Pictures from Anhui Service Project

Oh yeah, and here’s the fun part. These are some of the pictures from our service project. I literally have more pictures from that one week than the rest of my entire summer. So here are just a few of them.

This is where we slept. The boys had a classroom and the girls had a different classroom.

Everyone brought their own bowl and chopsticks (or spoon). We washed them throughout the week. This guy is an English major (and he also knows French!). He helped me study Chinese. He is planning to take the next year off college so that he can travel around with Roots and Shoots and do many of their projects.

This is a picture from the Opening Ceremony. We all had to introduce ourselves. In Chinese of course. And each of the volunteers had a nickname, mine was Flower (hua, 花）Easy for me to write, remember, and spell haha.

I guess those two years of education classes came in handy for something. Here I am writing the numbers on the board (in Chinese and English, be proud now).

Here is a picture of what the bags looked like that we handed out to the families. There was toothpaste, toothbrushes, towels, soap, etc in them.

This is a picture of the outfits that was handed out to the kids. So cute! It has the name of their school embroidered on the polo.

Different volunteers were assigned tasks throughout the week and so different people were assigned to prepare the food each day. One day my task was to wash the vegetables and to wash the dishes. Here is a picture of some meat and veggies getting ready to be cooked…..

Here is a picture of me and one of the volunteers from Shanghai washing the dishes.

Here is a picture of the stove at the school where we cooked the food. Some volunteers were assigned to chop the wood, other volunteers had to build the fire and keep it going all day long. So exhausting. It’s so hard for me to put in perspective that this (meaning things like the bathrooms we used, the way we made food, etc) is EVERY DAY LIFE for people. It’s not that they can just go there for a week, rough it and survive, but that for some people it’s all they know and it’s the way they live their life, day in and day out.

This is a picture of the new water filtration system that Roots and Shoots provided for the school

Me, just loooking really good. hahaha This photo was taken during the home visit part of our project. We walked throughout the mountainside village and delivered the goodie bags with hygiene products to families who have children in the school. Roots and Shoots also asked each person who received a bag to fill out a survey about their own personal hygiene habits.

This is me with one of the teachers when we were out visiting the families. The school has four teachers and a headmaster. Three of the teachers are over 60 years old and the fourth one is 30 years old. The school needs to hire another teacher but the village can’t afford it. It would cost 2,000 CNY to pay the salary of the teacher. I’m kind of tempted to take that job 

This is me pretending as if I have a clue about what’s going on, talking with one of the families.

Hanging out, outside of one of the houses. They were all very open air, I’m not sure how that works in wintertime. The school doesn’t have heat or air conditioning.

The countryside was so beautiful. It was a huge contrast to see such a rough way of life against the backdrop of beautiful creation.

In case you didn’t know, I love children (most of the time haha). And I love babies. Especially Asian babies. Check out these girls, I fell in love with them.

What a doll!

I could have held her for five days straight.

This is my teaching partner with some of the kiddos.

These two girls loved to hangout with me. They would help me clean veggies, help me practice Chinese and we could actually have conversations. They were so patient and would stick it out with me. They called me (as did all of the other monkeys) hua hua jie jie, which means Big Sister Flower. It sounds much cuter in Chinese.

All of the school kids and the volunteers and the headmaster at the end of the program.

This picture breaks my heart. That day broke my heart. As I was getting ready to leave, she came up to me and wouldn’t let go of me. She started crying. I know no words of comfort in Chinese. I just hugged her and cried a little too. I’m kind of thankful for the creeper who took this picture, at first when I saw that she had taken a picture I was offended, I felt that my meimei’s privacy had been violated. But now I have looked at that picture every day since leaving.