I was born on October 1, 1959, and I was fortunate to be the same day as the birthday of the Republic. Maybe my parents, in order to make me remember this day, gave me a resounding name: Pearl. Now, I'm old too, two years old. But the hometown people who knew my boyhood life still called me by my nickname when they met.
My teenage years lived with my grandparents and were completely immersed in the muddy waters of the countryside. No different from the peasant children, the semi-laborers in the village also have to participate in all kinds of labor of the production team, earn work and participate in the distribution of harvest. Therefore, agricultural production activities such as ploughing the land, raking paddy fields, planting seedlings, and planting grain were all participated in when they were young, which is not a good style, but it can be easily put into battle.
The place where my grandparents lived was called Tuanpo Village. It is a small mountain village inhabited by Yi and Han, with only about 40 households and a population of about 300 people. The Yi people live intensively on Tuanpo Mountain, while the Zhang family is scattered in a mountain bay. Before the 1990s, the entire village was extremely poor and backward.
There is no electricity in Tuanpo Village. When night falls, every household can only light a kerosene lamp. In order to save money and save fuel, the wick is generally rubbed very finely, soaked in a kerosene bottle, and after the match is lit, the lamp head emits a faint and dim light.
Tuanpo Village is coal-free. Cooking on the raw stove relies on firewood. Finding and piling firewood is a daily routine for every child in every household. Firewood is used every day, so the search for firewood is done all year round. Especially after the autumn harvest, it is necessary to cut down the poles and rods of the bag grain and carry them home, pile them together, and make a hat on it, cover it with grass to prevent it from being damaged by rain. The grains buried in the soil layer must also be dug out, shake off the mud and sand, and carry them home to build a fort. There is also climbing trees in the mountains to prune branches and digging trees, which are the skills of the village teenagers.
Tuanpo Village is short of water. Whenever the water is dry, the only well in the village has long been unable to see the water shadow. Cracked mouth, helplessly looking up at the clear sky. People in Tuanpo Village go to the Majing Reservoir for several months every year to fetch water. After the reservoir dries up, it is necessary to go to the farther and steeper yang ditch to carry water. I have a small body book, but carrying water is also a must-do thing. When carrying water, not only fill the bucket, but also put a few leaves in the two buckets to prevent the water from being shaken out when walking. Sometimes, with great painstaking efforts, the water was carried to the door of the house, and when one foot was stepped on, people fell down, and the water was all spilled out, and I really wanted to cry without tears.
In Tuanpo Village as a child, there was no main road. Children in the village go to primary schools a few kilometers away and take rough roads. It is easier to walk on sunny days, but it is difficult to walk in the mud on rainy days. The people in the village have to go to the communes and county towns farther away to catch up with the scene, and they can only rely on their own legs, and the hard work is self-evident.
In Tuanpo Village as a child, there was naturally no kindergarten or primary school. When children reach the age of primary school, the only place to go to school is Baiguochong Primary School, which is ten miles away from the village. It is said that it is an elementary school, but in fact, it is a lonely wooden pillar tile house, 15 pillar heads, four or five small rooms. There was a field outside the house, but it was not regular, it was not hardened, there was no basketball board, there was no ping-pong table, and the school did not have physical education classes. Of course, the absence of formal physical education does not mean that rural children do not have physical activity. I still vividly remember many of my own indigenous sports as a child: grabbing stones, playing chicken sticks, playing cotton balls, rolling iron hoops, playing slingshots, cockfighting, etc. During the lunch break, on the way out of school, the friends will often get together to play various competitions, and girls will also participate. There are also rewards and punishments for winning or losing, and those who lose should clench the fingers of their right or left hands, stick out their fists, not allow them to dodge, and obediently let the winner punish the loser with his finger. Some children have great strength, and they are also fierce, and they play to losers and scream in pain.
In junior high school, I left my hometown and went to study and work in many places. But I have never forgotten my childhood. The kind of rural days that work at sunrise, rest at sunset, and are poor and quiet has always been hidden in the chest. I know, that's my nostalgia!
With a flick of a finger, the human world has changed. With the acceleration of the country's reform and opening up, with the continuous enhancement of the republic's economic strength, and with the taking root and fruit of the party's three rural policies, new changes are taking place in The face of China's rural areas every day, and the same is true in my hometown. In particular, since the Eighteenth National Congress, the Party Central Committee has regarded the decisive victory in the work of poverty alleviation and the building of a moderately prosperous society in an all-round way as the biggest political task of the whole party, and the largest people's heart project in the country to grasp it, and has achieved the first centenary goal as scheduled. This year's Qingming Festival, I returned to the hometown where I was born and raised, and what I saw and heard became a little unconfident compared to the small mountain village I remembered. Obviously, he has arrived at his hometown, but he feels that he has mistakenly entered the peach blossom garden of someone else's home.
Roads, the biggest change is the road. All the roads through the village are hardened, and the main roads are designed and constructed according to standardization. There is also more than one road into the village, and the network between villages and villages, groups and groups, and households has been linked. The government has also built a special machine ploughing road to facilitate farmers to drive agricultural machinery directly to the field. There are cars on the road, and now in the countryside, motorcycles, cars, and small trucks can be seen everywhere.
Electricity, not only electricity, but full coverage of the rural network. Electricity for lighting, electricity for household appliances, electricity for cooking rice and stir-fry, processing of agricultural products or electricity. And the price of electricity is cheaper than in the city. At night, the public lighting system illuminates the large and small roads in the village and illuminates the corners and corners of the mountain village.
Water, now in the hometown, every household has built a happy water cellar and a mother water cellar. The embarrassing days of domestic water have long ended. In the patches of flue-cured tobacco planting areas, the state has also built a large water cellar, using drip irrigation and spraying equipment.
Children will always be the future of the country. The education department has set up kindergartens centered on administrative villages, and children who go to school are also picked up and delivered by car. Our generation used to walk barefoot to school, and now the children in the village can't understand it.
The hometown in nostalgia has become beautiful, rich, and harmonious. This is the inevitable result of the communists' practice of their original mission, and this is the most beautiful picture that embodies the growing strength of the great motherland. Grateful for the great party, grateful for the great country, because with you, there will be thousands of happy little families we have now!
One of the beautiful villages of Guizhou
The second beautiful countryside in Guizhou
Fields of Hope!
Fruit!