Xie Binrong [www.cnepaper.com]

A former senior engineer in the air force recently spoke to interviewers to share her unique experience of supporting education in one of the Yi ethnic villages of Liangshan Mountains, southwest China's Sichuan Province.
In 2013, Xie Binrong left the army and returned to her hometown in southwest China's Chongqing.
By chance, she saw online that volunteers were needed to support education in poverty-stricken Liangshan. As a graduate of a teachers' college, Xie wanted to help children.
Winning support from her understanding husband and daughter, after the Spring Festival in 2014, Xie had her long hair cut and flew to Liangshan to be a volunteer teacher.
At that time, Xie didn't expect to go so far on the road of volunteer teaching. She thought that she would be able to leave easily after completing a semester of service, but an invigilation experience changed her.
It was at the end of the first semester of Xie's teaching. She was exchanged to the central school as an inspector where she thought the children's academic performance should be better than that of the students in the village where she taught.
"But I saw a lot of blank spaces and twisted Chinese characters on the test papers, and some students couldn't even write their own names correctly," Xie recalled.
At that moment, Xie realized that what was most needed there was teachers.
Since then, each time the academic term started, she would leave bustling Chongqing for the mountains to be with the children. This year is the 10th semester she has spent teaching.
Over the years, she has taught in many different schools, but all are struggling.
Zhaganluo Village, where Xie teaches now, is a small mountain village with only a dozen households, with children forming the majority.
When she first arrived, she found that some sixth graders couldn't even speak a complete sentence in Mandarin, and others didn't even know double-digit addition or subtraction.
Therefore, Xie started teaching the children how to add and subtract by using their most familiar foods — corn, potatoes, walnuts and peppers — as teaching aids. She also composed songs to teach them pinyin and Chinese characters.
To her surprise, the children learned quickly. Only in one semester, they had not only learned all the pinyin, but also more than 100 Chinese characters.
In addition to teaching children literacy skills and mathematics, Xie also taught them to develop good habits.
"Only when they have a certain literacy, an open vision, and a good lifestyle, will they have the confidence to change their poor conditions and the hope for escaping poverty," Xie explained.
She gives the children toiletries and shows them how to wash their faces and hair, and brush their teeth. Slowly, the children's faces have become clean and their clothes neat and tidy.
Although life in the village is more difficult than her comfortable life in the city, Xie has endless motivation when she sees the children's progress.
What's impressed her most is the innocence of the children. When there was no vegetable to eat in the cold, some children dug a potherb for her from the ground; a child once wrote in her New Year's wishes: I hope Teacher Xie can accompany me for forever.
"Children need me, knowledge and love," says Xie, noting that she is becoming more and more inseparable from Liangshan as well as the children there.

Xie Binrong and her students [www.cnepaper.com]