一个家庭四五百块人民币的助学金意味着什么？
                           What Does It Mean To Have a 400 Yuan Educational Grant?

     助学金，原来不单单只是把钱给家长。我们跑遍大山里的每个学校，开家长会。跟家长讨论区区这笔小钱该怎么用，能真正用在孩子们的身上。尽量说方言，但方言还必须翻译成傈僳话，说明这笔钱不能拿去买烟买酒，而是要给孩子多买件床单或衣服，可以让学生在学校替换着用，不至于整间宿舍臭烘烘。低年级学生很用力地帮自己家长写名字，家长再按下手印，拿到这笔钱。我心里说不出什么，至少，看到一点希望。
    Sending out educational grants is not as simple as to putting money to parents’ hands. We travelled through every school in the mountains and held parent conferences, discussing how to put good use of these tiny grants. We had to talk in local dialects, which would then be translated into the language of SuSu. We listened to the locals declare that the money will not be taken for alcohol and cigarettes, and will be used to buy clothing and bedding for the children---- it is very important for students who live in school to have those so that the dorms wouldn’t smell bad. Lower grade students helped their parents write down their names clearly, parents pressed down their finger prints firmly. I can’t say too much in my heart, but at least, I see some hopes.

     驱车深入大山里的小学。从丽江到石鼓镇、到黎明乡中心、蜿蜒老君山上游美乐河两岸千岩万壑纵谷深处的村落，不通公路。越野车，颠颠晃晃地攀上山坡边的小学，灰扑扑的小学生们跑到坡边上来好奇张望外来的我们，恭敬的说声老师好。
    We drove to schools that are located deep in the mountains. From Li Jiang to Shi Gu Zhen, to Central Li Ming district, we followed the windy roads of Lao Kun Hill and the cliff paths of Mei Le River, and arrived to remote villages that don’t have a paved road. Bumping up and down in our jeep seats, we reached hill side schools and greeted by students in their dusted outfits, they curiously ran out and politely said “Hello Teachers” to us.

   我们坐在教师食堂的火塘边烤火，山里的寒气呵着灰蒙蒙的天气，等待需要走上四五个小时山路的家长们下来开会。助学金发放加上家长会在这里彷佛是件大事，足以耗上一天半天的时间。
    In the cold mountain mist, we kept warm by the fire near the teacher’s dining hall, waited patiently for parents who had to walk down four, five hours to get to the school’s parent conference. It is such a big event here to have grants distributed, plus the parent conference---big enough to spend a day and a half for that.

     黎明乡中心校领导陪著我们讨论家长会开会内容，以及农村里正在发生的多项问题。例如落户；许多学生的父母未到法定年龄结婚生子，因此无法帮孩子报户口，有的甚至不在意，造成许多孩子无法接受义务教育，或者有的实际年龄与学龄不符。再如卫生；学生住在学校只有一身衣服一床被套，衣服一个礼拜回家换洗一次，被套则是整学期没换，到了夏天，彼此传染皮肤病。还有一直以来的抽烟喝酒问题、从来不太清楚的家庭经济管理观念，有了钱容易花，钱却不容易找等等。我们琢磨该如何进行，如何以最简单共同参与的方式和家长聊这些问题。
     The head of Li Ming District Central School accompanied us and discussed the materials for parent conference, along with many other issues in the village. For instances, how to register a student’s residence? Some parents gave birth to children before reaching their legal marriage age, and resulted many unregistered births. But to get into the system for school admission, kids have to be locally registered and matched to their actual age. Many parents don’t even want to care about those details. Another issue is sanitation. Students only have one set of clothes and one set of bedding, they washed clothes every week at home, but the bedding did not get washed for the entire school semester. And that is a cause for contagious skin disease in summer times. Then is the never-ending issue of alcohol drinking and cigarette smoking. Many families are not keen on money management, they do not understand the grants can be easily spent but hard to get. We thought about how to proceed, and how to communicate with parents using the simplest yet mutually participating methods.  

       资助可以有很多方式，可以直接将钱打到学校帐上转发，或者直接发放物资，还是带着教育意义的亲自对话？一点点的心思和一点点的费力，也许像是播下一些小小的种子，会在某些地方微微发芽。There are many ways to distribute funds. We could do a direct fund transfer to the schools’ accounts, in-kind distributions, or this sort of face-to-face educational dialogs. A little bit of thoughtfulness and a little bit of efforts, similar to spreading seeds, perhaps, they may grow somewhere, someday.

