The Community Service Project

Hello again!
The last time I wrote, my time in Kunming was coming to an end, I moved out of my homestay family's house, and began to prepare for life on the road again. Last Tuesday night, donning my human-sized backpacker's backpack, I (along with my group) boarded a 14 hour long night bus to Shuang Jiang, a small town South West of Kunming. We spent the day there, taking our last showers, shopping for food to tide us over while living in a village, and meeting with the government officials and members of the NGO that were leading our project. The governmnet made it clear that they were trying to impress us by treating us to the nicest restaurant in town for both lunch and dinner. The following morning, after a quick trip to the supermarket, we headed to the village. Getting there was interesting. First, we took a minibus for 2 hours on unpaved roads through the mountains, arriving at the township center around lunch time. We stopped there for lunch where we were served, amoung other delicious dishes, bee larvae. After lunch, we discovered that the road was not good enough for our minibus, so we loaded our bags and boxes upon boxes of bottled water into a 4-wheel drive Mitsubishi while we climbed into the back of a tractor for the remainer of the journey. For the last one hour of our trek, we stood in the back of this tractor, gripping the metal bars around us for dear life, while it bounced its way down the dirt road. It was somewhat of an adventure. We joked that we though we passed a sign that read "Welcome to Nowhere! Entering: the middle."

The natural village (there is a difference between natural villages and administrative villages) that we stayed in was pretty cool. We were in the mountains and had the most amazing views and the climate was tropical, so despite it being mid-November, the weather was warm and sunny. The people were the greatest. I don't think that any other foriegnors had ever stayed at that village. The first night, after a hard (half-day) of labor, all we wanted to do was go to sleep. The entire village gathered on our doorsteps, though, dressed in their fanciest traditional clothing and wanted us to take pictures of them. Our rooms had no doors on them, so the people filed in to shake our hands and offer us walnuts and sunflower seeds. At one point I had fallen asleep and woke up to an old woman shaking me awake. I'm not sure entirely what she wanted, but I took the hint and joined everyone else on the porch.

The following night the village put together a dance party in our honor. They decorated the basketball court with drying leaves and set up an entire sound system for us. They even brought out a TV whose only purpose I could determine was to a) show us that they owned a TV and b) play Justin Timberlake music videos. People came from all the sounding villages dressed in their traditional costumes and bearing instruments. The students performed songs for us, some in Lahu (the village's dialect), some in Chinese. When we were asked to get up and perform, Michelle suggested that we do "I'm a little tea cup" (short and stout. here is my handle, here is my spout...oh yes. That one.) In retrospect, I feel bad that that is the only bit Western culture that we exposed them to. After the performanced came the circle dancing. And oh, did we circle dance. We danced until our legs fell off and still didn't recognize the pattern in the steps. Any time one of tried to drop out of the circle for a brief rest, we were pulled back in my the enthusiastic old women. At the end of the night, they presented us with the most beautiful hand made bags. Though this goes without saying, the night was absolutely amazing.

After three days of work, we had dug all the ditches, layed all the pipe, and installed faucets in all the homes of the village. At the end of our last day, we walked around the village and turned on all of faucets to make sure water was running to each of them. We left the next day, dirty and exhausted, and satisfied with a job well done. Everyone pulled his/her weight and it felt great.