Les Enfants de Hong-Kong au secours de ceux du Ningxia

Un journaliste français, thibault Mayaud, sillonne le monde sur les traces de Corto Maletese, tout en écrivant des chroniques sur des initiatives humanitaires... A hongkong, il a découvert le lien qui s’est établi entre le lycée français international et la communauté de nos amis au Ningxia. Voici son article, disponible, avec photos, sur l’URL suivante : (www.cortour.com)

« Fils de césar ou fils de rien, tous les enfants sont comme le tiens ! » chantait le grand Jacques Brel. Idéal que les élèves du lycée français de Hong-Kong essayent d’appliquer en venant en aide à l’association « Enfants du Ningxia » fondée par le journaliste français Pierre Haski après avoir découvert leurs conditions de vie au travers du Journal de Ma Yan.
Ma Yan, fille de paysans pauvres de Yuwang au nord-ouest de la Chine, dans la province du Ningxia, apprend un jour que sa famille n’a plus les moyens de l’envoyer à l’école. Elle a quatorze ans, et tous ses rêves s’effondrent. Elle écrit pour crier sa révolte.
Bouleversée par ce désespoir, sa mère confie la lettre et trois carnets du journal intime de sa fille à des français de passage dans ce village du bout du monde. Parmi eux, Pierre Haski, correspondant du journal Libération en Chine... Son article de janvier 2002 crée un rapide mouvement de sympathie à l’égard de cet enfant. En l‘absence d’organisation de solidarité dans cette région, des âmes charitables choisissent d’offrir des bourses scolaires aux enfants -surtout les filles- exclus du système éducatif, à commencer bien sûr par Ma Yan, figure symbolique de ce combat.
Sur la route de l’école
Vingt bourses ont ainsi été versées moins de deux mois après la parution de l’article. Quatre cents à la rentrée 2004.? Constituée en association depuis octobre 2002, Enfants du Ningxia suscite la sympathie par le but qu’elle vise et l’indignation face à la situation qu’elle combat.
Choqués par ce qu’ils découvrent, les élèves français décident de s’engager
Professeur de chinois au Lycée Français International de Hongkong, Anne-Marie Bordas est d’autant plus sensible à la situation qu’expose un jour Pierre Haski dans son établissement qu’elle a déjà vécu en Chine dans les années 80. « Cela a été un choc de découvrir qu’un des effets des réformes économiques et de l’ouverture avait été de fragiliser l’accès à l’éducation des enfants et en particulier des filles  » dit-elle. « Que les histoires des filles mariées de force à 15 ans étaient encore d’actualité dans certaines régions de Chine, j’avais du mal à le croire, comme nous avons du mal à le croire et l’admettre dans un pays dit communiste où l’égalité de droit devrait être garantie... »
Ramassage scolaire
Aussi choqués que leur professeur, certains élèves décident en concertation avec elle d’entrer en contact avec les enfants du collège où étudiait Ma Yan. Des actions sont organisées par l’ensemble de la communauté scolaire, des professeurs aux élèves en passant par les parents, pour sensibiliser le plus de gens possible à cette cause tout en récoltant des fonds pour soutenir directement l’action d’Enfants du Ningxia. Stand sur la kermesse pour présenter l’association, soirées théâtre ou cinéma à son profit, sollicitation d’autres Français au consulat ou dans les associations de Français à l’Etranger permettent de récolter 32 000 HK$ (environ 3200 euros) en 2004.