助学金背后- 「助学」的意义
Behind the Grants: the Meaning of “Assisted Learning”

     二十多年的助学金支持，滋根从最初支持女童上学的助学到随着社会环境变迁而有所改变。最初的助学支持承载了改变在乡村里的女孩没有权利上学的观念；而现在当男孩女孩都能上学的时候，助学金承载更多因贫困或家庭困难（包括孤儿、单亲）而失学的学生的支持意义。同时，贫困的概念本身一直随当前社会经济快速变化而变化，因所谓贫困而失学的学生类型也变得多样。项目工作人员不得不对贫困定义重新思索，对失学原因细究，同时思考助学金的项目内容：这样一点钱能在一个家庭起到多大作用，这笔钱背后究竟能承载哪些改善或教育的内容意义？
    The twenty years practice of assisted learning has transferred Zigen from its original goal of helping rural girls to go to school. The original commitments helped change the rural notion that young girls had no rights to go to school. And now, when boys and girls can all go to school, Zigen’s commitments have turned more towards assisting poor and disadvantaged families (including orphans, single-parent children) to continue learning. Along with the rapid changes that come to the society and economy in the past decades, the concept of poor and disadvantage keeps changing, and the reasons that kids quit school also become varied and complex. Project managers have to rethink about the definitions of poor and disadvantage, to study the reasons of quitting school, and to really think about the projects themselves: how much help this little money can bring to a family? How much change or educational value this small fund can bring to a student?  

       当我们发放黎明中学助学金的时候，挨着名单一个一个问，才发现九十名受助学生已有七名不读，整个学校四百多名学生，在这学期中以前已有五十多名学生辍学，大山深处出来的学生辍学率更高。失学原因远比小学生复杂得多，不再单纯只是父母付不出生活费让小孩念书，或者因双亲四处打工、单亲疏於照顾而就学流离。初中学校管理与教学是一方面的问题，更多是长大的少年接近工商业生产线的链带，在城乡差距的推拉之下，书没念完就被吸附到附近城市打工，更远的到达深圳、广州（有工厂直接到村里来招人的）。贫困已经完全是另外一层意思，和城市水平相比，农村里部分父母基本鼓励孩子外出打工，度过家里困难为优先。
       When we sent out grants in Li Ming Middle School, we talked to the assisted students one by one. We found out that among the 90 students that received our financial aids, seven had quitted school. In the entire student body of more than 400 students, 50 of them have quitted, and the dropout rate for students living in the mountain areas is even higher. The reasons for quitting school are more complex than primary schools, not simply because parents can’t afford the living or studying fees, or parents have to work elsewhere, or lack of cares by single parents. Besides the problems of middle school management and teaching quality, more of an issue is the economical unbalances between a rural and an urban society, and the growing commercial temptations to young students. Many students are tempted by the job opportunities in the cities, so they quit school and start working in a nearby city. Some students even travel far to work in Shenzhen or Guangzhou (there are factories that come to villages for direct hiring). The concept of being poor or disadvantage has a total different meaning now, it could mean a certain match to city living standards. Many rural parents encourage their children to work outside, and to take care of the family’s financial troubles first.

跟学校教育相比，谈及家庭教育，和父母对话显得困难。
Compared to the discussions on school education, family education, and the conversations with parents went a lot more difficult.

         家长们陆陆续续地走进学校开会，有的父母不在家是爷爷奶奶来了，有的拿着酒瓶，有的手上的烟未曾停过，黝黑的皮肤缝隙隐约有股山里的浓浓土味以及汗酸。他们渴望自己的孩子走向城市，明显的外出务工要比读书会更快速得到实际效益，如果学生在学校里的学习让他们看不见未来，或者对于学习成就失去信心的话。 Parents streamed into school for conference, in cases when parents were absent, a grandma or grandpa came. Some carried along a wine bottle, some were smoking nonstop. You can almost sense some sort of mountain smells from their tanned skins. They were eager for their kids to work and live in a city, and expressed clearly that working outside of home can make a better living than studying here at home. If they can’t see a future for their kids in school, or see that their grades are failing, they said, it is better off that the kids can start working right way.

