The prisoners of ignorance

IT WAS A SOMBRE group of Hong Kong students who met up for breakfast at 7.15am in a hotel up in the mountains in western China recently. They were tired from a gruelling trip on the overnight bus from Kunming to Lijiang the previous day and frustrated that the carefully laid plans for their annual China week seemed to be going horribly wrong. The 17 students from Li Po Chun United World College, Ma On Shan, and their principal Stephen Codrington, had spent the previous afternoon and evening carrying out a damage limitation exercise. It was also cold, especially for those acclimatised to Hong Kong weather. And it was about to get a lot colder. For the group was about set off further up the east Himalayans to about 3,000 metres to spend a couple of days in a lepers' village. What Dr Codrington and his students didn't know as they ate their breakfast that morning at the Yi Xiang Hotel, Qiaotou, was that things were about to get a lot worse. It had all started so well. Plans for the international college's China week were always made well in advance and Dr Codrington and the only second-year student in the group, Chris Sykes, 18, from Canada, had been to the lepers' village, Ma Chan, the year before, where they helped construct a toilet block. The plan was to lead the group of 16 freshers on a new campaign to whitewash the inside of the villagers' houses and get to work on the details of an already advanced plan to provide a teacher for the village children. The college's Global Culture Action Team, headed by Chris, had spent the best part of a year exploring the practicalities of sourcing and funding someone to overcome the phobia about leprosy. Central to the students' plans were their go-betweens, Australian Margo Carter and her Nepali husband Sean who had worked with Dr Codrington the previous year. Ms Carter runs the Gorged Leaping Tiger Cafe in Qiaotou, about two hours' drive from Lijiang, and was to provide accommodation, arrange transport, source DIY supplies, prepare food and liaise with the village over the painting. And that is where the problems started. When the group arrived in Qiaotou earlier this month, they found Ms Carter and her husband had shut up shop and disappeared. There had been an accident in or near the cafe and the victim had to be taken to hospital in Lijiang. All attempts to contact the couple had failed, which meant no accommodation, transport, food, paint, tools or village liaison. That afternoon had been a mad scramble to rearrange the tight budget to cover hotel and food bills, buy paint and other supplies and, most difficult of all, find drivers at short notice who were prepared to go anywhere near, let alone into, the lepers' village. Three taxi van drivers agreed to do the job, except that they hadn't been told where they were going. So the students' first job after breakfast on Wednesday was to explain they were headed for a lepers' village. Two of the drivers wanted to pull out but were persuaded to make the trip by a combination of extra cash and an agreement they could drop the group 100 metres from the village. Two hours later, the students arrived - to some disconcerting news. Although the villagers had been told the group was arriving, they weren't sure when and said their pressing need was for roof repairs and not a cosmetic paint job. And to make matters worse, the year-long plan for a teacher was about to collapse. The children had been rescued by Project Grace in Kunming and the Catholic charity Caritas in Macau and sent off to private boarding schools in Kunming and Lufeng. There had been a communication breakdown. Nothing immediate could be done about the roof but the villagers were eventually persuaded that they did need their walls painted after all. The students soon found that it was a lot harder than they bargained for though, with layers of soot on the walls accumulated over years from wood burning stoves without ventilation. It took hours of scraping to get the black dust off only to discover that the residue reacted with the paint, turning it pink. In addition, there were no face masks and the students found themselves having to brave plumes of soot and dust. It soon became clear that this was a two-day job and a planned hike through the beautiful scenery of Leaping Tiger Gorge would have to be delayed. In addition, the group discovered that the toilet block built the previous year had been plumbed into a spring that worked only in the rainy season, leaving it high and dry the rest of the year. It was at this point, though, that things started to pick up. Once the villagers saw their homes brightening up they began to show their appreciation and were even mucking in by the end of the day. It was a tired group of students who made it down the mountain that night for a debrief over dinner. Peter Akkies, 17, from the Netherlands, was upbeat about the fact that improvisation had saved the day but had found the DIY challenging. 'The painting was pretty tough at first because we had to mix all the paint which proved to be problematic, it was either too liquid or not liquid enough,' he said. Diego Terrero, 18, from Venezuela, was troubled by some of the crippling effects of leprosy. Even though the villagers had been cured, they were left with permanent injuries. 'I saw an old lady without a leg and found that quite shocking,' he said. Angad Pheheja, 16, from India, was less than impressed with hygiene in the village. 'I saw buckets of food that looked quite stale and there was meat that looked like it was there for decades,' he said. Hongkongers Brian Lo Ka-chung and Felix Lau Ka-hei, both 17, were impressed that the taxi drivers had gone all the way to the village and one even helped with translation. 'On the way back they told us that taking us there had broken their stereotype because they saw that the lepers were not that horrible. They said it wasn't that scary anymore,' Brian said. Felix added: 'Our taxi driver told us they were so impressed with what we did and that we were willing to get involved and not afraid of getting dirty and making contact with the villagers.' The villagers' reaction to the painting had made Mike Schoenleber's day. Mike, 17, from Missouri, US, said: 'When I first got to the village and saw all the problems we were facing, I didn't really feel that we were accomplishing anything, almost in fact that we were hurting the village, but about midday one of the women whose rooms we were fixing up walked into the room and her face lit up. She got a big smile on her face and just put her thumb up in the air and started saying hao, hao [good, good] and all of us got so excited and our spirits totally turned around.' Chris Sykes was philosophical that the plan for a teacher had come to nothing. 'In a sense it is disappointing that this project we've been working on isn't really one that's needed or a necessity. But in another way, it should be something that we're happy about, because what we were trying to do has already been accomplished and well beyond anything we could have ever imagined. The children have been sent to a private school in Kunming which is way better than a teacher being sent to the village,' he said. But it was Dr Codrington who summed up the real lesson of the day. 'We've all learned a lot of useful lessons about improvisation and about the need to adapt and rise to the challenges,' he said. 'I really hope that one of the lessons you learn from this China week, that you carry through the rest of your lives, is the skill of being able to adapt and improvise.' And the real achievement had nothing to do with DIY, but rather with changing attitudes. 'Lepers in China are the most outcast group in society and I think what we're doing in a broader educational sense is to overcome the stereotypes that people have,' he said.'They've all been cured and all have exit certificates. They could leave if they wanted to. So we asked them the obvious question: Why don't you want them to leave? It was partly because of poverty but the big thing was the prejudice. 'Because of their physical disfigurement they know they'll be outcasts in society and that even includes their own families. So that's the real thing that traps them there - the ignorance of people.'