Little Sparks That Light Up the Sky

Although they were just little sparks, they wanted to light up the sky for children in poor areas. Chinese postgraduate students, as volunteers, went to primary schools in poor counties in western China to help children’s education.

Nie Bingqing, the leader of the volunteer team, embarked on the journey of supporting education with other volunteers last summer, full of enthusiasm and hope. After a long journey through mountains and rivers, they finally arrived at a poor county primary school in Xinjiang. Opening the door of the classroom, the vision in
their hearts encountered reality. It seemed that not everything was as they thought. A series of problems followed: difficult living conditions, lack of teaching resources, low level of education and so on. With the negativity surrounding teaching volunteers on the Internet and the questioning of utilitarianism around them, they had to remind themselves of their original aspiration when they decided to support teaching and thought about the real purpose of teaching volunteers. Day and night, they still didn’t get the answers they wanted.

Over time, clues started to appear. The dependence of students made them believe that volunteers should be their guides. The enlightenment of teachers made them realize that volunteers should be devotees of local education. Actually, the answer was on the road they traveled, in the books they read, and in the things they did. All of these
made them teaching volunteers. They appeared in the work of epidemic prevention, visiting left-behind children and preparing lessons at night. Most importantly, on the podium, they taught knowledge and passed on values to the children.

For the time being, they have outlined the identity of what it means to be teaching volunteers in their hearts, and paved the way for children to go to their ideal universities. But their story isn’t over yet. They are leading more youth by devoting more effort to rural education. They go to the places where the motherland and the people need them most.

作者：刘栩均 山东大学