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From rural China to laptops and laundromats
(AP)
Updated: 2005-09-13 09:36
He Mei's home in rural China had no electricity, and no roads. When she
walked over the mountains to school at the beginning of every semester, her
older sister escorted her before dawn with a torch.
This undated photo
provided by He Mei shows her sixth grade class in rural China. Mei is in
the front row third from right. He Mei’s home had no electricity and no
roads. When she walked over the mountains to school at the beginning of
every semester, her older sister escorted her before dawn with a torch. At
the end of the year, Mei will do what few visiting Asian students do:
She’ll take her new master’s degree and go all the way home.
[AP] |
From this remote beginning, Mei has made it to a university in upstate New
York.
At the end of the year, Mei will do what few visiting Asian students do.
She'll take her new master's degree in educational leadership and go all the way
home, not to the booming urban areas that are luring back graduates, but back to
the mountains where she started.
She wants to teach the children of her Mosuo ethnic group and send them on
their long way into the world, one that moves so much faster than their own.
"Others say, 'You deserve not to go back,"' Mei says, in enthusiastic and
almost fluent English. "I say, 'My village deserves me to go back."'
Mei, 27, is one of about 450 students chosen every year from 22 countries to
join the Ford Foundation International Fellowship Program. The 10-year program
was created in 2000 with the largest grant in the foundation's history, $280
million, to bring together bright young people from the ends of the world.
Fellows can choose where they would like to study. When they've completed
their degree, the foundation encourages them to return home.
Mei, already holding an undergraduate degree from an institute for ethnic
minorities in her province, chose The College of Saint Rose because she knew of
another Chinese student there.
The program looks for people with stories like Mei's, with less privileged
backgrounds but with open minds, in the hope of giving them a voice at an
increasingly global table.
Many fellows do go home, says Keith Clemenger, director of the Beijing office
that chooses about 35 Chinese fellows a year from hundreds of applications.
But Clemenger adds, "Few have come from more remote areas than He Mei."
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