At Last

Even though it had only been 24 hours, I swear I could hear the strains of Etta James in my head, when I got back to my apartment to find my luggage waiting for me. it had been a very long first day in China. I’d woken up a couple of times in the night and managed to force myself back to sleep, but at 6am, I decided to get up and take a shower. That was easier said than done, as the all in one mini-bathtub / shower cubicle wasn’t really designed for the taller than average Westerner.

I needed to post a photograph, as this bathing contraption is quite something. if you’ve ever seen one of the cheap ‘knock-off’ versions of popular electronic devices like iPhones or talents, you’ll know that they tend to go overboard with badly implemented features, and this is a perfect example of that. In order to picture this device, think about those BathFitter commercials where they ‘renew’ your bathroom by fitting a pre-moulded all-in-one ‘skin’ over your old bathtub. Okay, now you have that picture in your head, shrink the length of the bathtub by half, add a pre-moulded seat, and make the height so that anyone who is over 6 Feet tall can’t stand up. Now add in a control panel that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the DeLorean from ‘Back To The Future’ – radio, fan, blue flashing LED lights, etc., and you’re getting the picture. There are other buttons too, but It can be hard to work out their purpose when your head has to be held at a 45 degree angle to fit under the shower!

My original plan for my first full day was to have breakfast and then take a leisurely tour around the campus. Over breakfast, I bumped into a fellow Board member who is here working on her PhD over the summer. She told me that she was going to be helping with interviewing young women for the ‘World Academy for the Future of Women’ all day, and asked if I wanted to help. As the Academy is the main reason for this trip, I jumped at the chance. The World Academy is a wonderful program designed to empower young women by developing their leadership skills. in many ways, it is very similar to the Students In Action program that I ran for the last years. It has a very robust service component at its core, with the women each developing their own service projects, based on the United Nations Millenium Goals.

For those of you know me well, it will come as no surprise to learn that I was quickly hooked, as I met and got to interview these young women. Sias is a private university in Central China, and as you talk to the students, you learn that the majority come from very impoverished backgrounds, with their extended families making huge sacrifices to send them to University. I interviewed about 50 women in total, and I think that all of them were the first in their families to go to University. Given that that was the same for my brothers and me, their stories really resonated with me.

in a country of 1.4 billion people, I don’t know what would constitute a statistically significant sample size, but I have to say that there has been a refreshing innocence and naivety to all the students that I’ve met so far. Without exception, they have been polite, respectful, earnest and you can see visibly see their hunger for knowledge and desire to better themselves.

The World Academy is an extracurricular program,consisting of 10 hours a week of lectures, study groups, tutorials and project work. As such, it primarily takes place in the evening and at weekends, so it is quite a commitment. It is also all in English, so while that it is very attractive to the students who want to improve their language skills,it really stretches them.

in preparing for the interview, the young women had submitted a comprehensive application form, where they had to explain why the program was important to them, and why they should be selected. I quickly learned that some of the young women’s English wasn’t as good as others, but in their quest to be accepted into the program, they’d compensated for that by learning their essay answers parrot fashion, hoping to recognize relevant ‘trigger words’ in the interview questions. It really through me at first, as the young woman I was interviewing had me really convinced that she had pretty good English. It was only when I asked a simple ‘off the cuff’ question about where she grew up, and she went into a very long and detailed explanation of why she thought she’d make a good leader, that it all clicked. I did have to hand it to her, though; if she was confused by my question, she didn’t show it. It was clear that joining the Academy was incredibly important to her, and she was sticking to the script.

After interviewing the young women, I went to meet with a group of young men who had pushed hard for a way to be part of the World Academy. In hearing about their determination, it was heartening to hear the story of the young man that made it all happen. He’d talked about how his older sister was the smarter one in his family, but how she’d had to take a job so that the family had the money to send him to university. Because of that experience, he now feels that he has an obligation to help level the playing field for women. Meeting and hearing these young men, who make up the inaugural Men’s Academy for the Future of Women was very powerful. I’m not sure how, given the very traditional and male-dominated environment that they’ve grown up in, that they have been able to evolve their thinking about equality and opportunity for women,but it was incredibly heartening to witness.

After the meeting, I came back to my apartment, did a quick happy dance on seeing my luggage, and just collapsed into bed. As I surrendered to sleep, I found myself reflecting bAck on the day. in the West, the picture that we have of China is at the macro level. When you’re talking about such larger numbers, either their population or the size of their trade surplus with the rest of the world, all of the detail gets lost. As I sit here in Central China, it feels like I’ve taken a magnifying glass to a beautiful oil painting, and I can see all of this intricate detail that is usually missed by the naked eye.

I feel very blessed and fortunate to be here, and in my own way, I feel just like the students I’ve met so far. I have an insatiable thirst to know more.