Winter in the morning and summer in the afternoon

The weather here has taken a cold snap and it's now around minus 2 at night. I have made all the necessary Chinese purchases - warm pyjamas, wrist to ankle thermal underwear and a long red padded down coat. The strange thing is that by the afternoon it can hit the 20s and it's t-shirt weather again. As my interpreter says, "For you it's winter in the morning and summer in the afternoon." It is indeed!
At the start of this week, I went on an interesting day trip round the rural north of the county to visit half a dozen schools which had "special features." What this means is that the government has given the school a substantial amount of money and they had often chosen to spend it on prettying up the exterior of the school with fountains, ponds, gardens etc. Nothing wrong with that per se, but then you walk into a dirty, bare cramped classroom with 80 kids sitting on broken stools and can't help wanting to tell the proud headmaster that the money could have been better spent. I managed to restrain myself though, and waited till I got back to school to tactfully put my views to my own school.



View of front of one of the "special feature" schools





Not all of the schools spent the cash on pure decoration. One school had built a library and one had built a "psychological room" to help students with emotional difficulties. Great idea! The problem was that these rooms were beautiful and were kept beautiful by not letting any students into them. So far, I have seen quite a few science labs, computer suites, libraries, sports areas etc and NOT ONCE have I ever seen any children using them.
"psychological room" - unused but beautiful!


A few schools however, put the money directly into benefiting the kids. I visited a very remote school (two hours along a dusty track up a mountain) for children of migrant workers. This means the parents have gone to the city to find work and have left the children alone so the school puts them up in dorms and feeds and educates them. I have seen some pretty gruesome dorms already and as the migrant school is for the poorest children, I expected the worst. However, the school leaders had spent the money on very practical things - the dorms and dining hall - and, for China, these were fantastic.

The dorms of migrant workers children. It looks unlived in, I know, but that's just instilling in the kids a sense of Chinese discipline - the
kids sleep two to a bed as well.




















Me and two of the migrant workers children. They were very shy as most of them had never left the mountains before and were probably wondering why a strange white woman was wandering around their school...

The reason that we were visiting all these schools is because my school, Longju Middle School has also been given money and the headmaster, Mr Yao, wants to see how best to spend it. Let's hope I can subtly influence him less for show and more towards the practical!