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I and the protagonist of this article, Teacher Yan Qianghua, both grew up in the countryside, came from poverty, and have seen too many tragic scenes of poverty. I deeply feel that temporary poverty is the test of fate, and poverty in a lifetime is self-abandonment. Since the country introduced the precise poverty alleviation policy, this gospel has indeed had an effect on deeply alleviating poverty in the countryside, but the lack of materials and the hardships of life are actually not real poverty, we are facing insurmountable poverty, in fact, it is the poverty of knowledge, especially the poverty of character, which must start from cultural poverty alleviation.
Teacher Yan Qianghua's current poverty alleviation work is mainly based on living relief and industrial poverty alleviation, but he quietly built a village reading center in the villagers' incomprehension, with the intention of re-injecting the abandoned ancient village into the cultural creativity of the times and changing the cultural ecology of the countryside.
Poverty is a word that makes people feel powerless. There is a folk saying, "save the emergency does not save the poor", everyone will encounter a moment of difficulty, Yang Zhi sells knives, Qin Qiong sells horses, at this time to meet the heroes who are in distress, a gift of food, a robe gift, they can quickly return to the sea from the shoal; The real poor are not the same, poverty has worn out their ambition, and the hardships have trapped them like a quagmire, and it is really powerless to lift them up, to change their destiny like a normal person, full of passion and morale!
A year ago, my fellow villager, Teacher Yan Qianghua, took the initiative to ask his Yangtze River Publishing and Media Group to go to Zhupu Village, Yinzu Town, Daye City, Hubei Province, a poverty alleviation point assigned in the province, to serve as the leader of the poverty alleviation task force and lead the villagers to alleviate poverty. Every day bit by bit, all remembered in his circle of friends, every day to look at WeChat, watch him busy before and after, to help local villagers rebuild rural industries, change the status quo of poverty, the heart is very emotional, has always wanted to go to him to visit and learn once!
On the afternoon of May 29, I drove two hours to his village, just stopped in the courtyard of the village department, heard the sound of me parking, he immediately came out of the village house to greet me, a little bit of cold and warm, we walked together to the village for a turn.
Zhupu Village is located in a natural village called Hujiashan, where the ancestors immigrated from Jiangxi, so far the dialect is still the former Jiangxi dialect, very difficult to understand, but see all the way through, meet the old man in the village, everyone saw Teacher Yan, have smiled and greeted; Even the puppy who was wandering around, seeing Teacher Yan also came over and rubbed his pants leg, it could be seen that he was now fully integrated with the village!
Teacher Yan went to the countryside, and after understanding the local situation, he felt that if poverty alleviation was only to alleviate the poor, or to build an industry in the local area, it would cure the symptoms but not the root cause, or it should start from culture, in order to cut off the root of poverty more thoroughly!
Hujiashan was cut in half by the 316 National Highway, the west was the old mansion, the east was the new mound, more than ten years ago, all the villagers moved to the new mound, the old mound became a deserted village, abandoned in the hazelnut bushes, leaving an empty old mansion, waiting for the years to bury.
The abandoned old houses in Hujiashan are of great historical and cultural value
We walked together to the old temple, only to find that this old temple is very flavorful, the old sanjin ancestral hall, the door is the Jiangxi residential style of the eight-character door, the wall is all terrazzo, the eaves are pasted with colored tiles of the eighties style, the roof ridge is made of cement to form a double dragon play bead, into the inside of the altar position, empty, but the two pillars are very exquisite, the bottom end with a four-cornered pot-shaped stone pillar to carry the above wooden structure, the magpie climbing branch pattern carved on the stone pillar is very exquisite, it seems that here has been renovated once in the Republic of China , began to absorb the Western architectural aesthetics, Hu Jiashan's ancestors, before the world!
After leaving the ancestral hall, I went to another old Red Army's former residence, full of walls and vines, but the green brick tiles were very elegant, and the corners of the walls were reinforced with long bluestone, and the structure was very strong. Look at the remaining doors and windows in the house, which are not ordinary farmhouse things, the wood has not yet decayed, the lattice lines are simple and smooth, and the woodwork is exquisite. The yard has become the world of motherwort and houttuynia, white pink butterflies flying up and down, four cuckoos screaming in mid-air, it is really a quiet place, as long as the place is slightly renovated, restore the old appearance, attract the city people to come here to live and develop cultural creativity, not lost to those tourist attractions of the ancient village ah!
