Habitat for Humanity

My program in China puts together a weeklong trip for us! There are the business student, the global context students, and the advanced Chinese students and each program has their own weeklong trip. The global context students went to Xi'an, the dances Chinese program went to Yunan, and my business program went to Chengdu in the Sichuan Province!

We left Shanghai and flew 3 hours west to Chengdu to begin our week long adventure! The first part of our weekend long trip was spending 3 days going to a Mayan village outside the city of Chengdu and do Habitat for Humanity! 


The village undertook a lot of loss when the massive earthquake hit the Sichuan Province last year and many of the villager's homes were destroyed as a result. Currently there is construction preparing the land to build new homes for those families affected, but since the physical reconstruction is not ready to begin. Besides playing with local children who lived our attention, we did a number of jobs to help the villagers and make a difference

One job we did was working with the village farmers in their vegetable gardens using hoes to turn over the soil to keep it from drying up. If the soil drying then it becomes useless for planting so you have to pull up lower layers of dirt with moisture still in it to the top, it's really hard work and the night after doing that my back was definitely sore!

Another job we did was pulling weeds in the vegetable gardens with some of the women in the village, which was fun because it gave us the opportunity to speak with some of the locals for part of the day. One interesting thing happened when pulling weeds with a local woman that made an impression on me. While we took a water break from weeding one of my friends and I sat out in the sun. The local woman came up to us instructing us (in Chinese) that we needed to hurry and get back in the greenhouse area, which is covered. We asked her why we needed to drink our water inside and she told us that it was because we were going to get tan/dark by sitting out in the sun and being dark is ugly! In china being very light skinned is considered beautiful while dark skin is frowned up and some people even act slightly racist against those with dark complexions. They even sell cremes and lotions that have whitening elements in them to make skin lighter. The reasoning behind it can be found in other countries too, like India, where dark skin is perceived I be a lower class since they are the workers who have to work all day in the sun making them dark as opposed to the wealthy who have the luxury of sitting inside all day and having light skin because the sun never has to touch them. This symbol of beauty tends to be seen in cultures where there are larger class separation or a stone caste system influence. But even though I know this is a common practice, it was still interesting to see it put in practice.

Our last job we did was transport a huge pile of bricks from one location to another to be used for construction in one of the new homes. All the bricks were originally the bricks used to build one of the villager's homes that need up being destroyed in the earthquake. Some of the bricks were salvaged from the wreckage and will be used to build that family's new home! We met the grandmother of the family who will be using the bricks to make their new home and she was so grateful for us being there and helping us! She brought us an entire grocery sack filled with fresh oranges that we could have for a snack, obviously this woman is very poor and we realized this was so much to take from her so we accepted a few oranges to take with us and said she should keep the rest for herself but she refused and insisted on us taking the oranges. It was such a sweet and very meaningful gesture of her gratitude. She also had a puppy and about 30 baby chicks at her makeshift current home and invited us over to play with the animals! She was such a sweet woman! As we're all the villagers we met. We got the chance to sit down with a family from the village and they were very friendly and, although shy, loved being able to talk to us about their lives and their families.

The village that we worked in for Habitat was gorgeous! The scenery is very mountainous and for as far as the eye can see is covered in bright yellow flowers called oil flowers. With a beautiful stream running across one side of the village and a bamboo forest going up the other side, the location was breathtaking! Every day the villagers would make us a delicious meal and we got to play games with the local children. It was a really fun way to spend the breaks each day we worked on the project. We also got the chance to hike up a path through the bamboo forest and up to the top of the mountain. We found out that the hike was a major part of the Silk Road and was one of the most well traveled routes! It was cool being able to hike alone an area that has so much of China's history surrounding it!

And by the end of the Habitat for Humanity part of our weeklong trip I go a certificate awarded to me for my work in the village! It was such a unique experience to be able to volunteer and make a difference in such a foreign place. It truly makes you appreciate what you have and humbles you when you meet the kindest people with the greatest appreciation for the time and effort you put into making their lives a little bit easier!