paper #2 part 2 photo analysis

I took this picture in July, 2007, the time before going to the United States. At that time I was traveling to Yunnan province which is located in the west of China. There was a Non Government Organization (NGO) that served Luku Lake area which was one of the places of interest in Yunnan. I contacted them by accident, and the leader Lao Zhai invited me to go to local family with him, so I accepted. From the conversation with Lao Zhai on the way of one local family, I knew that the NGO’s purpose was to help local family to find financial assistances for their children’s tuition fee, because their parents were unable to afford it. From the picture you can see that it was a beautiful place where the two children were on the half way up of mountain playing in flowers. However, their faces were depressed, without any smile, and even though living in the beautiful place it seemed like they were not happy. The children’s clothes were very dirty, and their hair had not been cut for a long time.
These two children are belonged to the family that we were going to visit. After a short conversation I knew that this family was struggled their live. Their annual income was approximately 5000 Yuan (about 700 US dollars), most of income was from farming, they only ate rice one time each week, and potatoes were their main food, let alone ate meat. They feared sick, because they did not have medical security, and they did not have money to go to hospital. Lao Zhai and I had a rest in their house for a while. I looked around and found out that there was no electricity provided in this house. I could not imagine how terrible it was that lived in the dark after sunset every day. This family was trapped, isolated on the huge mountain area.
This is just one small segment of the issues happened in current China that the development of west and east parts are unbalanced. The life quality in east area, especially in coastline area, is almost same as the quality in development countries. Nevertheless, as I have described, people in some east are still struggling on food, sick, water and electricity. To solve this problem, I believe more fundamental facilities need to be built, and children from poor family need more assistants for their tuition fee that let them be educated.