Day 19: Meeting with Li

Before I came to China I met with a Christchurch woman who has sponsored a boy in Gansu to be able to study at school. This boy is Li, and today I had the pleasure of meeting with him. Li is 22 years old and, through the kind support of his sponsor, is studying Computing.

First Andrew and I met Li for lunch and he showed us a great restaurant where we had lamb meat which we dipped in salt and pepper before eating, cow's knee which was served in a sweet sauce, and a sweet white soup. Following that, Li took me to his school and showed me the buildings. Li said that there were around one-thousand students studying at the school, though we couldn't get into the school building itself because it was a public holiday (Mid-Autumn Festival). I did get to see inside the Dormitory Building and we sat on the field and had a good chat.
The dormitory building is six storeys high, the first three floors for boys and the upper three floors for girls. Many of the students here are between fifteen and eighteen years old, and eight people share a room. Next, Li showed me his accommodation which is just a short walk from the school. This was a sparsely furnished room with a hard bed, a desk and drawers, and little else. He had recently purchased speakers for his MP3 player so we was able to reintroduce me to Backstreet Boys and Blue, and he showed me his English-language textbooks.

It was wonderful to meet Li, and very kind of his sponser to enable him to get an education. It was interesting to see a bit of student-culture in China, and the only suprise was the amount that the group of them smoked, but otherwise they were as gentle, generous and fun-loving as you could wish.