From participating in field trips to village meetings, from organizing art activities to innovating ethnic embroidery, from carrying out ecological agriculture to running B&Bs and catering, from practicing hand painting to taking language and culture classes, it is difficult to imagine that these fragments constituted what was once a national-level The daily lives of more than 40 women in Waipula Village, Yijiu Town, Yongren County, Yunnan Province, a poverty-stricken county. Most of them only have junior high school or primary school education. One-third of the women are even illiterate. Several I haven't left the village for ten years.
In September 2017, the China Women’s Development Foundation joined hands with Mary Kay (China) Co., Ltd., the United Nations Development Program, and the China International Economic and Technological Exchange Center of the Ministry of Commerce to jointly launch the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Demonstration Village Project (referred to as the SDG Project) in this village. Through various empowerment training and guidance provided by the project, local women have burst out with strong cultural self-confidence and tenacity to transform a happy life in their hometown, and have become the pillar force of rural revitalization.
It is precisely under the leadership of women that this remote Yi village, once a deeply impoverished area, was not only completely lifted out of poverty at the end of 2019, but the economic value brought by the newly harvested ecological rice is enough to replace some of the environmental problems. The development of friendly flue-cured tobacco cultivation, Yi clothing, handicraft production, folk tourism, catering and other diversified industries have enabled the village's economic development to remain stable during the epidemic.
Waipula is the Yi language, which means a village built on stone slabs. For thousands of years, due to traffic congestion and harsh geographical conditions, people could only build their houses on stone slabs with a limited area. Therefore, a large number of three-story houses were built in the village. The construction of layers of rammed earth to meet the needs of village development has also become one of the most important cultural heritages of Waipula.
Nowadays, from Waipula to Yongren County, Kunming, and then to Beijing and Shanghai, people have remembered another name representing Waipula - "Daughter of the Moon".
In the Yi language, it means Huo Bo Ruoma. In the Yi culture, there is a legend about the daughter of the moon. A Yi girl is clever, diligent and kind. She is recognized as her daughter by the moon fairy and lives in the moon palace. The daughter of the moon symbolizes the struggle and yearning for a better life by the beautiful and intelligent Yi girls.
Huo Bo Ruoma is an art team spontaneously formed by women in the village. In just over a year since its establishment, the Huo Bo Ruoma team organized a country music festival in the village, attracting more than 3,000 people from surrounding areas. With the participation of tourists from towns and cities such as Panzhihua, Sichuan, at a cultural evening held in various counties in Yunnan Province to celebrate the 99th anniversary of the founding of the Party, Huo Bo Ruoma performed a song and dance program with the melody of a Waipula village song and won fourth place. The good results have become a favorite story among the villagers. The women of the multi-talented Huo Bo Ruoma team have transformed into boss ladies, village representatives, craftsmen, planters, embroiderers, cooks, etc., and are at the forefront of rural construction in Waipula.
What kind of team is this? What caused her beautiful transformation?
50-year-old Chen Jiali:
The true identity of the backbone of the art troupe is Grandma Tofu
The tofu pudding made by Chen Jiali is famous far and near.
She has slightly dark skin, is illiterate, and does not speak Chinese fluently. Chen Jiali, who is wearing ordinary clothes, does not stand out in the crowd. . After skillfully putting on ethnic costumes and makeup, her eyes shone and she seemed to have become a star.
"The best dancer in the Huobo Ruoma Art Troupe", "The planner of the Waipula Village Douhua Festival", "Everyone in the village is learning to make bean curds from her", "One of the best Yi embroidery workers", heard from the villagers Chen Jiali was not shy when they introduced her to outsiders. She took out the Yi embroidery works she made in her spare time and introduced them one by one. After a while, she brought out the bean curd made by herself and invited everyone to try it. taste.
Her mother-in-law is 90 years old and needs to be taken care of. The corn in the fields has just been recovered. The family still raises dogs, pigs, chickens, and grows more than ten acres of mango trees and flue-cured tobacco. Her life is better than anyone else's. Trivial and heavy.
"When I first started practicing dance, my legs were so sore, but unless there was an elderly person at home to take care of me and I couldn't walk away, I rarely didn't practice." Although her husband occasionally complained, Chen Jiali took out the dance skills she once studied and made by herself. Tofu's determination always insists on participating in the art troupe's practice.
For her, now that her children are older and her living conditions have improved, nothing is more important than enriching herself.
39-year-old Xia Xuefang:
"Before going out, my two-year-old daughter reminded me 'Mom - lipstick!' "
Xia Xuefang (first from left) and her children
When she first became a wife, Xia Xuefang's relatives Some of them didn't understand. At that time, Xia Xuefang was doing business in the town. The transportation in her hometown was convenient and the conditions were much better than those in Shangougou Waipula, which was more than 20 kilometers away from the town. In the past two years, relatives from her hometown came to Waipula to play, and they all changed their views. They felt that the living environment and development prospects here were much better than those in their hometown.