Les élèves décident alors d’aller rendre visite à Ma Yan et ses petits camarades fin mai 2004. « Il s’agit pour moi, explique leur professeur de chinois, d’entraîner les jeunes dont nous avons la charge vers des actions solidaires et citoyennes. Nous sommes un lycée très riche, sa population n’a aucune idée de la pauvreté sinon à travers les reportages, les jeunes ont à peu près tout ce qu’ils peuvent désirer sur le plan matériel et vivent dans des conditions de confort maximales.
La plupart des élèves ne connaissent pas la Chine, et ceux qui la connaissent n’en ont vu en général que les grandes villes ou les régions très touristiques. J’avais envie qu’ ils puissent voir une autre Chine avant de quitter Hongkong [les parents de beaucoup de ces élèves y sont en effet envoyés pour une mission professionnelle de quelques années seulement] ; que "les pays du sud "dont on leur parle en cours de géographie ne reste pas un simple mot mais qu’ils touchent du doigt une réalité sur laquelle demain, peut-être, ils pourront agir. »
Nouveau voyage, nouveaux projets en perspective
A ce titre le premier voyage a semblé très bénéfique. Et pas seulement pour les jeunes hong-kongais. Pour Anne-Marie Bordas, « il y a du coté des enfants de Yuwang un réel besoin de s’ouvrir au monde, de rencontrer d’autres adolescents, cela m’a fait l’effet d’une boufée d’oxygène dans les deux sens. Cette année, j’ai donc le projet d’emmener à nouveau des élèves dans cette région et j’espère pouvoir aboutir. »
L’association que soutiennent ces élèves poursuit également divers projets pour élargir son action. Comme elle l’explique sur son site internet, http://www.enfantsduningxia.org : « Il s’est en effet révélé indispensable de proposer également des projets qui touchent collectivement les villageois, et pas seulement quelques familles choisies, car notre intervention, dans cette zone très isolée du Ningxia, a bien sûr suscité autant de satisfaction que de frustrations.(...) nous avons notamment pensé, après discussion avec les villageois, nous attaquer au problème de l’eau, l’autre grand souci des villageois après l’éducation. »
Si la première tentative de creuser un puit s’est finalement révélée inefficace, l’énergie est là pour tenter une seconde fois à la place de celui qui s’est écroulé il y a cinq ans, Des contacts ont également été pris avec d’autres associations penchées sur ce grave problème de l’eau (au Burkina Faso notamment, Et Enfants du Ningxia développe enfin aujourd’hui des projets pédagogiques de sensibilisation et d’éducation auprès des élèves français.
Tous les moyens pour lui venir en aide, et par là aux enfants défavorisés de cette région pauvre du nord de la Chine, sont donc les bienvenus.
Vous trouverez à cette fin les coordonnées bancaires de l’association sur son site
Les chèques, à l’ordre de « Enfants du Ningxia », peuvent également être envoyés au siège : Enfants du Ningxia, 45 rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, 75003 Paris.