Mountain spring water emerges from the mountain and flows into a ten-mile clear stream
There is a mountain stream in front of the old temple, which merges to form a pond in front of the gate. As early as two or three hundred years ago, the ancestors of Hujiashan carefully built up the creek bank and pond with a strip of stone, and the creek arranged different cleaning areas such as laundry and vegetable washing, and two rectangular large stone troughs were set up next to it, which were specially used to wash sweet potatoes, pull out the plugs underneath, and dirty water flowed out, just like a modern bathtub.
The water of the creek comes out from the bottom of the surrounding bamboo lush mountains, a hundred-year-long stream, the water flow turns the stone into a daiyu color, the bottom of the water is full of aquatic plants such as foxtail algae, which shows the local ecology is good, but unfortunately at the end of the stream, there is a local villager raising sheep by the pond, which affects the century-old clear water pond, which is a pity!
This is an abandoned land in the eyes of the villagers, but it is a precious village in the eyes of Teacher Yan. He has been planning to bring this place back to life, into a sunny and rainy reading traditional farming culture residence, so that the deserted village continues the cultural context, only when the civilized and open atmosphere takes root here and spreads, the village can permanently get rid of poverty.
This is also the blind spot of the current poverty alleviation work, poor farmers lack money, lack of ability to cope with diseases and natural disasters, lack of skills to maintain a family's food and clothing, lack too much, even if the government intervenes, give them a bottom line, help them solve their living difficulties, develop production, but if they do not pay attention to driving away the ignorance and numbness in their hearts, this kind of welfare security and production support is only to cure the sores in front of them, once the poverty alleviation work is over, they are still very likely to return to the past way of life. Becoming a group that is highly dependent on government relief is by no means the original intention of poverty alleviation!
At dinner at night, Yang Xiuzhi, a poor household, called him and asked Teacher Yan to teach him to write. This child is in the third grade of primary school, every week Teacher Yan and the team members have to go to see her once, the child is very close to him, Teacher Yan is very concerned about her, but he does not dare to go too close, after all, he has the day to go, the relationship is too close, for the child, it is a kind of cruelty, this degree of pinching or wanting!
Last year, the local government made up 36,000 yuan for her family award, and one of Yang Xiuzhi's uncles took more than 70,000 yuan and renovated her home into a two-story small building.
Entering the house, Yang Xiuzhi and her grandmother were smiling and greeting us to sit down and drink water, Yang Xiuzhi said that the title of her essay was called "My Dream", but she did not know how to write? Teacher Yan asked, what is your dream? Yang Xiuzhi thought about it and said that she wanted to be a wedding dress designer. So Teacher Yan followed her words and taught her how to describe her dreams and how to achieve them, and the little girl picked up the pencil and wrote it!
Standing up, we walked around the house, the grandmother was old and had inconvenient legs and feet, the house was piled up with clutter, wanting a child to grow up in such an environment, but giving birth to the dream of being a wedding dress designer, maybe this is the meaning of the dream! Living in the mud, I want to open like a lotus; it is obviously a small grass, but it has the yearning of a big tree.
Leaving Yang Xiuzhi's house, Teacher Yan and I sat in front of the village department to drink tea together, the night dew was wet, the stars were fighting in the sky, the evening breeze was cool, mosquitoes and flies were far away, it was really a good place for people in the city to go to the countryside to find a place to live.
In the conversation, Teacher Yan said that there is a special custom in the local area, that is, girls generally abandon school after finishing junior high school, either go out to work, or marry early, ask them the reason for abandoning school, and even answer that the girls who were originally together do not go to high school, and it is very lonely and boring to go to school alone.
This may be the root cause of poverty. Reading to change fate as a useless work, but covet early work and early money, and then the next generation to re-copy the previous generation's life trajectory, work to make a house, marry a daughter-in-law, give birth to children, chaos like grass and trees, birth and destruction like fireflies, can not be a generation of new people to win the old, into a dead cycle!
