The Disparity of Change

Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

I believe you can learn a lot about a place from the journey to get there. I've never traveled to a place where this was as true as it is for Zhuhe Township, China.

I recently visited China to witness Mercy Corps' work through local partners, to interview those benefiting from our humanitarian programs, and to get as much of a sense of the country and its myriad cultures as one can in a three-week time span. Soon after arriving in Beijing, China's capital, I began the nearly two-day trek to reach Zhuhe Township, the site of Mercy Corps' Giving Leadership Opportunities to Young Women (GLOW) project.

Zhuhe Township, in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture of southern China's Sichuan Province, is as isolated a place as I've ever been. Even with China's efficient airline network and vehicles at our disposal, the journey there was nothing short of exhausting. And the change of scenery — not to mention the shift in culture — was dizzying.

From Beijing — a gargantuan city of nearly 17 million people with a prolific skyline that swallows the horizon in all directions — we flew three hours to Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan Province. While still an enormous city of 11 million people, Chengdu seemed much smaller and less imposing than Beijing.

Our next flight lasted about an hour and took us to Xichang, the capital of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture. Xichang is a sprawling and bustling city, yet more subdued and slower-paced than Chengdu. Even with a population of more than 125,000 people, Xichang seems quaint when compared with the massiveness of Beijing: here there are no soaring skyscrapers to block views of the surrounding mountains.

The next leg of our journey took us into those mountains. Within minutes, city life was replaced by the pastoral peace of rice paddies and unassuming rural households. As our car climbed higher in altitude, we passed through fewer villages. Scaling still higher, houses disappeared altogether as we wound above the tree line.

Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Several thousand feet above sea level in the world's most populous country, we were alone. There were no people or buildings anywhere.

This was a different China.

From Xichang, we drove for three hours to Zhaojue, the area's county seat. Here was Xichang in miniature, a place so far removed from Beijing or Chengdu that it seemed like a different country. Shops displayed the unique alphabet of the region's Yi people alongside ubiquitous Chinese characters. The sound of conversations in the air overwhelmed the din of passing cars and trucks.

But our destination was farther still, over another set of steep hills.

Low-slung apartment blocks gave way to thatched-roof mud houses. Tiny street-side market stalls replaced trinket-laden shop windows. Instead of the determined gaze of quick-moving city dwellers I saw weary sadness, even behind the smiles of friendly-eyed villagers.

Everything changed when we reached Zhuhe Township. It is a place hundreds of miles, and perhaps hundreds of years, away from China's rapidly growing, ultramodern cities. Predominated by the ancient Yi culture and deeply rooted in traditional agriculture, Zhuhe Township somehow seems left behind. Unfortunately, heroin addiction and the resulting spread of HIV/AIDS are hobbling the place — and its people — to limp forward at a much slower pace as other parts of the country surge ahead.

Here, in a part of China that few visitors — whether Western or even Asian — have gazed, was the end of our journey and the beginning of one of Mercy Corps' most critical tasks.

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Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Professor Hou Yuangao has spent his career studying southwest China’s rich cultures. Today, alongside Mercy Corps, he’s helping save and preserve his own endangered ethnic group.

Hou’s boyhood home is in Meigu County, an impoverished part of Sichuan Province where farmers’ hard work only brings them an average of $120 per year. This region, called the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, is home to one of China’s poorest minorities: the Yi. More than seven million Yi people live in China, mostly in isolated and deforested mountainous regions of southwestern China.

As a young man, Hou left Sichuan Province to attend the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing, China’s capital. He chose history as his major course of study and, upon graduation, stayed on as a teaching assistant in the university’s Department of Ethnology. He began in-depth study of the very cultures he’d grown up around — including his own — at a time when that kind of research was just getting resurrected in China.

“Anthropology stopped for a very long time in the past,” Hou said. “When I began this work, there were fewer than a thousand anthropologists in all of China.”

Soon, Hou joined the university’s permanent teaching staff as Professor of Ethnology and Applied Anthropology, focusing on southwest China. His courses — and research — centered on minority population issues including poverty, women’s and children’s issues, cultural preservation, and migrants.

He frequently traveled from Beijing to Sichuan for his work. On each visit, he saw the quality of life decreasing in villages. Populations were sinking deeper into poverty, and families were losing the means to support themselves. Perhaps most alarmingly, once able-bodied young men and women were withering and dying.

In 2002, Hou’s work shifted from research to action.

Getting people to pay attention

The Yi Center employs young Yi actresses, actors and singers to present cultural plays that shed light on critical social issues. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

On each successive visit to Sichuan Province’s Yi communities, Hou witnessed a growing drug problem. The area’s Yi people were migrating in large numbers to more prosperous areas of China, such as Yunnan Province, in search of jobs. When they returned home — often without finding work — many came back addicted to heroin.

Along with drug habits that were previously unknown to Yi people, these migrants brought back HIV/AIDS. The communities — and culture — were ill equipped to deal with these unwelcome challenges.

Hou convened a group of fellow professors, students and others — called the Research Center for Western China Development — to address these challenges. Initially, their main goal was to get both local populations and government officials to pay attention. But awareness was only one part of the solution, and the crisis in Yi communities was quickly spiraling out of control.

“Drug usage and HIV/AIDS was affecting everyone in villages, to some degree,” Hou said. “I feared that, without intervention, these things would decimate the Yi people and destroy the area and the culture as we know it.”

So, once again, Hou came to the aid of his people.

Change begins at home

Hou realized that solutions for the Yi people must come from within their own communities, not from a working group far away in Beijing. As a result, he founded the Liangshan Norsu Women and Children’s Development Center in 2005. The center is headquartered in Xichang, the capital of the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, within reach of hundreds of Yi villages.

