Turning negatives into positives
“Your text here. Your text here.” That was the writing on the wall.
Those were the English words printed on the kitchen wall tiles below “red wine”, which was rendered in calligraphy next to images of (not wineglasses but) the coffee cups of the farmhouse we were staying in.
Likely because of linguistic . confusion, T nobody inserted text into the template — or knew they could and perhaps should. I’d guess the owners still have no idea what their walls say.
It’s quirky, but ultimately unimportant.
Either way, they’re happy to occupy a modern abode.
The houses are among the dwellings recently built for villagers, who still primarily occupy traditional brick-andadobe homes.
But the new houses cost about 30,000 yuan ($4,400) to buy in a community where the average annual income floats at about 6,000 yuan.
Our media team had traveled to Desheng village in the parched outskirts of Zhang jiakou, Hebei province, to report on poverty initiatives that turned the arid weather’s disadvantages into advantages through solarpowered farms.
That’s as the village also soothed the shock of extreme daily temperature fluctuations through subsidized greenhouses.
Shepherds herd sheep, whose hoofs punch cloven divots into soil broiled by droughts until it fractures into curled plates in front of a solar farm next to clusters of greenhouses standing in front of wind turbines that twirl like giant pinwheels.
The problems were apparent in the foreground. The solutions were in the background.
Yet their positions are inverting, in terms of quality of life.
The area is known for exceptional mutton, and I’d agree it deserves the reputation.
One day, a herder leading her flock across this tableau loaned me her staff affixed with a whip, and let me guide her livestock for a moment, just for giggles.
When I curiously experimented with the twine whip — meters from any animals — she and the creatures both panicked.
She told me to stop by using words, while the animals told me by galloping away. The sheep kicked up roostertails of dust.
We’d come to report on the droughts. Then, it rained. It was the second downpour of the year. And it was brief.
Yet, it still seemed ironic.
And the precipitation sucked the heat from the air.
The temperature suddenly plummeted from 35 C to 8 C, and was even lower at night.
Every dark hour that week was brisk, no matter how sweltering the day had been — and typically it was searing.
I didn’t pack a jacket since it was mid-May. I didn’t imagine I’d need one in the daytime — or need to sleep cocooned in multiple blankets and sometimes still shiver at night.
I often wore my sweater to bed.
But that was part of what made me think: What I saw in Desheng’s challenges and solutions made me ponder another, far more remote, swath of China, on the fringes of Qinghai province’s Yushu prefecture, which faces similar challenges, but to a more extreme degree.
Qumalai county in Qinghai, where I started a volunteer initiative six years ago, has also grappled with harsh weather — desertification, caused by climate change, according to government authorities, and extreme cold caused by elevations that hover around 4,000 meters.
The region on the planet’s “third pole” also happens to be one of the sunniest places on Earth.
Yet it largely lacked electricity when I first arrived six years ago. Our first projects were mostly buying solar panels for schools.
The area is also too remote to connect to the fossil-fuel energy grid.
And while Qumalai’s daily temperature fluctuations are not as severe as those in Desheng, the weather is always chilly and ultimately far more punishing. It snows 10 months a year. But climate change’s relative warming of this chunk of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has melted patches of the subterranean permafrost that previously propped up the precipitation that nourished the grass that grows on the topsoil — or, increasingly, doesn’t.
Qumalai’s grass is becoming sand at an exponential rate.
This has required Yushu’s nomads to curb herding — the primary source of incomes since crops cannot grow in permafrost.
But upon witnessing the success of the Desheng model, I wonder if a modified version of it could prove a solution in places such as Qumalai.
That is, locations where disadvantages such as insufficient precipitation and extreme temperatures are at least mitigated and, at best, turned into advantages through initiatives such as greenhouses and solar farms.
Perhaps this development strategy’s achievements are the writing on the wall.
That is, with a meaning that extends far beyond the village — perhaps to places such as Yushu and further afield in the world.