and I grew close while attempting to converse in broken English and Chinese. I helped him with his English homework, talked to him about American culture as we watched American movies, and taught him ‘cool’ English songs to sing at KTV (karaoke). Over the winter months my Meimei returned from school and I could see she was exhausted and not giving her body the nutrients it needed. I encouraged our Mama to teach us how to cook more vegetable dishes so that we could reduce some of the fatty meats and excessive oil. We played badminton and ping pong together and talked about being healthy at school and how much happier we were when we were active. Every night we would have time that was “only English” (per their request) and “only Chinese” to improve both of our language abilities. Every night we also made time for my Meimei and I to study the erhu (Chinese two-stringed fiddle).
Since our time together I know that my Chinese has improved (as well as my erhu) and am sure their English has as well. My Didi is now at an excellent high school in another province, I hope still practicing his oral English, and my Meimei is following me in my English classes as a semester internship from school. They are the closest relationships I have made in China and as we learn from one another I feel very much a part of their family, both adored and loved.
Natalie Thomure, Guizhou, 2011-2013
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My students, colleagues, and host family have all been so kind and welcoming to me. Additionally, through the community-based English-Corner, my site-mate and I have made other friends in the community. One of my closest friends now is my friend Leo, who invited me to join he and his friends on a 5 day camping trip over the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Holiday. These gentlemen, though they hardly knew me, welcomed me to join their epic journey. On it, I was able to experience the warmth of the Chinese countryside.
Everywhere we went, there were people who were eager to help us, simply out of the kindness of their hearts. I was deeply affected by this unassuming generosity, and moved by the journey I was able to experience with the help of my new friends. On the last leg of the trip, we planned to camp at the bottom of a pit in a small village. The route down was steep, and the rainfall was persistent. Our guide informed us that it would not cease, so we turned back. His family was very poor. We gave them all of our food, so they cooked a meal that we shared together. That night, the family put us up in their home and kept us warm in the cool autumn evening. The following day, they slaughtered an old hen and made us a delicious soup from their farm and their livestock. They accepted nothing but our words to express our gratitude, and let us depart with a promise that we would return. I was changed by this experience, as the kindness I experienced my whole life paled in comparison to the way this family treated us.
Amanda LeClere, Guizhou, 2012-present
(both from china.drupalgardens.com/content/pcvs-stories# )
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Background
From its inception in 1993, Peace Corps China, known as the US-China Friendship Volunteers, has concentrated on teaching English. China has set as a major goal, nine years of free primary and middle school education for children in rural areas by 2010, and in the entire country by 2015. To meet economic development goals, China requires primary and middle school students to study English beginning in fourth grade in urban areas, and seventh grade in rural areas. Currently, there is a country-wide shortage of over 500,000 English teachers.
The major challenges that China faces are associated with a large population: education, housing, and medical care. In the field of education, China set goals in the Chinese Education Development and Reform Program. The success of education in China rests on the success in the rural areas where the majority of the population resides. This part of China has made a great deal of progress in institutionalizing 6-year compulsory elementary education. However, it has a long way to go in institutionalizing 9-year compulsory education. This task is chiefly the responsibility of the teachers colleges and universities. According to the China Education Association for International Exchange (Peace Corps’ host agency), these tertiary education programs are seen as efficient in providing the education needed to address the social and economic needs of China. Accordingly, the colleges have been directed to increase their enrollment and improve their programs, with the result that almost every such institution now has, or is building, a new campus to supplement the old one.
With increased school enrollments to meet the nine-year compulsory education goal, comes the problem of shortages of qualified English teachers. In addition, English teachers in rural areas have been very isolated and have had little opportunity to speak English with native speakers. Because they have studied English in school for six years, their reading and translation skills are good, but they may be self-conscious about their speaking skills. Many textbooks are also outdated. While some new texts are being introduced, there is little opportunity for current secondary English teachers in rural schools to be trained in their use. The need for English language listening and speaking skills has only recently been addressed by China.
In response to this need, China asked the Peace Corps to assist in training English teachers and other professionals. Of the approximately 100 to 120 Peace Corps Volunteers, 80% teach conversational English, written English, English literature, and Western Civilization at the Teacher Training College and University level. The remaining 20% teach English in technical schools to help prepare students to work in areas like tourism, medicine, and joint ventures with international companies. Most Volunteers teach 14 to 16 classroom hours per week. As requested by the Chinese government, Peace Corps concentrates its efforts in the provinces that come under the Western China Development Project, which includes Sichuan, Gansu, Guizhou and Chongqing Municipality.