As the deputy general manager of Waipula Ecological Tourism Cooperative, Xia Xuefang has been very busy in the past two years. Her two eldest daughters always see in their circle of friends that their mother is on a business trip to study again. Recently, as the only representative of the town to participate in the provincial three-star hotel management training, she took down dense notes. After returning from the study, Xia Xuefang shared what she had learned with her partners.
“There are still only a few people participating in cooperatives and art troupes, and the power of many women has not been mobilized.” She sees the lack of participation and support in cooperatives and the lack of motivation for independent learning among villagers, and is anxious in her heart.
The youngest child has been in Xia Xuefang’s arms and back since she was 3 months old, and has followed her mother to participate in training activities and cultural programs in the village. Now she can dance with the Yi people. She often shared the changes that had occurred in her with the villagers.
"Mom - Lipstick" Since she often goes out to receive tourists, her 2-year-old child will remind her to tidy up her appearance before going out.
30-year-old Zhu Yongyan:
"After returning to my hometown to start a business, my life is a bit sweet."
Zhu Yongyan is very proud to introduce the quaint village roads in his hometown to tourists
Zhu Yongyan, who wears thick glasses and has never done farm work, always smiles. Silly, everyone calls her Mr. Zhu. Her position is the deputy general manager of the Waipula Eco-tourism Cooperative. She has to manage accounts, make coffee, and make bread. She is also an important member of the art troupe.
"From the beginning when I checked the cooperative account, it only had 2,000 yuan, and now there are tens of thousands of yuan in the account. This change is still amazing, especially when there is still an epidemic this year." She said at the university After working for a few years after graduation, she returned to her hometown to start a business last year. She gained much more than she expected.
"My father would drive a motorcycle to take my mother to the county town more than 40 kilometers away to perform. Because my mother got car sick, she could only ride a motorcycle."
"The bread my mother baked for the first time was as delicious as the one I made."
"The mango tree is expected to add 20,000 yuan to the family's income."
"After our program won the award, the group of Waipula exploded."
"We didn't have a partner last year, but we are talking about a partner this year, maybe by the end of the year or next year Will you get married?"
...
In Zhu Yongyan's view, sustainable development appears in many villagers' dictionaries, but it is their farmland farming without pesticides, the renovation of residential buildings through resource recycling, and the The inheritance of traditional Yi culture, neighborly friendship and harmonious family life. And this is her ideal happy home.
20-year-old Ma Jixiang:
The husband is no longer worried that his daughter-in-law will come home late
People in the village affectionately call Ma Jixiang "Little Xiangxiang"
"You can see green mountains and green waters, and a pair of eyes as clear as crystal" in "Border Town" The description of Cuicui is just right for the girl-like Ma Jixiang.
After receiving a junior high school education, she got married and had children at an early age, becoming a member of a family of eight with four generations living under the same roof. Precisely because of her good looks, when she first came to the village, her family didn't like letting her go out. They only asked her to do housework and raise children. Joining Huo Bo Ruoma, she won a lot of applause and discovered more possibilities in life. When
first joined the art troupe, women could only rehearse the program in the evening after finishing their farm work. Ma Jixiang's husband would always call and urge, "It's time to go home!" As the SDG project progressed, While the women are learning skills such as embroidery, reception etiquette, homestay training, and planting technology training, they are also learning how to build harmonious family relationships and lead their husbands to participate in various activities in the village. It was under this kind of influence that the villagers gradually accepted that women should go out to study and perform in public, and more and more husbands began to support their wives in participating in various undertakings.
Now, Ma Jixiang is still reserved when talking to outsiders, but she has followed her sisters in the village to many places and met many people, and her world is no longer small.
"I am also a member of the Women's Federation, and my favorite thing to do is embroidery. I hope to learn more things in the future, including embroidery, homestays, dance, etc., and become a good example for other women in the village," she said.
Nan Jing (first from right), assistant secretary-general of the China Women’s Development Foundation, is with Wu Tao and Xia Xuefang, captains of Yongren County’s village-based poverty alleviation work
“No matter what national beliefs and cultural traditions they are in, every woman’s heart Deep down, there is a desire to bloom oneself, show oneself, and realize dreams. This kind of breakthrough requires not only capacity building, but also psychological construction, ideological construction, and cultural construction. "China Women's Development Foundation, November 11, 2020. Secretary-General Nan Jing pointed out after inspecting Waipula Village that the handicraft innovations carried out by women using their ingenuity, such as handicrafts made by painting on stones and making dried mangoes by themselves, fully demonstrated women's huge potential for rural revitalization.
The women already have the answer in their minds as to how Waipula Village will develop in the next step. While developing diversified sustainable industries, villagers are already recruiting volunteers, rural construction partners, Waipula angels, etc., to form joint efforts with external forces in the form of co-construction and sharing, and step by step promote the sustainable development of 2030. Sustainable rural and ecological rural goals.
Editor Luo Shuhui
Photography Bian Weiye (some pictures are from interviewees)