 

www.cortour.com

 

Neither One Child’s Fight Nor a Fight for One Child

(Beijing review, 03/06/2004)

Ma Yan is not a heroine, nor a prodigy, but an ordinary schoolgirl whose dream used to be, and still is, going to school. She had dropped out from her primary school twice because of poverty. As a persevering and assiduous girl, she won sympathy and support from foreigners to continue her studies. Now, the 16-year-old is a little famous figure not only at home, but also in France and other countries, after her first book-Ma Yan’s Diary : The Daily Life of a Chinese Schoolgirl-was published in nine languages.
Her sad story with a happy ending began three years ago at her home village in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, one of the remote, poor areas of China. At the time, Ma was distraught because her parents couldn’t afford to keep her in school. She wrote down her thoughts in a series of journals, which she didn’t realize would change her life. One day in summer of 2001 Ma’s account of the struggle against hunger and poverty was given to a group of visitors from Beijing, along with a letter that Ma’s mother had received from her daughter.
One of the visitors, Pierre Haski, correspondent of the Paris newspaper Libération, was touched by the letter, in which Ma lamented that there was no money to keep her in school. “I want to go to school, mom. I don’t want to work at home. How wonderful it would be if I could stay in school forever !” the poor girl wrote. One month after reading this journal, Haski and his interpreter returned to the small village and met Ma and her parents. Ma was back at school, only because her parents borrowed money and her mother had taken a laborer’s job to pay off her loan. The visitors gave them some money to allow the 13-year-old to stay in school and pay off the loan.
After Libération published Haski’s report about the schoolgirl and her plight in January 2002, the reporter began receiving checks from readers. As a result, Haski set up the Association for the Children of Ningxia to use the donations to keep other farm girls in school. In addition, a French publishing house proposed to publish Ma’s diary, so he returned to Ningxia with a contract.
Ma and Haski, whom she calls Uncle Han, decided to give 25 percent of their royalties to the association. After her book came out in October 2002, the association’s membership grew to 300, and more donations poured in. Thanks to its publication, Ma’s family is no longer poor, and 250 other Ningxia youngsters, mostly girls, now have scholarships to continue their study.
Ma is now a junior high school student in Tongxin County, her hometown, where a so-called “Ma Yan effect” is functioning. More farmers, for example, began changing their traditional idea of treating men as superior to women, sending their daughters to schools. At the school Ma attends, the number of female students have increased from 170 to 370 in the past two years. Interestingly, a wave of journal writing is spreading among local children and teenagers. In Ma’s school, almost every student writes a diary. Some, it is reported, want to experience the same good luck as Ma.
Yes, Ma is lucky to have found foreign support. She understands that it is reporting that has changed her life. Ma said her ambition is to “study journalism at university.” Her reasons are based on her own changing circumstances and those around her. “Uncle Han and others traveled across the country and found poor children like us. I’d like to be a journalist so I, too, can help poor children,” she said.
Substantially, what is discussed here is neither one girl’s fight for her educational right, nor an international campaign for only one child. Ma knows there are still many poor children in Ningxia and other underdeveloped regions, mostly in west China, whose right to go to school is being threatened. But she may not know that now more than 100 million primary school-age children worldwide may not be sitting in class as she is-and about 60 million of those missing out are girls. And the crisis extends to another 150 million children who will never complete their primary education.
What makes these statistics alarming is the colossal numbers for a world that is entering a hi-tech era. No country can reach real sustained economic growth without achieving near universal primary education. Particularly for girls, education is related to lower infant mortality rates and higher life expectancies. What makes the statistics terrifying is that the world community is too tardy to curb the problem efficiently.
This is a vicious cycle-poverty is often the cause of dropping out of school, and the latter leads to poverty. Children of poor families are particularly apt to be dropouts. Poverty, with its attendant evils-ignorance, unemployment, drug abuse, school dropouts, violence-is the tumor of our globe. Education, in a fundamental sense, is the key to break this cycle.
It is increasingly recognized around the world that the most readily identifiable tragedy in modern life is the illiterate child. On International Children’s Day, June 1, all adults should ask themselves : What the best gift can we give to our children ? Perhaps the most meaningful thing we can do is to help the poor children in any way we can.
Ma’s case indicates that journalism can play a positive and concrete role in this endeavor. This is not only the responsibility of government and its educational departments. There should be no professional boundary in promoting education. All professions and trades are the products of education and should contribute to schooling. But the role of journalism is special. Mass media can help us know where these poor kids are and how serious their situation is. Moreover, the fourth estate and public opinion serve as a supervisory force for government’s educational policies and funding.
Her story also illustrates that there is no national boundary in supporting the young in difficult circumstances. When Ma grows up and realizes her ambition of being a journalist, we do hope she and her colleagues may broaden their horizons-do something beneficial not only for Chinese youth, but also for those poor children in countries and regions around the world.

 

 

The world came to her village

(The Daily telegraph, 10/4/2004)

Sixteen-year-old Ma Yan’s account of life in the poverty-stricken, drought-ridden north-west of China became a publishing sensation after it was shown to a visiting French journalist. Richard Spencer travelled to the depths of Ningxia to meet her.

