Getting to know JiaXian

Our second day at Jiaxian was the visit to the communities. JiaXian was mountainous, and the weather in the villages is cold.   

In the early morning and on our way to the communities, we dropped by a Daoist temple.  It was a nice one on top of a hill.  We brought some dried dates, one of the main products of Jiaxian.

The Daoist temple from afar...

We visited communities, talked to our partners, teachers, parents and the children. The people in the community were in awe when they saw Shanta, our colleague from Nepal because of her Nepali costume, and South Asian feature.  I, on the other hand, was again mistaken to be Chinese (but of course :-) ).

There is one reality in China , which I did not see in other countries I have visited.  In this part of the world, there is a  huge number of "left-behind" children.  These are children who had to stay school dormitories because their parents work in another place and there is nobody home to take care of them.  The school teachers or caretakers become their second parent.  And I believe, our organization's programs there is a good response to this situation.  We train the caretakers  and children about proper child care, nutrition, hygiene and about children's rights. This will enable the caretakers to take good care of the children, and knowing their rights, the children would also be able to take care of themselves.  And I commend our China colleagues for coming up with these programs- and also the school authorities and teachers for taking on the additional responsibility of being the caretakers of these children.

Children live and are cared for in these school dormitory

After the visit, we did a short debriefing about our findings together with our field office colleagues and our partners.  In the late afternoon, we traveled back to Yulin where we spent the night before we fly back to Xian.