In the cold, remote Pamirs, a charity worker shares the warmth of her heart
Print Edition
WHILE most Chinese spend the Lunar New Year with relatives, one Minhang woman passed the February holiday in a faraway, remote region with a “family” created by her heart.
Zhou Weihong, founder of the nonprofit Shanghai Aila-Wennuan organization, traveled to the plateau of the Pamir Mountains in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of northwestern China to visit impoverished children sponsored by the three-year-old charity.
The Pamirs are a vast mountain range in Central Asia. They sprawl across the borders of Xinjiang, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan. In the eastern Pamirs of China, Kongur Tagh is the highest peak at 7,649 meters.
Three branches of the Silk Road traversed these plateaus, which have a long recorded history. About 138 BC, Zhang Qian is said to have discovered a valley in the Pamirs. The Greco-Egyptian mathematician and geography Ptolemy (90-168 AD) vaguely describes a trade route through the region. From about 600 AD, Buddhist pilgrims travelled across the Pamirs to India from China.
Though steeped in alpine grandeur and stark glaciers, the Pamirs remain largely isolated from tourism. The residents living on the grassy plateaus are poor, relying mainly on sheep herding for a living.
Trying to help some of the people there is a formidable task for Zhou’s charity, which has 25 volunteers and sponsors 33 students in the Pamirs. She and her team have visited the plateau several times.
Zhou, who works in the travel industry in Shanghai, wrote the following account of her recent Spring Festival trip to the Pamirs.
On February 7, we reached Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County, where residents are mainly Khalkhas. This year, our organization has taken on 12 new students there. The local police took us to meet nine of them. The other three were living in such a remote, inaccessible area that we had to trust the police to visit them for us.
We brought presents for all the children — candies, hats, scarves and gloves. We also gave them “red-packet money,” as is the holiday tradition of the Han people.
At the first family we visited, a mother and the son stood at the doorway, waiting to greet us. After I gave the boy gifts, his mother gave me an ethnic crocheted hat. She was disappointed that we couldn’t stay for a meal. When we were about to leave, she pressed into my hands two cushion covers that she embroidered herself. They were red with black patterns. I asked my colleagues to unobtrusively leave some extra money at the house. It wouldn’t be right to take free things from such poor people.
All the families we visited were very warm and welcoming. One young girl named Ayi was especially active. She wore a pink sweater and a bright smile when she hugged me. Then there was the little boy who gave his red-packet money to his grandmother.
Local police told us the last family we visited was the neediest of the nine. The family lived about five kilometers from the main road. The young couple had two daughters, and the younger one was handicapped.
We met the elder daughter. She was tagging along timidly behind parents. I squatted down beside her, unwrapped a piece of candy and gave it to her. The girl burst into tears of gratitude, and I was moved to tears myself.
Meeting these children always makes me emotional, stirring a deep-seated warmth in my heart. During this year’s trip, I also went to visit my “stepdaughter” Guli. She lives in a village called Datong, far from any other towns. Her family is very poor. I first saw her in a photo in a friend’s album, posing with her mother and two younger sisters. She had the look of an angel.
Datong, though poor, is awash with apricot blossoms in the spring. Locals call it “the apricot village of the snow mountains.”
I personally sponsored Guli in her studies because I believe education is the ultimate way to change the destiny of the destitute. When I first met her, I asked the girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. “A teacher,” she said. That made me very proud.
I hadn’t seen Guli for a long time and was anxious to renew our acquaintance this year. We met at the home of one of her aunts, who lived in a town seven hours from Guli’s home.
She was wearing clothes I had bought her on our last get-together. We greeted one another with a warm, long hug. We talked about her studies. She told me she came in first on the English final exam.
She wanted me to give her an English name. Since her full name is Guli Annar, I chose Anna. At that, her face brightened and she said there was a princess named Anna in the Disney movie “Frozen.” I was amazed at her knowledge of the wider world.
After visiting Guli, I went to a village called Langan to see a small embroidery workshop started by local women to earn some money.
A girl named Zaar, who was helping her mother with embroidery work, was a rare college graduate in the village. In fluent Mandarin, she told us that she finished senior high school in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and then attended university in Sichuan Province.
Zaar told me that she had received a scholarship to attend college and earned money through part-time jobs on campus. I felt pride at her determination and independence.
She said she dreamed of becoming a steward on a train, but she had to return to her hometown because her parents missed her so much. Now she is trying to apply her experience to help others in the town.
Zaar’s family moved the kitchen stove to the yard outside their house to make naan, a crusty, pancake-style bread. A neighboring family insisted on slaughtering a sheep to make dinner for us.
The hardest part was leaving. Some of the village children wailed when we bid our farewells.
The more I visit the Pamirs, the deeper the emotions I feel about the land and its people. It is my second home.
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