Chinese children are told to learn from the spirit of revolutionary heroes : heroes such as Zhou Enlai, the former prime minister, or Lei Feng, a soldier of extraordinary, perhaps mythical, selflessness.
The children of Zhangjiashu, a dirt-poor village in China’s arid north-west, are learning from the spirit of Ma Yan, a 16-year-old schoolgirl.
"Ma Yan asked me why I was crying one day," writes one, Ma Dongyun. "I replied that I was crying because I could not go to school. My mother gave birth to a younger brother, who was sick. Uncle, I hope you can help me and my family."
Ma Yan is a cheerful, chubby-faced girl who three years ago was just a bright pupil in the local primary school. Then her diary was handed to a French journalist, and now she is China’s latest publishing phenomenon. You will see her face smiling shyly from book covers in British stores this summer.
The diary, originally published two years ago in Paris, sold 45,000 copies in France and has already been translated into eight languages. It comes out in English in July.
Now, her whole village is busy writing.
"My father says to us, ’I am sick. You must study hard’," writes Dongyun. "I said to my father that I would learn from Ma Yan. Uncle, please help my younger brother first ; he is good-looking. I hope you can help cure my younger brother."
Ma Yan’s tale was a truly pitiable one. Her diary was a daily record of her family’s search for money, food and water, as well as arguments with her mother and visits from her grandfather, "eyes full of tears, shirt dirtier than I had ever seen".
It also told of her struggle to continue with her education, so that her mother could "live a better life". The family lived off the income her father, Ma Dongjie, earned by picking facai, a herb that grows wild and from which he made perhaps £10-£20 a month.
At one point, while her mother did the same, there was a double income, though this meant Ma Yan was left to look after her younger brothers for days, sometimes weeks at a time. Then her mother fell sick.
It was at this point that her parents told her she would have to give up her education, so that they could afford to send her brothers to school instead. Although Communist in theory, China charges all its children fees, in this case perhaps £20 a year.
"Mum said, ’Honey, there is something I want to tell you’," her diary recorded. ’’ ’I am afraid this is your last term at school. You know we cannot afford to have three children at school’." She asked why her brothers could go to school and not her. "You are not grown up enough to understand all these things. When one day you are a mother, you will," she was told.
"This year, I cannot go to school. I’m back here, working on the farm to support my brothers. But I can imagine being back at school each time I recalled the laughter of my classmates. If only I could go."
One day in May 2001, her diary, originally started as homework for her school headmaster, was handed over to a visiting French journalist, Pierre Haski of the Left-wing newspaper Libération. What happened then transformed her life.
First came the response to the articles written by Haski, as readers began to send in donations. Then a publisher bought the diary and published it. Now she and her two brothers all have their fees paid at school. Her mother’s illness, which turned out to be an ulcer, was quickly treated. Her father has bought some sheep, a motorcycle, television and telephone.
Beneath the glitter of China’s economic growth, its skyscrapers and new, foreign-invested factories on the coast, lies the daily toil of a billion people, most of them peasants. Many have benefited from the country’s economic reforms, even if they haven’t yet acquired the signs of material success - cars, flats, mobile phones.
But there is an underclass who still live in wretched poverty, earning less than a dollar a day, unable to afford school fees and with no access to healthcare.
Many of this underclass live in the north-western provinces, such as Ningxia, an "autonomous region" many of whose residents are, like Ma Yan’s family, ethnic Chinese Muslims. Zhangjiashu is firmly in this category, and it makes a visit to the village both inspiring and unnerving. Reached by 15 miles of broken, earthen tracks - it is a four-hour walk to the secondary school Ma Yan now attends - the village presents a bleak, if striking vista.
In front of Ma Yan’s house, a sea of brown stretches to the horizon - barren, brown fields and hills, dust swirling in the wind. It has not rained here for three years, before that for five.
The village’s only colour is provided by the Red Flag flying in the primary school yard. But the locals are only too happy to point out the symbols of their new hope. On a hillside in the distance, for example, is a cave-cum-cottage of the sort still lived in by thousands of people in this part of China. It is the home of Yang Juan, another teenage girl.
She, too, has been writing. "When I reached the second year of primary school, my father wanted my sister to go, too. He said : ’For a girl, two years of school is enough.’ I was furious, because people’s beliefs here are so backward !"
Now, thanks to Ma Yan, she is also at secondary school. The money raised by Libération’s readers and then the book royalties has been used for a fund to support other children from the village, particularly girls, whose lives are now also being transformed.
