College graduate becomes a teacher in a cliff village
A 28-year-old woman, who graduated from Xichang University in Xichang city, capital of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in southwest Sichuan Province, has decided to stay back and teach in the village which is known as “cliff village.”
She is the first college student to be married to a man living in the “cliff village.” She met her husband when he worked as a traffic officer in Xichang. They married after dating for two years. She passed an exam and became the first teacher in the village in September last year.
“Happiness doesn’t depend on where one lives,” she said. “I decided to stay because the children here need us so badly.” There are currently two teachers in the mountain village.
They teach 30 children at the village school. The school starts at 10:30am and closes at 4:30pm every day.
A rattan ladder was once the only means of contact with the outside world for the villagers before the a steel ladder was put into use in November last year. The prefecture and county governments spent more than 1 million yuan (US$151,655) to build the steel ladder.
The 2,550-staircase steel ladder was made up of 6,000 steel tubes, each weighing 120 tones. It saves the villagers almost one-third of the journey when they traveled by rattan ladder. They spend half an hour less to go up to the mountain. The ladder, covered with anti-rust paint, is expected to last up to 10 to 20 years.
The village can also use 4G mobile phones.