Flying higher with needed support

Young Angolan says Chinese vocational school improved life

Taking to the stage at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, Jose Lourenco and his students ignited the passion of the audience with their performance of Angolan traditional dance on Jan 29.

Few would have expected that the young man would one day escape his impoverished upbringing in Angola to take to the stage to join his school’s annual gala in China.

Four years ago, when Lourenco was forced to drop out of school to help support his struggling family, he spent his days selling cheap goods on the roadside to supplement his family’s income.

Despite being an outstanding student at junior school, he had no professional skills and seemed destined to a hardscrabble life.

Then something happened that the 25-year-old Angolan says changed his destiny.

In 2014, Premier Li Keqiang visited Angola as part of his four-nation visit to Africa, where he inaugurated the opening of the BN Vocational School in that nation’s capital, Luanda.

Founded in Beijing in 2005 as a nonprofit school to teach skills to the children of migrant workers, BNVS today has nine branches in China and one school in Angola, BNVS Angola, which is both financed by authorities in China and Angola.

Lourenco joined the school on a one-year training course that helped him become computer proficient and raised his confidence.

As one of the first graduates from the school in Luanda, his outstanding performance in studies and other fields lead him to become a computer teacher there.

Versatile in singing and dancing, Lourenco has showcased his talent both individually and collectively at several annual BNVS galas in Beijing as a representative of BNVS Angola.

“I never dreamed of being able to have a decent job like this in such a respected school,” Lourenco says.

With his salary of $4,200 a year, he can help his parents and six siblings live a better life. Despite being the seventh largest country in Africa and boasting vast oil and mineral reserves, Angola’s gross national income per capita stood at just $3,450 in 2016, according to the World Bank.

“A job means hope,” the Chinese premier told Angolan students at the official opening of the charitable school. On that day, nearly 70 Angolan youngsters from low-income families — who would later be trained to become electricians, stone masons and machine operators, including Lourenco — were infused with hope for a better future.

So far, around 300 local students have graduated from the school, with over 70 percent of them finding jobs.

Yao Li, the founder of BNVS, says that the school’s goal is to help young people find employment through vocational education and realize their targets for poverty alleviation.

In this context, China has a rich experience. The government’s targeted poverty alleviation strategy has been focusing on providing education to help the impoverished build up their capacity for selfdevelopment.

And the BNVS is a prime example of that strategy. China’s first tuition-free, nonprofit senior secondary-level vocational school has helped nearly 6,000 young people in China to earn their own living and contribute to society in different ways.

In the past five years, over 65 million new jobs have been created in China and more than 60 million people have been lifted out of poverty.

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim says that China has lifted in total over 800 million people out of poverty, describing it as “one of the greatest stories in human history”.

Lourenco, one of the beneficiaries of the BNVS model, is a vivid example of how China is helping to alleviate poverty abroad through vocational development, as part of its vision for the world as a community of shared futures, and its efforts in pursuing common development.

“BNVS Angola not only provided me with the vocational skills needed in the employment market but also inspired my mind. I know the difference between survival and living a life now,” Lourenco says.

Currently, he is studying computer engineering at night college and hopes to gain a university degree. He has thought of studying in China some day. Lourenco loves the song that made Chinese rock singer Wang Feng a star in 2004 — Flying Higher.

He hums from it, “Reality is like a pair of shackles, chaining me ... I know the happiness I seek, lies in the higher skies. I want to fly higher, fly higher.”