Talent Shows, Chinese Style

This past week we helped host a 5-day training seminar for over 40 NGO workers from organizations throughout China. The workshops were actually some of the most impressive I've seen since I've been here, as there was a lot of role playing, hands-on observation of projects, and discussion of the fact that any NGO has to cooperate extensively with the local government from the idea phase, throughout implementation, and all the way through to project conclusion. In fact, it is impossible to carry out any poverty alleviation or rural development project without approval and oversight from the local party officials.

Last night, at the conclusion of the training seminar, there was a "talent show," which proved to be far more entertaining to me than any of the hours-long info sessions in Chinese that I attended. I honestly felt like I was at a 6 year old's birthday party. First of all, anything anyone did was basically terrible--at least 5 people went up in front of everyone, sang in an awful voice, forgot the lyrics after about 8 lines, and promptly laughed and went back to his or her seat. If the performers didn't sing, they instead did a dance which largely resembled something I might have done in a dance recital when I was 5. Second, everyone there would literally drag individuals up to the front of the room and force them to "perform," despite their protests. Once up there, however, the performer would get into it and everyone in the audience would clap and sing loudly along with them. Finally, I, of course, was made to perform because 90% of the people there had never interacted with an actual foreigner before and wanted me to do something in English. My colleague actually suggested I give them a proper, native-English-speaker rendition of the ABCs. I am not even kidding. Instead, I went up there and was like "OK, I picked a song that I think some of you may know the words to and can sing along with me." And then I sung Happy Birthday. Thus making it seem even more like a birthday party for my 4 year old nephew.

All in all, however, it was good for a laugh and did make me appreciate that Chinese people love any opportunity to get together with friends, and don't need any music, alcoholic drinks (though they love those too), or fancy venues to have a good time.

Local Dialect

Last week entailed another long trip to the countryside and many hours of meetings conducted entirely in the local Sichuan dialect--the meetings are particularly brutal for me because I understand about 15-30% of spoken Sichuan dialect, depending on how familiar I am with the subject matter at hand.  However, because DaBa (and, admittedly, just about any Chinese NGO) love the "face" and credibility they gain by having a foreigner working with them, I am unfortunately dragged along to attend every meeting.  I generally sit there absentmindedly thumbing through my pocket Chinese-English dictionary and trying to avoid lung cancer & TB while the locals furiously chain smoke and spit all over the floor as they discuss who in their village should be nominated for the aid grants we are allocating.  When the appropriate time arrives--my boss's mention of the fact that the "foreign friend" will be personally inspecting all the nominated households as an unbiased 3rd-party reviewer--I pull myself together and say that if we find that some households are above average and possess such items as a refrigerator, they will most certainly be eliminated from our list and will not receive the money that is intended for "especially impoverished" farmers.  This statement is usually followed by them telling me my Mandarin is better than theirs, inquiring how much a plane ticket to the US costs, and asking me if I've gotten used to eating Chinese food.  After the meeting finally concludes, we all sit down to a meal together in which copious amounts of warm beer and Chinese rice liquor are consumed, and I am forced to "gan bei" (the Chinese way of saying "cheers," though it literally means "dry your glass," and they really do make you finish all the beer in your mouthwash-cup-sized glass each time) with every Tom, Dick, & Harry Zhang, Li, & Wang in the village.  Fortunately 4 years of college in the US trained my liver to be able to handle about twice what the average Chinese male can, so everyone is always super impressed with the "foreign friend."

Here is a fun countryside game for you: Which person in the below picture doesn't belong?

大巴山生态与贫困问题研究会

A bit of background on why I am out here in the middle nowheresville, Sichuan province.  I came through PlaNet Finance China's internship program to work as a volunteer at an organization called DaBa Mountain Ecology and Poverty Research Center, a grassroots Chinese NGO that does poverty alleviation and community development projects ranging from clean water projects to public health education to earthquake rebuilding to microfinance.  I live and work at the organization's office in the small city of Tongjiang, and spend about 1/3 of the time out in the surrounding countryside doing field work and implementing projects.  While in the countryside, we stay at the family home of the NGO director, where his parents, brother, and sister-in-law still live.  From the nearest (very) small town to the house, it's about a 30 minute walk over a dirt road impassable to all vehicles other than motorcycles, through various terraced vegetable gardens, and along footpaths carved out from generations of local farmers' daily treks to and from the fields.   From three to six days at a time, the house serves as our base while we work to implement projects in the surrounding villages.

The majority of our projects are funded by larger domestic and international NGOs such as Heifer International, Partnerships for Community Development, and China's largest domestic poverty alleviation non-profit non-governmental organization, the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation (CFPA).  Sometimes we act to run and oversee the local implementation of projects, as is the case with Heifer International's animal husbandry projects; other times we design and run our own projects with funding that we have applied for through CFPA or private foundations.