When our car pulled over to the side of the mountain road for a little rest, I stepped out of the car into the open air. Every breath I took was so refreshingly stimulating. On the Guizhou highlands in the night, not a single light could be seen. But the farmhouses and the paths that crisscrossed the fields were faintly visible. This was what the Guizhou people described as a land where "The wind sweeps the land and the moon serves as a lamp."



Hard to build a fire


The chilly night made us all shiver. We had heard that the temperature would drop to zero degrees Celsius [32 F] the following day. When the hot water sprinkled down on me from the showerhead in the hotel where we were staying, I thought of an elderly farm woman I had met at one of our distribution sites. Seeing her persistent cough, I advised her to drink more hot water. She answered me in a husky voice, "I can't find enough firewood to boil water."

Those who came to our distribution site at Luosha Village, Luodian County, said that almost every household in the village has to collect firewood for fuel. When winter sets in and there is not enough firewood, they have to take cold showers. "Why don't you use coal? Isn't Guizhou rich in coal?" "There is indeed a lot of coal in the mountains," answered one villager, "but no one can afford to mine it."

When we were distributing at Dongjia Village, Luodian County, an old woman told me that all her life she had collected firewood in the mountains and that she did not even know what a piece of coal looked like.

After our distributions in Luodian County, we decided to explore the countryside to have a look at local village life and to find out whether our relief supplies had been useful to them.

The Guizhou highlands consist of rolling hills and mountains. The people build roads by blowing up parts of the mountain and shoveling away dirt and rock with their own hands. Bit by bit, they have connected the various mountain areas.

We drove along on a loess-and-gravel mountain road. The bumpy drive lasted several hours, during which time my head repeatedly hit the car roof and my bottom bumped into the sides of the car. I felt my stomach churning and a spell of dizziness came over me.

When we got out of the car to catch our breath, we met a child walking along the mountain road, carrying a basketful of firewood. Because his hair was a little long and covered his ears, it was hard to tell immediately whether he was a boy or girl. I borrowed the basket from him to see how heavy it was. Such a hefty load! Taking the basket back, he continued on his way. As I watched him bending over with the heavy load on his back and taking each step with difficulty, I couldn't help feeling sorry for him.



Hard to walk


We came to a village called Dongyao, which has neither electricity nor running water. Some villagers walked towards us from a hundred meters away and shook our hands warmly. There were twenty-seven families here, twelve of which, being especially poor, were our aid recipients.

Wu Chang-cai, afflicted with polio when he was a child, had twisted legs. His wife was blind in the right eye, and his baby, who still needed to be carried, was only two years old. The only other member of the family was the ninety-year-old grandmother. No one in the household could help put food on the table.

Wu had limped more than three hours to our distribution site at Dongjia Village. He carried a thank-you note with him: "Seeing you coming all the way from across the Taiwan Straits to help us, I feel so warm."

The road that surrounded Dongyao Village was twelve kilometers [7.4 mi] long, all paved with loess and gravel. Wu said that the village authorities had provided some dynamite to help build the road, but most of the money needed had been raised by the villagers themselves. They sold pigs and cows to pay for dynamite, detonators and labor. After five years of effort, they finally completed the road leading in and out of the village.

"If we don't make some changes, our village will never get rich." Although he was physically disabled, Wu still insisted on doing some light work and contributing to the construction during those five years. He emphasized that they had to depend on themselves to improve their living conditions.

It turned out that the basket-carrying child we had bumped into on the road was Wu's nephew, Sheng-ju. Wu lived next to his brother, Wu Chang-xue. Chang-xue wore a thin, worn-out overcoat, under which was a red sweater with seams split in many places. When asked why he didn't put on the new cotton jacket Tzu Chi had distributed to them, he said that he wanted to save it for Chinese New Year.

Next to a road in Mojian, Dongjia Village, profusely perspiring people were building brick houses. They used to live on a rocky mountain in Tianba Village. In order to help them escape from the fate of poverty which has been passed down from generation to generation, Tzu Chi was helping them to move away from the bare mountain and build more than thirty houses in Mojian. Upon seeing us, a group of figures in "sky-blue-and-cloud-white" uniforms, the villagers immediately put down their tools and waved enthusiastically.



Hard to go to school


At our distribution site at Gaobo Village, Huaxi District, Guiyang City, we saw women dressed in black turbans and long colorful gowns. Policewoman Zhou Yong-qin told us that seventy percent of the inhabitants of Gaobo Village are Miao people, one of the minority ethnic groups in China. They don't usually wear their traditional costumes, except during festivals or special holidays. It was clear that they considered the Tzu Chi distribution an occasion important enough for them to don their brightest attire.

Near-kin marriages, a prevalent problem here, have produced many mentally and physically handicapped children in the area, and thus make it even harder to eliminate poverty from the region. Chai Xing-long, a twelve-year-old girl, was waiting in line to receive relief items. Her mother, standing beside her, was mute. When I asked the girl where her father was, her voice faltered and tears rolled down her cheeks.