Peace Corps addresses the needs of future and current teachers in rural areas, as well as other professionals by offering them opportunities to improve their oral and written English skills. The Chinese have traditionally followed the grammar-translation approach to English in which students master the grammatical system of the language. Peace Corps Volunteers focus, for the most part, on the communicative skills to help Chinese use English in social, academic, and business settings. Through a summer outreach strategy, this opportunity is extended to middle school teachers in schools where Volunteers are not assigned. With content-based teaching, Peace Corps volunteers have also integrated environmental, HIV/AIDS, gender equality, and diversity awareness, as well as critical thinking and problem solving skills, into their teaching and extra-curricular activities.
NOT ONLY DO I COMMUNICATE WITH FRIENDS IN MANDARIN, BUT I ALSO DEVELOP NEW SKILLS THROUGH UNFORGETTABLE EXPERIENCES.
Former Volunteer in Gansu, China
(from china.drupalgardens.com/content/background )
VSA (Voluntary Service Overseas, UK) & Peace Corps (US) cooperation with Guizhou University 贵州大学
In 1989, Guizhou Agricultural College, then a separate university, began hosting VSO teachers in the Foreign Language Department. The following year, Guizhou University began hosting foreign teachers from the AISH programme in Australia and visiting teacher programmes in both New Zealand and the University of Alabama. Simultaneously, VSO teachers from both the UK and the Netherlands were recruited to work in other Guiyang institutes of higher education including the school of fashion and the catering college, both experiencing booms concurrent with Guiyang’s emergence from relative obscurity. These teachers taught in both the undergraduate and post-graduate programmes at each institution. In 2005, eight years after GuiNong (Guizhou Agricultural College) was merged with GuiDa (Guizhou University), Guizhou University began hosting United States Peace Corps Volunteers (PCV’s). The PCVs teach at both the undergraduate and graduate level in the School of Foreign Languages.
(from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guizhou_University#VSO_and_Peace_Co…
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VSO purpose is to bring people together to share skills, build capabilities, promote international understanding and action, and change lives to make the world a fairer place for all.
VSO is an international development charity that works through volunteers living and working as equals alongside local partners. VSO has offices in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Cambodia, Kenya, the Philippines, India and China. VSO was founded in 1958 and since then over 50,000 volunteers have worked in over 140 developing countries in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Latin America.
(from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Service_Overseas )
VSO website: www.vso.org.uk/about/what-we-do
Email: info@vso.ie
What we do:
Climate change
Education
Participation and governance
Health, HIV and AIDS
Secure livelihoods
VSO’s work revolves around four development areas, linked to the priorities of our partners, international development targets and our areas of expertise. These are health, participation and governance, secure livelihoods and education. We’re committed to gender equality in all our work so that men and women have equal opportunities to realise their potential.
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The Peace Corps is a volunteer program run by the United States government. The stated mission of the Peace Corps includes three goals: providing technical assistance; helping people outside the United States to understand American culture; and helping Americans to understand the cultures of other countries. The work is generally related to social and economic development. Each program participant, a Peace Corps Volunteer, is an American citizen, typically with a college degree, who works abroad for a period of 24 months after three months of training. Volunteers work with governments, schools, non-profit organizations, non-government organizations, and entrepreneurs in education, hunger, business, information technology, agriculture, and the environment. After 24 months of service, volunteers can request an extension of service.[2]
The program was established by Executive Order 10924, issued by President John F. Kennedy on March 1, 1961, announced by televised broadcast March 2, 1961, and authorized by Congress on September 22, 1961, with passage of the Peace Corps Act (Public Law 87-293). The act declares the program’s purpose as follows:
To promote world peace and friendship through a Peace Corps, which shall make available to interested countries and areas men and women of the United States qualified for service abroad and willing to serve, under conditions of hardship if necessary, to help the peoples of such countries and areas in meeting their needs for trained manpower.
Between 1961 and 2013, over 210,000 Americans joined the Peace Corps and served in 139 countries.[1]
(from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Corps )
More than 830 Peace Corps volunteers have served in China since the program was established in 1993. Currently, 146 volunteers serve in China. Volunteers work in the area of education. Volunteers are trained and work in Mandarin Chinese.
(from www.peacecorps.gov/learn/wherepc/asia/china/ )
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The value of the Peace Corps’ China program
By Peter Hessler
POSTED: 09/17/2011 01:00:00 AM MDT WWW.DENVERPOST.COM/CI_1891223318
Rep. Mike Coffman recently called for the Obama administration to end the Peace Corps program in China, describing it as “an insult to the taxpayers of the United States.”
