Nong Jiagui, a deputy to the 14th National People's Congress (NPC) and a rural teacher, said he has never regretted spending four decades teaching children in a remote village in southwest China's Yunnan Province.
Nong shared his story in a group interview on Thursday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing ahead of the opening meeting of the fourth session of the 14th NPC.
In 1986, at the age of 20, he came to a primary school in Luosongdi Village, Guangnan County, a place that was once an isolated treatment center for leprosy patients.
At that time, the village didn't even have a name. Nong named it Luosongdi, which means "peanuts" in the ethnic Zhuang language, the village's main crop. By this way, the students could write down their home address without associating it with leprosy when they registered at new schools.
"The difficulties there were greater than I had imagined. The classroom was a borrowed clinic room, barely over 20 square meters. The textbooks were old books gathered from here and there. With no exam papers, I had to write the questions on the blackboard. But the hardest part came when I tried to enroll my third-grade graduates into fourth grade elsewhere at another school. No school would accept them. The children cried and said to me, 'Teacher, we still want to study. We don’t want to spend our whole lives in this nameless village. Please help us find a way'," said Nong.
Deeply touched by the students' eagerness to learn, Nong has stayed there teaching for 40 years.
In 1992, the first group of students he taught graduated from the primary school. Their scores ranged from 135 to 206, all surpassing that year's passing line of 115.
"For over 40 years, as the only teacher at the school, I have taught 12 classes with 126 children through multi-grade teaching. All of them have started working. Some people once asked me: 'How many 40-year periods does one have in a lifetime? Was it worth it to stay committed to this one school?’ My answer is yes, it was worth it. Because my students said,'If Teacher Nong had hesitated just a little and not persevered, we would never have been able to leave the village. Knowledge truly changed our destiny'," said Nong.
With support from governments at all levels and people from all walks of life, the school has now been transformed from a dilapidated, leaky building into a spacious and bright facility, and the once-isolated mountain village has also shaken off poverty, he said.
NPC deputy never regrets after 40 years of teaching in remote village
