London camp helps shy boy gain confidence
When my 11-year old family friend Quan recently visited London for his 15-day summer school camp, I offered to take him out for a meal and show him a little more of the city’s attractions. Having seen Quan grow up as a shy kid over the years, I could only imagine how scared he would be, away from home for the first time, in a foreign country too. I had imagined that he would be crying with homesickness, but I was wrong.
When we met at Tower Bridge, I was pleasantly surprised by the mature and confident young man standing in front of me. He greeted me with a big smile,
This Day, That Year
ItemfromJuly13,1995,in ChinaDaily:Expertsinspect thePearlRiverinabidto findwaystosolveitspollutionproblem.
TheGuangzhougovernmentinGuangdong provincehaslauncheda campaigntoprotectthe city’senvironment.
The rapid economic growth in the Pearl River Delta has brought not only a rise in living standards, but also serious environmental problems.
After decades of efforts, progress has been made in cleaning up the delta. reassured his friends that he would be back with the group at the appointed hour before leading me away from the tourist crowd.
“How did you get here this morning?” I asked him. “Oh the journey wasn’t bad at all,” he answered in a matterof-fact way, before providing a full explanation of how and where he and his friends took a bus, train and underground to arrive in Central London from the southeast commuter town of Welling, where his homestay family lived.
Quan’s mastery over London transport took me by surprise. In Beijing, he hardly traveled on public transport alone, as his mom and dad gave him rides to school and weekend activities most of the time.
But living in Welling was a different matter. Of the three boys who stayed with their
In 2004, a group of 11 provinces and regions along the Pearl River Basin, including Guangdong, Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou, Hunan, Jiangxi, Fujian and Hainan, launched an initiative to control water pollution.
In 2009, Guangdong earmarked 197 billion yuan (429 billion) for environmental projects. The money will be spent over 11 years.
Last year, the province set the goal of turning all nine cities in the Pearl River Delta green by 2020, building the country’s first conglomeration of State-level Dunkirk, host family, Quan was the youngest but also the best English speaker. Thus he took it as his responsibility to not only translate between their homestay mom and the other kids, but also to take care of his friends’ daily needs, including food, laundry and transport.
“The boy who slept in the bed above me was constantly homesick and cries a lot, so I spend a lot of time comforting him,” he told me.
Quan was not homesick. He felt liberated by his newfound freedom in London, but he joked that one thing he will not miss is the “terrible” food: daily sandwiches at school, and fish and chips or pasta with tomato sauce cooked by his homestay mom.
“I hated the food, but I ate them all, as I didn’t want to starve myself,” Quan laughed heartedly. forest cities.
The province, a manufacturing giant, plans to increase its forest coverage from 58.8 percent last year to 60.5 percent in 2020, according to its 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20).
By 2020, 520 forest parks and 170 wetland parks will be built in Guangdong.
Three of the nine Pearl River Delta cities —
Quan’s experiences are representative of the thousands of Chinese children who travel overseas each summer for study abroad programs. Their classroom studies are important, but surely the more important lessons come from the school of life, as they discover aspects of themselves in a foreign land, away from home.
They will treasure the friendships, memorable experiences and independence that they gain from those trips for many years to come. The interaction between children like Quan, their teachers and host families will also help to cement understanding between China and many countries around the world.
Contact the writer at cecily.liu@ mail.chinadailyuk.com Guangzhou, Huizhou and Dongguan — have been given State-level forest city status by the State Forestry Administration.
To obtain the title, forests must account for 35 percent of a southern city’s land.