Beautiful People...

For our high school Interim trip this year, I went to Mijiazhuang village, Yunnan, for a trip called YEP HEAL. YEP stands for Yunnan Education Program, a program that focuses on helping the people of Yunnan through service projects, such as water projects and eyeglass clinics, and health education. The HEAL program focuses on Health Education Advocacy and Literacy, so much of our time in Yunnan was spent promoting health knowledge. 

We stayed at a school near the village center, the only school within a two-hour walking distance. Our first two days were filled with service projects. We picked corn and sunflowers, dug a giant hole that was eventually to be turned into a latrine, and got to know locals with whom we worked. A special aspect of the HEAL program is the involvement of locals in supporting health, so we also did presentations in the evenings to village advocates who were to carry on the work when we left. The villagers—both the adults and children—were incredibly friendly and hospitable. The adults looked decades older than they truly were, aged by years of hard labor under the sun and inaccessibility to suitable medical care. The children, though, were what made the trip. We got to play with them for only three days, teaching and doing educational skits in their classrooms during school and playing countless games, teaching them the Macarana, and talking during breaks. 

I became very attached to two little girls who played with me during the week but also in the evenings even of the first two workdays; one of them is named Sun Si Qi, and before we left, she gave me a note written in Chinese characters. I asked one of my team members to translate it for me, and the meaning was something much deeper than I expected a five-year-old girl to come up with. She wrote that she loves me like a big sister, wishes to come visit me and go to college where I live, and that I touched her heart. Tears still come to my eyes when I think about the look her face as our bus pulled away, and a smile still comes when I think of her laughing. I was also touched by a group of fifth-grade girls who gave me plastic jewelry—quite valuable to them—gave me a Chinese name, Yi Fei, and talked to me for over an hour despite my broken Chinese.

After our time in the village, we drove to Kunming and visited cultural sites before returning to Shanghai the following day. My team grew very close as friends during the trip as we bonded with the kids and each other as well. The memories of this trip, the knowledge I gained about Yunnan culture, and the people I met and got to know will always be near to my heart.