This is an interesting read from someone from Batu Pahat.
It appeared on The Star Online on Nov 24, 2008.
http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2008/11/24/lifefocus/2570375&sec=lifefocus
Malaysians Abroad
By EMMELINE TAN
A Malaysian is helping to give minority children in China a better start in school
EVERYONE in China speaks Mandarin. Or do they? While Mandarin is the lingua franca and medium of instruction in China, there are many minority groups who don’t understand a word of it. They speak languages peculiar to their own people and their children find it difficult when entering school where subjects are taught in Mandarin.
For that reason, Martin Chow and his wife Diana left their comfortable corporate jobs in Malaysia in 2005 to serve in China with SIL International, an NGO promoting the well-being of minority communities through language development.
Chow is the associate director of external relations while Diana is the external relations manager.
Martin Chow with his wife Diana and daughter Joyous.
(Formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, SIL is headquartered in Dallas, Texas.)
“Ma Qinghua’s story is a good example of what can happen when children are allowed to learn in their mother tongue,” said Chow, 45. Qinghua is an 11-year-old Dongxiang boy in SIL’s bilingual programme in Gansu, a province in northwest China.
In an essay competition organised by the NGO, Qinghua, who won first prize, wrote: “My father was arrested for taking drugs long ago. We did not have enough money, so I could not go to school.
“Every night I would dream of going to school with a school bag, but would wake up to find that it was just a dream.
“One day we heard this great news, ‘You can go to school, there’s no need to pay school fees!’ But in the school, I could not understand the Mandarin from my textbook! I was so sad. My teacher spoke in Mandarin and also read in Mandarin.
“Then one day, things changed. I heard familiar sounds from my teacher. She was reading in Dongxiang, my native language. The school books now had Dongxiang words together with Mandarin words. Since then, I could understand the lessons clearly. I loved studying again.”
Another example is Yang Yunji, a Dong child from Guizhou Province, said Chow.
“As a child, he lived in a closed Dong minority county which is culturally and economically disadvantaged. He had no Chinese language ability at all. When he entered school, Yunji faced the predicament of reading and using Chinese for all his subjects.
“Then SIL developed the Dong Han Bilingual Education Project at the village level, allowing Dong minority children in preschool and first grade to have a transitional teaching period from using the Dong language to Chinese language.
“Now, after several years of study, the students not only have high reading and writing ability in the Dong language, but they have also made good progress in using Chinese. Every year in the nationwide examination, their class’s average personal scores in language and mathematics have been higher than the local averages,” said Chow.
In May, SIL organised a charity golf tournament in Kunming where more than RMB200,000 (RM100,000) was raised for a school building project in Yunnan.
“At first glance, this golf tournament seems all about raising funds for minority children. But it has greater implications.
“We have been working with the government but two big groups we have not learned to leverage were corporations and the media. Without them behind us, our efforts are like throwing stones in a big ocean,” explained Chow, an accountant by training.
“We envision that in maybe the next five to 10 years, our projects will be financed by corporations. We do not have the human and monetary resources to finance all the multilingual projects here, but the host government and the corporations do.”
Chow stressed that the minority population in China numbered into the millions.
“We want to see more children excel in their studies and later do well in their lives instead of isolated cases of selected minority children. Minority children should not be denied the right to excel because they are not fluent in the national language,” he said.
Minority children need to undergo multilingual education by learning their own language first to have a good start before getting into the national language, added Chow.
“In this way, they will obtain the necessary learning skills set before the national language kicks in as the medium of instruction. These children will then have confidence in learning and thus fare better than those without the benefit of a multilingual education.”
Some might ask why this former finance manager and his stockbroker wife would want to uproot their family (they have a 10-year-old daughter named Joyous) to slog for such a cause in a foreign land.
“Life is too short. We do not want to regret how we’ve lived. There was a survey done among people over 95, asking what they would do differently if they had their lives to live over.
“None said anything like, ‘I wish I had worked harder for more security and material success.’ Most answers related to building better relationships with others, taking more risks and giving much more time to meaningful causes.
Chow added that his family feels fortunate to be in China in these interesting times of change.
“China is developing at breakneck speed. Where we stay, if you are away for a week, you will not recognise the road when you come back.
“Yet some of the villagers are still very poor. My family and I see ourselves as social entrepreneurs working to better the lives of the minorities,” he said.
Fact File
NAME: Martin Chow
AGE: 45
HOMETOWN: Batu Pahat, Johor
EDUCATION: Montfort Primary School, Batu Pahat; Batu Pahat High School; Tunku Abdul Rahman College, Kuala Lumpur; University of Stirling, Scotland.
OCCUPATION: Associate director of external relations
CURRENT BASE: Kunming,Yunnan, China
YEARS ABROAD: Three
> For more information about SIL, go to eastasiagroup.net. To contact the Chows, email martin_chow@sil.org
