May-5-2010, Beijing. Videos filmed edited by Volunteer Sun Jing. Photos from Minhoo.
Starting at the end of March, every Thursday and Friday afternoons, PTE staffers along with a few PTE volunteers travel to Dongba at Chaoyang and Pingxiwangfu at Changping District respectively, to teach 2 classes of 11-14 year-olds about general health issues and HIV prevention. As an effort to reach young migrant children and teach them not only about the threats of epidemics largely concerning the adult migrant workers in China like HIV, PTE’s staffers designed and upgraded previous contents so that the 12-week classes also cover topics on general health issues such as nutrition and personal hygiene.
As always, the students are lovely. And of course, very wild… To better sustain order in class and help overcome their short attention span in the last class of the day, Xiaoyi and volunteer Wang Ying came up with an adapted version of the theme song from the popular Chinese cartoon ‘Pleasant Sheep, Big Bad Wolf’. With lyrics adroitly changed to information about HIV prevention, children had a good time and learned well.
These Health Classes taught at both locations received help from our NGO partner Compassion for Migrant Children and many dedicated university student volunteers. It takes volunteers and us at least 3 hours on the road to go to and come back from these locations to teach.
Migrant schools in Beijing are being moved out of the urban area and relocated to the outskirts of Beijing, as villages inside city, where these migrant schools are usually located, and where tens of thousands of migrant population could build or rent houses and stay for long, are being evacuated and bulldozed to make space for future residential and commercial buildings.
Mainly because of the relocation, it’s getting more difficult for NGOs and volunteer organizations to stay in touch with migrant schools and communities to give consistent help. And every year, PTE along with other NGOs has to go farther away to search for classes to teach. “Wherever they go, I will go.” says PTE staffer Xiaoyi.
2 students got full mark on a general health quiz