On the Road Again

One of the strongest and dearest memories of my time in Fujian was the wealth of international literature at my disposal. The director of the China Studies Program had bookshelves stocked full of titles like "River Town," "The Poisonwood Bible," and "The Ugly American," books that have since helped me better develop my worldview.

The other 10 students in the program were some of the most veracious readers I have known, and soon we had developed a sort of unofficial book club among us all. Toward the end of the semester we spent about three weeks traveling the country of China, sleeping on overnight trains and stopping along the way to take in the beautiful countryside. And all the while we passed around our books to one another, utilizing our time the best we knew how as we spent endless hours in train stations all across the country.

I strongly believe that a person reads more intensely when traveling, and I hadn't realized how much I missed doing just that until last weekend when I got to revisit this cherished activity. 

Some girls from work invited me to spend May holiday with them in the ancient river city of FengHuang, which is located about six hours away from Guiyang. Besides the wonderful company I found in these girls, I could not have been more thrilled to spend a solid 12 hours reading and soaking up the Chinese scenery outside my window. 

I had been purposefully saving Muhammad Yunus's "Banker to the Poor," for a special occasion, so I tucked the book in my overnight bag, hoping it would serve as a sufficient companion for the long drive. I would soon find that this book was the perfect read for my short trip to Hunan province, and the intwining of Yunus's stories and the images  I saw outside the foggy bus windows provided some really interesting food for thought. 

Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work as founder of the Grameen bank, an institution that provides micro-loans to the world's poor. This man has for sometime been one of my heros, as his work has gained wild success across the globe and micro-finance has given what Jeremiah would call a "future and a hope" to people who have little to nothing of which they can call their own.

I heard an interesting commentary on NPR several days before leaving for Guizhou. The man being interviewed talked about how China is a facade of growth and development, and for that matter who hasn't seen the countless images of cement-laden Chinese cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen smeared across our television screens? But China is still very much a developing culture as I was keenly reminded last weekend, and most of it's inhabitants don't have a Stackbucks at their disposal. Rather they live like the people I saw on the roads linking Guizhou to Hunan: with very little.

I guess you could say I'm in the process of learning how to respond to these realities. I took lots of classes in college where I learned about the economics of developing cultures and the pressing issues that face the world's poor. But the situation looks a lot different from a Chinese bus window than it does in a text book. I don't mean to sensationalize the situation or propose that people with little material wealth don't experience joy and contentment from life, as I would be out of line to make such assumptions. But I wonder what it looks like for me, Lauren Emily, to play into this dynamic by getting outside my test-tube life and helping others on a very real level. It seems like such an abstract idea, but I believe individuals like Muhammad Yunus teach us that it can in fact be done if we can open our eyes to catch the vision.