No child should be left behind

By Jason Lee
0 Comment(s)Print E-mail China.org.cn, June 16, 2016
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On the west coast of Hainan Island is a small town called Erman. Most of the 29,900 residents live with less than US$1.5 a day. More than half of the population earns their living as migrant workers or fishermen, who work far away from home and have to leave their children in the boarding schools in Erman.

 

According to the education bureau of Zhanzhou city, to which Erman belongs, the city has nearly 8,000 left-behind children.

An 11-year-old boy surnamed Lin is one of them. He likes to sit under a tree near his the playground at Bijia Primary School where he lives and studies, looking at the sky in the direction of Sanya, a city in the south of Hainan where his parents work. In fact, he has nowhere to go, except the playground.

Thin and dark-skinned, Lin looks like a 6-year-old, much smaller in size than how he should appear at his age. "My father said he will come back in 16 days," he murmurs. "But he will take part in the lion dancing and my mom will continue to work in Sanya."

On a hot afternoon in March, when Lin was alone under a tree, three of his classmates named Hua, Jun and Zhi came to him. They talked about a plan to trick their fathers into coming back to pay for their school uniform fees. But all their fathers wired the money to them later, and did not come back.

The school has a very simple dining hall. It is actually a kitchen with a cooking bench in the center. The Headmaster Xue Weibang's wife raises more than 10 chickens to treat guests occasionally. "We do not have that much money to treat them with feasts. We just try the best to save every penny," she said. "We just call it a dining hall. In fact, the students eat under trees or in their dorms when it rains."

The headmaster's wife is in charge of cooking as well as washing the children's clothes in the kindergarten. She gets up at 4 a.m. and finishes her work at about 8 p.m.

The dishes are not bad for the day, featuring chicken, vegetables, wax gourd soup and rice. The pupils can eat as much as they like.

Lin decides to take his lunch to the dorm and eat it there. But he is too hungry and starts eating his lunch on the way. Reaching his dorm, Lin has almost finished half of his lunch.

He borrowed a mobile phone from a reporter interviewing the school, and called his father. They talked in local accents. But Lin’s facial expression turns from excitement to disappointment in the end.

His father said he cannot come back because he must earn the money that is needed to rebuild their home, specifically the leaky roof. The man drives a passenger tricycle, and his wife works as a gardener in Sanya, a tourist resort 360 kilometers away from Zhanzhou.

Jun's brother Shang is a fifth-grader, but already a heavy smoker. Jun and Shang live in their shabby home not far from school. They raise some chickens and a dog.

"My parents come back to see us once a month, or every two months sometimes. They do not know I smoke at all. I started to try I for fun at first, as many left-behind children did in the village," Shang said. Jun and Shang's parents earn their living as sugarcane cutters.

According the Erman town government, sugarcane is a main revenue source to local residents. A ton of sugarcane is worth of 450 yuan (US$69), and the profit is only 200 yuan, after the costs of chemical fertilizer and human labor are deducted.

Xue, headmaster of the school, said he invited a number of people to build the bungalow dorm, which can hold 12 people. The back window of the dorm is broken. The pupils often throw their left-over food through it to the outside. The disgusting smell of rotten food permeates the whole room.

"Among the 220 pupils, 191 are left-behind children, More than 40 of them do not go home during the Spring Festival, " said the 48-year-old Xue. "I just do my best to help them."

Since Xue took the job at the school eight years ago, he and his wife have never been back home to celebrate the annual Spring Festival. "I can only have a rest when I am sick, " said Xue, wearing a bitter grin on his face. He gets up at 2 am every night to check if the children are asleep.

Wang Binliang, a teacher at the school said, "What the headmaster wants most is a standard dining hall and school clinic. Once a child gets sick, we have to send him or her to the town. It is very inconvenient, because the headmaster only has a motorcycle. "

Xu Ruoping, vice-head of the Zhanzhou education bureau, said the city government is preparing to spend three million yuan building a multifunctional classroom, a comprehensive building that has classrooms, dorms and a library, and a dining hall for the school. He said the project will start in the second half of this year, and that "No child should be left behind."

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