First day of school
After three months of hard work, today Daoming 4 primary school officially opened.
In the morning and since dawn, the school yard was full of many villagers. Parents brought their children to school carrying all a small school bag. All the children formed lines perfectly, while teachers called their names and gave them free school supplies.
Roll work is deceptively simple, but it was made for us very difficult because no child here knows exactly how old they are, and even their parents can only tell us an approximate age. They just said: I think it is 7 or 8 years old. I think he belongs to the year of the sheep, or monkey (according to Chinese tradition, the Chinese zodiac consists of 12 animals that correspond to 12 years). But having to use the Chinese zodiac to calculate the age of children forces us to have to count the years with fingers and even many parents do not even know what year from the zodiac their children belong to, and only you can say that the child was born when it was harvesting maize or before the harvest. Many children do not even know his name. As they lack civil registration, and have no identity, the name is not important to them. Parents simply have given them a nickname and so they are known, for example, according to the ranking of the house: his second son, the third, and so on. Now that they will go to school they know that every person has to have a name, and that even those who have no name yet parents expect us to give them one. And this has caused many difficulties, because parents want all girls names are Cuihua, which means beautiful, so beautiful, so many students names are repeated. In order to be able to distinguish each one, I have to give a new name.
This year we plan to start with a kindergarten class and a class of first grade, so we've divided the students who knew the age for the two classes. And those students who did not know his exact age, nor his parents could tell us, we have divided them by their appearance and by their height. But, in these mountains, and due to malnutrition, children 7-8 years only appear as one of 6 or 7 years. The original village has registered about 60 students, but the villagers of nearby villages, when they heard that we have built a new school, have come here also, so that in the end, the number of students is 93, far exceeding our plan. We hope that more children may come into our school and that more children have access to education. This is the objective of the aid program of St. Paul School of Macau.
