I stood at a dusty bus stop by the side of a highway conversing with a pineapple vendor and waiting for a group of volunteers to show up. When they arrived they disembarked and by the time the doors closed we realized I'd waited at the wrong bus station and we were all a few stops short of our final destination.

I waited at a dusty bus stop with a group of nine second year university students who'd given up their only free afternoon of the week to take an hour long bus ride to Beijing's far north to teach migrant children about HIV/AIDS.

We boarded the next bus heading in the right direction and rode it to the end of the line. A woman selling mangoes helped decipher a sheet of jumbled directions we'd been given to the school. The mango women said to go north and north we went. A blue sign propped up against seven long stalks of sugar cane pointed us down the alley towards the school. We wandered past a row of stores selling cement, sand and rebar; over a creek of open sewage and by a group of young men making pool tables.

We walked to the end of the alley where a small pathway opened on the left. Inside and through a small residential compound we walked through the rusted iron gates of the Hai Qing Migrant School.

I sat on a wobbly wooden chair in the schools only office watching the nine volunteers nervously pour over their notes in preparation for the classes. They giggled and asked each other questions before pairing up and marching out with the 2:30 bell to teach the students.

I paced the now quiet pathways outside the classroom peering in through broken windows as the volunteers moved through day one of PTE's curriculum. I snuck into the back of the 8th grade classroom to watch. In a lone desk set apart from the 8 ordered rows of 50 odd students a lone mentally handicapped child sat in a desk against the back wall. Up front the two volunteers were playing a guessing game where students learn HIV infection rates in China and the world. The boy had trouble speaking but seemed to hear OK and wrote down guesses of his own for me to call out. Everyone was eager to learn and the two volunteers masterfully led the class through games and activities to help the students gain a base of understanding of what HIV is.

We walked out of the school around 3:30 as a few drops of rain started to fall. Back past the men making pool tables and the creek of sewage we walked on towards the bus stop. It was a long road we'd walked to teach a couple hundred kids and it felt at the same time wonderful and hopeless. The volunteers will return for the next three Friday's to finish the course. Those that teach and those who have been taught will undoubtedly be changed for the better, but there are so many more to reach.

We stood at the bus stop eating ice cream bars and waiting for a bus back to the city. The sky continued to leak out a few raindrops. We had come a long way and reached a few hundred kids with information that will have a positive impact on their life, and that is something to be proud of. To walk so far to reach so few is in the end what it takes to make change.

We must all keep walking.