助学金作为一个对话的引子-家长、学校以及乡村发展
Educational Grants as an Introduction of Dialogs --- Parents, School, and Village Developments

        我们试图从对贫困意义与教育的关系阐释里开启对话：“我们就是因为心情不好才抽烟喝酒，因为没什么收入，家里又那么多事，生活苦闷，只好抽烟喝酒，可以让心情好一点啊！”“我们家是几乎连菸酒都买不起，”“我抽烟那么多年了，这种习惯是不可能改掉了。这是我们这一代人的生活习惯，我们这一辈就是这样活过来的，我们没机会受好的教育，也没机会赚什么大钱，就只是个农民。学生娃娃有的是机会，他们现在命好，有机会受好的教育，学校老师要好好地教，让他们养成好习惯，我们父母做不来的，就要学校老师多费心，从他们这一代改变起。”
     We tried to start the conversation by explaining the relationship between being poor and having an education:“We started smoking and drinking to get rid of bad moods. We don’t have much income, so many headaches in life and not much to hope for. The drinking and smoking help the moods.”“In my house, we can hardly afford buying alcohol and cigarettes.”“I have smoked for many years and it is impossible for me to kick this habit now. This is the life style of our generation, and this is how we live. We did not have a chance to get a good education, and did not have the opportunity to get rich, we are just farmers. Now the young kids have plenty of opportunities and can get a good education. Teachers must do a good job teaching them, so that kids can form good habits. Things that we parents can’t do, teachers please try more efforts, so that this generation can change.”

        这几位家长的话语里头强烈吐露一种宿命感，像是守著没几亩地的包谷田，顿时让我想起父亲一辈他们对自己的生活命运有著坚定的宿命观，任何奢侈的事都不觉得归他们的份，把孩子好好养大成人有个好成就好归宿便什么都好了。自我懂事以来，父亲便是一直蹲在摩托车前操弄他的工具，车子一直换，他的姿势不变二十多年。我有时想著，该如何去理解上一辈的时代命运在他们身上刻划的痕迹，我似乎不能简单地拿著我们这一辈的理想去撼动上一辈人既定的价值观。
       There is a great sense of fate in these conversations, similar to those farmers who spend their entire life working around some small corn fields. I recalled my own father and his generation, who also share a very strong sense of fate. They don’t believe any kind of luxury life had anything to do with them. Bringing up their kids to a successful and prosperous life is the only thing to make their lives complete. Growing up, the picture of my father crouching in front of a bike and fixing things has never changed. Bikes changed, but his posture never did for twenty some long years. Sometimes I would think: how to understand the marks of fate that had casted into them over the hard years? I simply can’t change their firm believes and value system by using my generation’s dreams and hopes.

        除此之外，用很简单的算帐方式和家长们谈家庭经济管理的重要性，除了开源也要节流。每有一点对话空间，教育就在里头慢慢渗透了，如涓涓细流，或许有那么点滴的改变。我们谈及了这个大山里组建中草药种植合作社项目的可能性，如何与当前几家已在种植的农户组织合作，就刚起步的或有兴趣的农户给予培训支持，透过合作产销，避免中间商收购，将利润真正回归到农民身上。也谈及了如何以天然方式在山坡边进行土鸡养殖相关的培训，养出健康的土鸡，而非以不良的饲养方式低价竞争。 一旦有机会启动，将是一条漫长的学习道路，教育与发展平行如春天吐露的花瓣在农村小道上缓慢而如实地铺开。 
        Besides that, we talked about how to use a simple way to calculate family budget and the importance of family finance, and the need to save money while making money. Whenever there is a chance for conversation, there is some sort of education getting in. Like small streams, may be a few drops of change may come along. We also talked about the possibility of a cooperation venture of herbal planting in the mountains, and how we have talked to a few farming families on that already, and will provide training and supports to the interested and new growers. Through a direct cooperation model, we can avoid brokers so that profits can return to the growers. We also talked about the training program to raise organic cage free chicken in the hill sides, and strategies of keeping fair prices on healthy chicken instead of getting into a price war by reducing feeding costs. This will be a long learning road. Whenever there is an opportunity to get started, growth and education will slowly explode in parallel in those country roads, like the flowers of a spring.

文、图/林慧珍