“I will never forget that I am from the remote countryside of Daliang Mountain（Sichuan Province）; I was lucky to go to college and then I got a job as a teacher. I will do my best to teach each child so that they can all go far!”

In 2008, 24-year-old Ma Yan, with a passion for education in Tibetan-inhabited areas, came to teach at the middle school in Batang County in Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province. For ten years, she has dedicated herself to teaching the children there.

Ma Yan and her students.

Batang County is one of 68 impoverished counties in Sichuan province that was planned to cast off poverty in the next three years. It is also one of the 680 pilot counties in which the state has implemented the Rural Compulsory Education Nutrition Improvement Program.

When she first arrived at the school, language communication became the biggest obstacle in Ma Yan’s teaching process, as 95 percent of the students were Tibetan, but she did not give up.

“During class time I was okay. I could emphasize a certain point by repeating it several times,” Ma Yan said. “But when I tried communicating with students and parents outside of class, then I was in trouble. I would need a local Tibetan teacher to help translate.” She said that the students couldn’t understand her, and she would raise her voice in every class.

“During these years, the school’s facilities have been greatly improved, but students’ understanding of Mandarin is still relatively poor, which makes the teaching rather difficult,” she said. In Ma Yan’s view, students in the mountains are not as broad-minded as students in more developed areas, but their thinking ability is almost the same. In teaching, teachers should not only focus on communicating the knowledge content, but also make efforts to help cultivate students’ study and living habits, in order to help them keep pace with modern education.

Ma Yan and her students.

Ma Yan has immersed herself in educating and teaching the children of the mountains, and she has received praise from local Tibetan parents for her pay, who say that Teacher Ma Yan “yak-bo-rey! Hajang ya-wo-ge-ge!” (which in Tibetan means “a very very good teacher!”)

There are always someone asking Ma Yan, “Do you regret coming to a backward Tibetan-inhabited area?” To which Ma Yan smiled, and said in a loud and clear voice, “I have no regrets! I myself was a child from the mountains who achieved good things. I know what it means to change one’s destiny by studying.”

Editor:Yanina