Grief-stricken teacher finds a path to fulfillment
The year 1995 was the darkest time in Zhang Guimei’s life, losing her beloved husband to cancer after spending all their savings trying to cure him. Before that, Zhang had lost her parents.
Feeling desperate, she applied to leave the city of Dali, Yunnan province, where she had worked with her husband as a teacher, and went to teach in the remote mountainous Huaping county, Lijiang city, Yunnan, totally foreign to her.
“I wanted to find a place where nobody knew me or could remind me of any beautiful moment in my life,” said Zhang, who was born in Heilongjiang province, Northeast China, in 1957 and went to Yunnan province in 1974.
That decision changed not only her life, but also those of numerous children living in deep mountains. Although she was in darkness, she lit up the sky for others, and was elected as a delegate to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.
In 1997 she was diagnosed with uterine fibroids. Her colleagues and students donated money to help her, which moved her deeply, and she wanted to repay them.
She noticed that many girls dropped out of school, and after visiting their homes she found poverty and outdated perceptions hindered parents in supporting their daughters’ education, and made them get married at a very young age.
To change the situation, she made up her mind to establish a high school that would offer free access to local girls. She tried to collect money, but many people were suspicious, and she got very little.
An opportunity for change came when she was elected as a delegate to the 17th CPC National Congress in 2007. After an interview in which she talking about her ambitions, the local government pitched in, and Lijiang Huaping High School for Girls opened in 2008, with Zhang as principal.
The first year it had 96 students, many of whom were poorly educated before entering the school.
“If girls from the mountainous area want to leave, we just offer a hand, to help them fly out to see a wider world,” Zhang told China Global Television Network.
Since the school’s establishment, more than 2,000 students have flown to the outside world and changed their lives.
“Over the past decade our Party and government have tried hard to help every child attend school, and today we’ve achieved this goal,” she said.
In the future, she said, she hopes to lead children from the mountains to the track of modernization.