As a former China volunteer who now lives in Colorado, I have several criticisms of Coffman’s stance. The first is basic: Coffman did not meet with any Peace Corps staff or volunteers during his spring trip to China, despite the fact that he visited Sichuan University, where the program is headquartered. Other American lawmakers have made the effort to learn firsthand about what their constituents do as volunteers. On April 24, no fewer than ten senators, including Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, attended a briefing by Peace Corps staff and volunteers in Chengdu.
Legislators are busy; I appreciate that. But a little time makes a big difference – ask anybody who has spent two years of his or her life teaching in a remote part of China. Like many of the five hundred Americans who have served in Peace Corps China, I arrived in 1996 with no background in Chinese language, history, or culture.
Two years later, I left as a fluent speaker of Mandarin, an achievement that is common in the Peace Corps, where volunteers enjoy remarkably close contact with local communities. Most importantly, I taught English in a college that had no other foreign teachers besides the Peace Corps volunteers. My students came from the countryside, and many were the first members of their families to go beyond middle school. Often their fathers were illiterate; their grandmothers had bound feet. And yet these young people were studying English, part of China’s effort to engage with the outside world after decades of Maoist isolation.
Fifteen years later, I’m still in touch with nearly one hundred former students. Most of them teach English in rural middle schools – teacher-training has always been the main priority of the Peace Corps in China. And one of the primary goals of the Peace Corps worldwide is to promote a better understanding of Americans.
I taught my students about American culture, literature, and politics, and now they pass these lessons on to their own students. They regularly send emails with classroom questions: What’s the Tea Party? How do Americans respond to the economic downturn? How does the electoral college work? (Some questions are easier to answer than others.) And while anti-U.S. propaganda can be a problem in China, I guarantee you that things are different in classrooms that have been touched by the Peace Corps. The Chinese have a deep respect for teachers, and they appreciate what it means for a foreigner to dedicate two years to working far from home.
Another primary goal of the Peace Corps is to help Americans understand the outside world. Since the China program began in 1993, former volunteers have gone on to work for the State Department, and they’ve become foreign service officers in China and other countries.
Many work for American businesses, where their language skills are invaluable in negotiating the Chinese market. Large numbers are teachers who give their American classrooms an unusually accurate picture of China. The impact of the Peace Corps in my field, journalism, has been remarkable.
Former volunteers have become China correspondents for The New York Times, National Public Radio, Newsweek, and the New Yorker. Alumni from the program have already published six books about China, with three more coming soon. (To put this in perspective, during the same period the combined bureaus of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times produced three books.) The last time a Pulitzer Prize was awarded for China coverage, the recipient was Jake Hooker, a former Peace Corps volunteer whose exposé of counterfeit Chinese drugs resulted in significant changes in the pharmaceutical industry – changes that help protect American consumers.
So where’s the insult to the taxpayer? I’d say it comes from a legislator who wants to cut a remarkably successful program without doing even the most basic research into its value.
Peter Hessler was a Peace Corps China volunteer from 1996 to 1998. He lives in Ridgway.
Aimee Groom, on 04-November-2011 04:15
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Guizhou
Eric and Saara: There’s nothing “mamahuhu” about this pair of Peace Corp workers in Guizhou
Earlier this year, Eric Doise and Saara Raappana embarked on an adventure that would take them deep into the heart of Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces. Just a few months into their two year Peace Corp placement in Anshun and they’re already neck deep in cultural curiosity—and adjusting to becoming cultural curiosities themselves. While they are busy disseminating the English language and sharing some American culture, their blog “Horse Horse Tiger Tiger” shares what China is teaching them, with the folks back home. Here, they let us in on a little of what they’ve seen, heard and learned so far.>>>
ChinaTravel.net: First up, tell us a bit about yourselves and what brought you to China?
Eric & Saara: We came to China through the Peace Corps. Saara earned her MFA in Poetry at the University of Florida and had been a university-level teacher in the United States, as was Eric, who earned his PhD in the English Department at the University of Florida. We like traveling, teaching, and learning from and about other cultures, so the Peace Corps seemed like a perfect fit. While we didn’t pick China—where you serve is ultimately the Peace Corps’ decision, we’re excited to be in such a fast-growing, vibrant country as China.
CT.net: What was the inspiration for creating your blog?