The center was created — with a generous grant from the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing — to support education, sustainable income and life skills training for young Yi people, especially females. The program began with one hundred Yi youth.

Those youth soon began to effect change for their communities: they became peer educators to fellow students in their home villages. They put on plays in local markets that raised awareness about the dangers of drug use. They got people thinking — and talking — about the devastation of HIV/AIDS.

“People just used to rely on the government for everything, but now there is a new power,” Hou said. “We have participation from our youth, and great support from the local population.”

The government of China began playing a critical role as well: it is heavily investing in infrastructure, such as a new highway that connects Yi communities to larger cities, to help ensure that rural families — and especially ethnic minorities — aren’t left behind as the country’s economic miracle unfolds.

A change was finally happening in Yi communities. And people took notice.

Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

A shining partnership

The center’s success was recognized by the Chinese government, as well as by many international non-governmental organizations, including Mercy Corps. In 2006, with support from the Nike Foundation, Mercy Corps partnered with Hou’s Liangshan Norsu center to create the Giving Leadership Opportunities to Young Women program (Project GLOW).

Project GLOW reaches adolescent girls aged 10 to 18 with activities that focus on education, economic opportunities and health. Mercy Corps has helped the center open and expand a school in Zhuhe Township, a particularly impoverished town in the prefecture. Currently, 87 girls live at the school. Many of them are orphans or have lost a parent to drugs or HIV/AIDS.

Eight teachers, mostly from the Yi ethnic group, give lessons and activities on subjects such as Chinese Mandarin, math, Yi language, agriculture, sports, and physical education. Working at the school benefits the teachers as well: at the end of the year, they will receive valuable certification.

One of the center’s other benefits — which becomes abundantly clear by watching the girls interacting and laughing with each other — is the camaraderie they share. At a young age, they’re building friendships and a community of kindred spirits that will benefit their ethnic group for years to come.

There is still plenty of work to be done, Hou acknowledges. Dozens of Yi villages still languish in the conditions he sought to address when he first came home. Yet, even as Mercy Corps plans with Hou to expand enrollment to two hundred students, he’s already seeing a large portion of his vision come to fruition.

“These are my people, Yi people, learning about their own challenges,” Hou said. “They are taking responsibility and then taking action.”

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Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

Guo Xin seemed destined for her job.

Before becoming a program officer for Mercy Corps, she did part-time work for local non-governmental organizations while a student in medical school. That work made her interested in a longer-term career in humanitarian work. Her chance came when one of her friends forwarded a Mercy Corps job announcement to her.

“I was surprised to find an international organization devoted to bettering the lives of poor Chinese families,” Guo Xin said. “And when I visited the website to find out more about the job, I was deeply impressed with the ‘Be the change’ idea.”

During her interview, her appreciation of Mercy Corps — and sense of serendipity — grew even more.

“I found out that Project GLOW was going to be implemented in Sichuan Province, which is my home as well,” she said.

Today, Guo Xin regularly travels from Mercy Corps’ Beijing office to the Project GLOW site in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province. While there, she provides training to the local staff, monitors and evaluates the program’s progress, and just spends time interacting with the young women whom the project serves.

She recently took time to answer a few questions.

What is the objective of the Giving Leadership Opportunities to Young Women project (Project GLOW)?

Mercy Corps helped start Project GLOW to empower Yi ethnic adolescent youth, especially girls, in southwest China to improve their ability to earn a living wage, and to better their social, educational and health status.

Guo Xin walks along the road to Zhuhe Township with 12-year-old Erji Zini, a student enrolled in Project GLOW activities. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

When was the first time you visited Zhuhe Township for work on the project, and what were your initial impressions of the people there and of the area itself?

I first traveled to Zhuhe Township on January 22, 2007, in the midst of winter in the mountains. I immediately noticed that people there were very poor, wearing often-ragged clothing. Even in the winter, some of them didn’t have shoes on their feet. There were no trees on the surrounding mountains, which made the place even more desolate.

What are the biggest challenges for young women growing up in the area?

Young Yi women have very little chance to get an education at all and, as a result, have little chance to make important life decisions by themselves.

How is Mercy Corps helping young Yi women meet those challenges?

We provide them with literacy, health, life skills, and vocational training so that they can prepare themselves well for either migrating to other cities for work or staying to find good jobs and earn money locally. We also deliver HIV/AIDS and drug use prevention information to help them survive the epidemic disaster of AIDS, which is caused in large part by shared needles during heroin use among the local population

What do the young women learn at the training center?

The curriculum includes Chinese Mandarin, math, Yi language, health and life skills, agriculture skills, sports and physical education, recreational activities, and lectures about job skills.

How many young women are there now? How many more will be enrolled in the near future? How many teachers are there?

We have 87 girls now in the training center, and 11 girls are also doing vocational work in addition to their schooling. We plan to enroll another hundred students by the end of this year. There are currently eight teachers at the training center.

Is there a particularly heartwarming story you'd like to share about time you spent at the training center?

My best memory so far is dancing with our girls after dinner to make us warmer in winter. I could feel so much friendship and warmth. They are very happy at the training center, especially when they sing and dance. Our girls are really very bright; they just lack opportunities to make their potentialities into reality.

What are some additional things that Mercy Corps would like to do at the training center — and in the Liangshan area — in the near future?

We would like to help girls live and learn in a better-equipped training center, and to give them even stronger support to change their lives. We also want to share and replicate the successful experiences we’ve had with other organizations and schools throughout the Liangshan Yi region.

Is there a particular quote or phrase that describes your work with Project GLOW?

Work in Zhuhe Township and the surrounding areas is not easy, but it’s always exciting.

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