Follow Up to Selia's presentation to a rural village

Selia got back to China late Saturday night.  She started class early Monday morning and by Wednesday had secured an opportunity to give a presentation to a group of high school students in a rural village for the following weekend.  Here is her latest email.

 

 

 

Hi, hope you are enjoying the rich life.

First of all, I would like to thank all of your support and interest of the project I am doing and responding my last email. I am sorry that I didn't get back to you right after I came back from home about how the speech went.

The high school in my home town were planning to give us (Me, Jerrie Ueberle, Pok Nanda) two hours to talk to the entire student body on campus as they don't have any meeting room that is big enough to host 3000 students. When we got there, it was raining so that we didn't get to make this happen. But the vice-president finally decided to let us give our speech in their biggest meeting room that host 200 students, which I appreciate a lot. I gave an 1 hour speech and Jerrie and Nanda did one hour. We had a very active interaction with the students. I shared about my experience about how to study English, my college life and my project Illegal Marriages. I asked them to sign my agreement sheet if they agree that there is something wrong with illegal marriages and they would like to continue school or look for other life opportunities instead of getting married. What turned out to be is 179 students out of 200 signed it!!!

It was really a lovely weekend that I finally got to meet my family after the long summer. They are so wonderful, generous and fabulous people that have given me so much that I can't appreciate more. I am proud of being my parents' daughter and fortunately, I worked hard to make my parents proud of me and I did it.

Thanks to Jerrie and Nanda, they helped me to find out some issue that has been around my village but I never thought about. There are trash everywhere in the village. We have no trash can so that everyone throws out trash. We are so used to it. One funny thing is Jerrie picked up some trash on the ground and had it in her hand for a while but finally had to put it back to the ground as there is nowhere to put it. And the place that the trash lies in could be planted beautiful flowers. We have very good soil in the village that you only need to put flower seeds into then it will give you a beautiful garden. Now I really understand why Jerrie keep saying that people are in poverty not because of no money but lack of leadership. We have lots of mosquitoes and diseases because of the trash. If we could put trash cans in the village and train the villagers to separate the trash and plant flower along the road where the trash is. What a difference it would make`!

I thought I was brave enough to put posters in my village. But now I feel shamed of myself. I am never enough to challenge the tradition that girls could talk in public and take the lead to educate my people in my home village to start to change our life to be better. We do need money to do that. But there is something more than just money.

There is long way to go and lots of challenges. Life is full of choices, changes and challenges. I chose to make a change then I have to take all the challenges. I am proud of coming from the village, being abandoned by my parents but adopted by the most wonderful parents in the world , being an advanced member of the World Academy for the Future of Women, and being a Chinese that can go anywhere in the world.