After wiping away her tears, she said that her seventy-year-old father loved to drink. Not long ago, he had fallen down some stairs after getting drunk and had been seriously injured. Last night she had walked three hours on a mountain road to her uncle's home in another village to ask for his help.

The sleeves of Xing-long's red overcoat, far too long for her, were rolled up. The oversized overcoat had been given to her by her aunt. Under the coat, she wore a dark blue sweater knitted by her mother. She said that her mother often collected scraps of iron, paper and plastic and sold them for money to buy yarn.

Sometimes her mother also put together pieces of broken wooden planks and rented them out to villagers at the village's weekly markets to use as mats. The girl told us that a wooden plank was rented for two yuan (US$0.24) a day and that currently they had three wooden planks at home. She and her mother were also responsible for farming the little piece of land they owned.

Her mother gave all the hard-earned money to her father, but most of it was spent on liquor. Xing-long will graduate from elementary school this year. Ever since she was in the fourth grade, the family had not been able to pay for her school tuition. If it had not been for the village head, who advised her father to apply for a government subsidy, she would not have been able to continue her studies.

It is not unusual for students here to walk two hours to school. Some parents wait until their children are older before they send them to school. Some of the students have to drop out of school and resume their studies only when they have enough money. Therefore students in the same class are usually not of the same age group.

Speaking of school tuition, Liao Xiao-shang, an elementary school teacher at Luosha Village, said that teachers at her school are responsible for getting students to pay for their tuition, or else a certain portion of money will be deducted from their wages. Once she had to walk six hours to visit families who were behind in their payments. "If it's really beyond their means, I just let the matter pass," she said helplessly. "How can you ask children to quit school just because their parents have no money?"



Hard to get medical treatment


At the distribution site at Gaobo Village, the Tzu Chi International Medical Mission joined efforts with a local hospital to provide free medical care for local people.

When they heard that there would be a free clinic, many Miao women who were waiting for the relief distribution immediately rushed forward to register to see the doctor, still holding their carrying poles, bags and ropes.

An old woman coughed persistently. When I handed her a mint, a crowd of people swarmed towards me, thinking that it must be some kind of medicine. In no time, they were narrating their symptoms and pointing out their sores. I had no option but to take to my heels and flee the scene.

"I ache all over," a Miao woman told Dr. Yang Chi-kuo of the Respiration Therapy Department of the Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital, her words translated by a local nurse.

"Do you often carry heavy objects on your back?" Dr. Yang pressed on her waist and asked her where she ached. But wherever he pressed, the woman cried out in pain. He then pressed her knees and asked her to take off her shoes. The socks she was wearing had several holes. After pressing on her foot several times, he asked her to strip off her socks. He pressed on her heel, ankle and neck. Then he instructed her to sit on a table and bend her back.

The woman said that only ten days after giving birth to her baby, she had had to go back to the fields to work. She regularly carried heavy objects weighing eighty or ninety catties [107-120 lbs]. She started to feel pain all over after she accidentally sprained her back muscles one day.

Dr. Yang examined the woman closely, hoping to locate the real cause of her ailment. A long line waited outside the clinic, but no one complained.

In another room Chang Yao-ren, vice superintendent of the Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital, was treating a swollen and blackened right hand. A nurse, who also translated for us, said that the man with the burned right hand had fallen down by a stove one week previously, and his right palm had been seriously burned. For the past week he had been applying herbal medicine to his hand, but it only caused a serious infection.

Dr. Chang disinfected the hand with care, applied iodine and then wrapped a bandage around it. He also gave the man some medicine and told him to change his dressings regularly.

Superintendent Zhao Li-ping of the local People's Hospital said that Huaxi District was located at the juncture of town and country where the People's Hospital was the only general hospital. As those who came to the hospital were mostly poor farmers, a large number of bad debts had accumulated over the years. Seeing that most farmers were too poor to seek medical treatment, the hospital often held free clinics in the countryside.

During our relief distributions, each family in the various villages also received a family medicine box which contained pills for the treatment of flu, diarrhea, allergy, stomachache and infection, in addition to a thermometer, iodine, absorbent cotton, bandages and ointment. It was a small but complete first aid kit. Instructions on how to use the various medicines were translated to the villagers on the spot. Tzu Chi volunteers also asked the local public health office to continue providing consultation services to the villagers in case any problem concerning the use of the medicines should arise in the future.

A total of fifty Tzu Chi volunteers from Taiwan participated in the distributions. They paid for their own travel expenses and traveled over mountains and rivers to deliver rice, cotton jackets, comforters, cotton socks, shoes and family first aid kits to over 13,000 extremely poor Chinese people in Gaobo Village and Maiping Village in Huaxi District, Luosha Village and Dongjia Village in Luodian County, and Zongdi Village in Ziyun County.

After three days of distributing relief supplies, we went back to Taiwan on January 9, which happened to fall on the fifteenth of the month on the Chinese lunar calendar. I raised my head and saw a full moon in the sky. Immediately my mind returned to the bright moon riding high above the Guizhou highlands.