Yang Juan’s letter was one of thanks to some of her French benefactors. "I don’t know how to thank you. I know the only way is to study hard..." The fund is now paying the school fees of more than 200 children, including those of every village child at the primary school.
Seven girls, including Ma Yan and Yang Juan, board at the school 15 miles away, Yuwang Middle School.
Haski’s intervention in a story he was writing about was an unusual one, and he was aware of it. In one interview, he recalled : "I found myself in a situation where I could influence reality, but I had to live with that responsibility - to Ma Yan, but also to a region that in a sense we have destabilised."
By destabilisation, I guess - after my own tour - that he means the villagers have seen a way out of their poverty and are eager to grasp it. As I passed a house, I saw two children sitting on the doorstep writing something. "They are writing letters to you," I was told.
And, as I went on my way, a series of children, and some adults, thrust letters and notes into my hand.
"In order to support my extremely poor family, I became a teacher in the primary school... My father is seriously ill, and my husband cannot work because of an injury from a car accident. My family just depends on my tiny salary to make living. I hope that you can try to help me." The author is Ma Xiaoqin. She is a teacher at the local school, and is just 17. She has a baby, aged four months.
The old, almost all illiterate, beg more directly. "Please give me money for medicine," says one old man, dropping to his knees. "My leg has been crippled since birth. You are my only hope."
The local headmaster, Hu Dengshuang, sometimes wonders what he started when he asked his children to keep diaries. It was, he admits, partly a conscious act to bring attention to their poverty, the difficulties of keeping children at school, and in particular the obstacles facing girls.
He had even gone to Beijing and had photographs taken for newspapers there about his village’s situation.
"I do feel a loss of face when journalists come to the village and people beg them for money," he said. "That’s not the character of the village at all."
He worries that people are learning the wrong example - not to go out and improve their lot, as Ma Yan did by studying, but to wait for charity to come to them.
But, he adds : "All good things come with bad things attached," and he is sure the good outweighs the bad.
The headmaster of Ma Yan’s secondary school, Ma Chenggui, is also troubled, saying he no longer wants to rely on outsiders. What fate can unexpectedly give, after all, fate can take away. The government has promised tuition fee waivers for poor pupils, he says, and 50 children are already benefiting.
As he speaks, Ma Yan herself enters his office, and suddenly it is hard not to be inspired again. She is just back from Paris, on a book tour, where she has been up the Eiffel Tower and to the Louvre, a palace unheard of or even imagined in her village.
She is matter-of-fact about her visit, and does not understand a question about whether she is intimidated by the changes to her life. "How could I not be happy ?" she asks.
And then, though it is nine o’clock in the evening, she goes back to the classroom. She is behind with her timetable now, her headmaster scolds, and senior high school exams are in the summer.
He will allow no more journalists, he adds. He is stopping a television docudrama team that wanted to spend the week shadowing her.
Night has fallen, but proof of China’s obsession with education is hard to miss as you look around. In one classroom, children are studying by candlelight. Ma Yan’s, a shabby affair of dirty concrete, has gloomy electric lighting. As she takes her place, her 60 classmates, packed tight together but eagerly following their teacher’s every word, are having an English lesson.
"You are welcome to take part in my birthday party," they chant, smiling at her, but not stopping. "Thank you. That is very kind of you."
Ma Yan has her eyes on high school, then university. "I want to study journalism," she says. "My purpose is to keep the whole world informed, to report the poverty and real life in this area."
Back in the other China, the China where children win scholarships to foreign universities, I try to discover what people feel about Ma Yan and her book. It was eventually published, to a modicum of local publicity, last September. It has sold 50,000 copies - a respectable number, but not the 300,000 the publishers had hoped for.
One young woman pointed out that, while such tales might be shocking in the West, and the simplicity of the teenager’s Chinese charming, here they are only too commonplace.
Shi Tao, the book’s editor, was somewhat more cynical. "We targeted it at parents of well-off families in cities, hoping the book might encourage them to compare the different lives of their children and those of the same age in poor areas.
"We thought they could ask their children, ’Why aren’t you studying as hard as these poor children ?’ " In fact, she said, such ambitious parents were more interested in buying the real current hit among memoirs : A Chinese Girl at Harvard.