Yinzu Town is known as the "capital of ancient construction", rich in all kinds of skilled craftsmen, many children drop out of school to work after graduating from junior high school to earn money.
This is a small building built by a family engaged in the ancient construction industry in the village, and many details can be seen that the people in this place are industrious and smart.
Teacher Yan said that he is currently renovating a "reading culture creative space" at the middle gate of Yangqing, and every year he wants to hold a "book festival", put the best books in this reading space, invite the best children who have the best exams every year, and give him a box of books every year.
Early the next morning, we had breakfast together at Grandma Hu's house in front of us, and we began to go to the reading space mentioned by Teacher Yan last night to see! This reading space is located next to the original old highway, which was originally Yangqing Primary School in the 1950s and 1960s, and also served as a sales point and infirmary of the supply and marketing cooperative for a period of time, which is connected with the lives of generations of people in Zhupu Village, and the old graffiti on the wall still remembers the immature ink of several major village cadres in the current yuan!
On the same day, the staff of the Termite Control Center of Daye City came to the village reading center to check the situation on the ground, and they promised to help Teacher Yan Qianghua to carry out free termite control and increase the life expectancy of this old building.
Because it is public property, it has not been taken care of for a long time, and the old house was originally broken and crooked, and it has been unable to shelter from the wind and rain. Teacher Yan persuaded the village committee to come up with a poverty alleviation fund to repair the place. Walking into the hall, the roof was full of new rafters and bois, and what attracted my attention was that Teacher Yan specially found the old man who had been doing things here, let them recall the location of the tiles in the past, and then specially ran to the field to find the bright tiles to lay. I used to live in a house with bright tiles, and the sunlight from the bright tiles is also part of my childhood memories. In such an era of cement construction, Teacher Yan's intention to repair the old is very touching!
On the surrounding walls, the villagers said that it was better to paint the walls directly into a smooth wall, but Teacher Yan vigorously rejected the public opinion and demanded that the Cultural Revolution slogans and Chairman Mao quotations on the walls and even the graffiti of former students be preserved. The charm of the old grandmother lies in her wrinkles, and whitening surgery on her is blasphemous!
Walking into the two sides of the box, the thick northeast sassafras pine house beams between the two walls, after laying the floor slab, is a loft structure space, which is reserved for handicraft workshops, and children can learn and experience the handicrafts of their ancestors here in the future. Suddenly I felt that the children of Zhupu Village were really lucky, if they could go down the route planned by Teacher Yan, this place would definitely become a blessed place full of culture, wealth and courtesy!
Coming out of the reading space, we ran to the base of two hundred acres of wormwood and weeds. The poor households in Zhupu Village are mainly orphans and widows who have lost their labor force and orphaned children, and the other is the disabled and mentally ill who have completely lost their labor force, and cannot get rid of poverty through investment support and technical training.
Wormwood and weeds are planted together at intervals, mugwort is wormwood, citrus is an excellent variety of Yangxin Junken Farm, just planted this spring, now most of the wormwood grows to people's knees, to May Duanyang can be harvested and sold for money, Chongyang Festival can be cut again, is an immediate investment project! With the quick money visible in front of them, the villagers naturally have confidence in poverty alleviation.
The mushrooms are growing happily, and it is almost time to harvest the first stubble of wormwood
Along the road next to the water port, Teacher Yan walked in front of me one foot deep and one foot shallow, while nagging about his planning for every inch of land and every hill, I walked behind and suddenly a strange feeling arose in his heart, he seemed to forget that he was only a three-year poverty alleviation team leader, but his feelings for this land and the people were like his hometown, and he wanted to take root and run this place as a grand dream for a long time!
The lush wormwood field stretched directly to the distant horn ridge, the water in the left hand flowed through, the green mountains in front of him drifted out of the white clouds, two yellow cows were nibbling on the grass in a bush of small flying tents, the four wild birds were crying, the drizzle was weaving, looking at the middle-aged man in black in front of him, his steps were strong, as if he wanted to walk into the depths of the green mountains, the end of the white clouds...