Eric & Saara: One of the goals of the Peace Corps is to inform Americans about the culture, customs and people of the country where you serve, and our blog is just one of the ways that we’ll be able to fulfill that goal. The name came from a Chinese phrase that means “not too good, not too bad”: ma ma hoo hoo (mǎmǎhǔhǔ, 马马虎虎), which translates literally as “horse horse tiger tiger.”
CT.net: What were some of your first impressions on arriving in China? Tell us about your best experience so far.
Eric & Saara: Our first impression of China was how crowded it was, which is probably a fairly typical response. However, soon after our arrival, we moved in with a host family in Chengdu that we lived with for two months, and quickly came to appreciate Chinese hospitality. We also were, and continue to be, amazed at how rare foreigners are in most of China. Coming from America, we take for granted that seeing people of different ethnicities and races is common; but in China (especially in the smaller towns and cities), it’s rare to see a non-Chinese face. Stares from unsuspecting, well-meaning Chinese people have become the norm.
Huangguo shu waterfalls, Guizhou
Huangguoshu Falls, Anshun
CT.net: What was your best experience?
Eric & Saara: Our best experience outside of living with our host family was seeing Huangguoshuo Falls, the country’s largest waterfall. They are actually a series of falls, but due to time constraints, we were only able to see the major one. Once we entered the gate for the falls, we walked through a beautifully landscaped garden populated by stones, worn by the enormous pressure of the falls. The water at the bottom of the falls is a pristine blue. Perhaps our favorite feature of the site is that you can walk behind the fall, providing some amazing sights of the falls and lush surrounding areas
CT.net: You’re currently based in Anshun. Any tips for visitors to the city on what to see, where to go or what to eat?
Eric & Saara: Huangguoshu Falls and the Dragon Palace, which we have yet to visit, are nearby. Dog meat is not uncommon. Most restaurants that serve it have pictures of dogs on their storefront, but it’s probably a good idea to learn the Chinese characters or hànzì ( 汉字) for “dog” (gǒu, 狗) if you’re averse. If you’re looking for a nice meal, the Triumphal Hotel near the Beijing Hua Lian Square (Běijīng Huá Lián Guǎngchǎng, 北京华联广场; also home to some large dinosaur statues) has good food (the 11 and 14 buses go here). If you enjoy eating dumplings (jiǎozi, 饺子), try out Běijīng Jiǎozi Guǎn (北京饺子馆; the 11 also goes here, but I believe the sign is in hanzi only, which will make reading it difficult for most foreigners).
Anshun is also a great jumping off place for many minority towns. The surrounding area has Miao, Buyi, and Gelao minority villages that you can visit. Travel to and from Anshun is convenient as you can catch trains to Chongqing, Chengdu, Guiyang, and Kunming, among other large cities.
One note on the buses: unless there are police around, you don’t need to actually be at a bus stop to catch a bus. If you see one approaching that you wish to board, simply flag the bus down with your hand, and they will usually stop for you. However, be prepared to get on quickly as they will take off while you’re still boarding if you’re not fast enough. Taxis are also fairly inexpensive; RMB 5 will get you most places in the city, although you should make sure you’re not getting the foreigner price. If the driver uses the meter, you should get a fair price.
CT.net: What is the one thing you wish you’d known about China before arriving?
Eric & Saara: Just how different the various areas of China are from each other. This might seem obvious, but because it is still a developing country, the discrepancies between the major cities and the smaller cities can make it seem like you’re in two different countries. For instance, without a cell phone that makes international phone calls, it is all but impossible for travelers to call other countries from Anshun. In the major cities, however, international phone cards are fairly easy to come by. In other words, prepare to be flexible if you are planning on traveling across the country.
CT.net: What do you miss most from home?
Eric & Saara: Definitely the food. We like Chinese food, but I’m certain we’d pay way too much for pizza, American French fries, a hamburger, pie, etc. if we could locate it right now. Anshun has no Western food.
CT.net: What would you miss most if you were to leave tomorrow?
Eric & Saara: Our colleagues and students have been wonderful hosts, helping us get settled in and showing us around Anshun, and because we still keep in touch with our original host family in Chengdu, we’d certainly miss them. We’ve also enjoyed learning and speaking Mandarin. The Peace Corps provided us with some wonderful teachers during our training, and one of our colleagues has continued to fill that role admirably.
CT.net: What three words sum up your China experience?
Eric & Saara: Unpredictable, enjoyable, loud.
If you’ve enjoyed meeting Eric and Saara then drop by and say hi over at Horse Horse Tiger Tiger and see what’s going down in Anshun.
(from blog.chinatravel.net/living-working-studying-in-china/pea… )
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