The Party Flag Flies High on the Frontline of the Grassroots Level| Lights a Lamp for Children in the Mountains -- Remembering Zhang Guimei, a Communist Party Member and "Principal of the Burning Lamp."

Kunming, 24 May (Xinhua) -- Title: Lighting a Lamp for Children in the Mountains -- Remembering Zhang Guimei, a Communist Party member and "Principal of the Burning Lamp."

Xinhua News Agency reporter Pang Mingguang

Zhang Guimei, 64, secretary of the party branch and principal of Huaping Girls' Senior High School in Lijiang, Yunnan Province, suffers from bone tumors, rheumatism, pulmonary fibrosis and other diseases, and has to take a lot of medicine every day, and also paste painkiller plasters on his hands and neck.

Even though her body is not as good as before, and even climbing the stairs is very difficult, every morning, she will still insist on doing a very ritualistic thing - before the students get up to read in the morning, turn on the lights in the corridors of the teaching building one by one.

At 5:15 a.m., the students were still asleep, Zhang Guimei endured the pain of her whole body from a single bed on the third floor of the girls' dormitory building to get up, move downstairs step by step, and then sit in the dormitory manager's electric car, come to the teaching building, turn on the lights for the students.

"The girls are afraid of the dark, so I turn on the lights in advance so they can read in the morning with peace of mind." Zhang Guimei said.

Since becoming the principal of Lijiang Huaping Girls' High School, the country's first public free girls' high school, in 2008, Zhang Guimei has been pouring all her energy into students for more than a decade. In the past 13 years, 1804 students of Huaping Girls' High School have been admitted to the university, and Zhang Guimei, the "principal of the lamp", has illuminated the lives of many poor girls in the mountains.

In the eyes of the students of Huaping Girls' High School, the principal is very strict. Zhang Guimei has a small green horn that she carries with her. "Hurry up, rub what?" "I won't do it a minute or a second you're late!" Zhang Guimei will hold a small loudspeaker every day to urge students to attend classes, eat, study by themselves, and do exercises. The ubiquitous urging voice of the principal has become a unique landscape of huaping girls' high school campus.

In the eyes of the students, the principal loves them unreservedly. At the beginning of 2018, Zhang Guimei was critically ill and hospitalized, lying on a hospital bed, she said to the county leaders who came to visit her: "I am not in a good condition, can I let the civil affairs department give me funeral expenses in advance, I want to see this money used on the children." ”

Since teaching for decades, Zhang Guimei has always had the habit of home visits. A school teacher once asked her why she had to make a home visit to a parent-teacher conference. She replied: "Many of the students' families of female high school students are very poor, and I can only fully understand the difficulties of their families by visiting their families, so that children can put down their psychological baggage and prepare for the college entrance examination with peace of mind." ”

Since the establishment of Huaping Girls' High School, Zhang Guimei has visited more than 1,500 students' homes, covering four counties in one district and four counties of Lijiang City, covering more than 110,000 kilometers.

Zhang Xiaofeng, director of the Huaping Women's High School Office, said that when she saw her compatriots wearing shabby and thin clothes on the way to visit home, Zhang Guimei would take off her coat and put it on her fellow students, and sometimes even take off the clothes of the accompanying teacher. "She never had a meal at a student's house, and the bread and steamed buns she brought with her would be distributed to the elderly and children on the side of the road, and we often went hungry when we followed the family visits."

In addition to serving as the principal of Huaping Women's High School, Zhang Guimei has also served as the president of Huaping Children's Welfare Institute since 2001. In the past 20 years, Huaping Children's Welfare Institute has adopted 177 children, and Zhang Guimei, who has no children and no daughters, has taken care of the growth of groups of children in the welfare home, and many children have affectionately called her "old mother".

Today, many children in welfare homes have grown up to become doctors, teachers, policemen, soldiers... Zhang Guimei said that the welfare home now has more than 20 children, "I will continue to be a good mother and raise the children." ”

"In my childhood memory, my mother was very strong and could overcome any difficulty. It was really painful to see that she was sick now. Lei Qiufeng, 31, was one of the first children to come to Huaping Children's Welfare Institute, and she had never seen her parents since she was a child, but she was admitted to the Sichuan Mechanical and Electrical Vocational and Technical College in 2005 and has now become a worker in an enterprise in Panzhihua City, Sichuan Province.

"Now that I am also an honorable Communist Party member, I want to do my best to help others like my mother." Lei Qiufeng said.

On the wall of Zhang Guimei's office, there is a passage she said: "If I have a pursuit, it is the cause of education in the poverty-stricken areas of border nationalities; if I have hope, it is my students and children; if I have motivation, it is the party and the people." ”

This is the original intention of a Communist Party member, and it is also a portrayal of her life.