The photo shows a group of naive children, who seem to be at most 7 or 8 years old. They stood side by side in the middle with a female teacher with pigtails, like a graduation photo. The background of the photo is a dilapidated school and rolling mountains. Although the photo has faded, my memory of this photo is getting clearer and clearer.
That's right, the female teacher with pigtails is me. The photo was taken ten years ago when I was teaching poor students in Dashangou.
When I was a freshman that year, I suddenly received the above task and asked me to teach in Dashangou for two months.
Dashangou is a very remote village, hidden in the mountains, with inconvenient transportation and almost isolated from the outside world.
The day I went there was a rainy day with dark clouds. The car that took me there was driving on a slippery mountain road. Looking down, it looks like an abyss, and it seems that it will fall if you are not careful.
When I finally got to the ground, I saw the children in patched clothes around me barefoot, looking at me curiously, and their hearts were like needles. At that moment, I made up my mind to change the children's lives and future.
But my determination is still too long. First of all, I have to solve my food and shelter problem.
That school is a shabby little house, as if it would collapse when the wind blows. There is no ready-made place to live in the school, but fortunately I brought a sleeping bag. The kitchen seems to have not been painted for hundreds of years, and it is full of oil. I just brushed the pot for a century. There is no faucet, and the water is pumped from a well in the village and put in an iron bucket.
At noon, it stung me to see the children take out their own hard buns and dried salted radish and eat them hard. What a life these children lead! I quickly opened the canned meat that I didn't have time to eat when I came and gave it to them.
Think about it again. When I was a child, I ate everything I wanted and lived like a pretentious princess. It was a shame.
At night, after school, I will go to students' homes to learn about their lives. The road to school is also tortuous, hiding in the Woods, children happily shuttle in the Woods, hard life has exercised their strong physique, and I obviously can't keep up with their pace.
Along the way, they will tell me some fairy stories, saying that an old fairy lived in this mountain, and some children got lost in the mountain and were led out by a silver fox. These beautiful myths add some interest to their monotonous life.
Because they only have one dress a season, they hardly change clothes. The next day, I made them wash clothes and hung them all over the yard. I also told them to cut their dirty nails and watch them bathe in the river in the village, like a group of lively ducks.
After doing this, the children's appearance has changed, they are all clean, and there is no shadow of children in the mountains at all.
The children taught me how to catch cicadas, how to catch fish, which mushrooms on the mountain can be eaten and which are poisonous, how to read words, how to calculate problems, and tell them what the outside world is like. We had a very happy time together.
Before I knew it, my teaching life was coming to an end.
That day, I stood on the uneven platform and gave the children the last lesson. I wrote capital letters on the blackboard with nail-length chalk.
"Dreaming-thinking-"I said. "Come, read with me."
"Dream-think-"the children said in unison with the textbooks I sent them.
"Do you have a dream?" I asked the child.
"My dream is to be a poet like Li Bai!" A boy in the class raised his hand to answer.
"I want to be a teacher like you!"
"I think …" The children announced their dreams loudly in this shabby classroom.
"Teacher, my dream is that you can stay with us all the time ..." The most naughty boy in the class suddenly said like a faded balloon at the moment.
This sentence is like opening children's tears, and everyone is crying.
"Teacher, you don't go, ok ..."
"We will take a bath and cut our nails every day ... don't go ..."
"……"
The children's words pierced my heart like knives. I don't know when, tears have wetted my eyes.
Why don't I want to be with these kind and simple children? But as a college student, what can I do at this moment?
"I will come back to see you." I held back my tears and made an agreement for the children.
That day, I left, and the car that picked me up gradually went away. I saw the children running after the car from the back window, which made my tears flow freely.
"teacher! You must come back! " The children ran crying.
"We are waiting for you here!"
…
The children's figures have disappeared and the mountains have gone, but the children's voices have echoed in my mind for a long time.
Later, I never went back to that big ravine, never saw those lovely children again, only this old photo was still with me.