Foundation Blog

Fuzhou, China

Yearning to immerse myself in the language and culture, I decided to volunteer in a rural hospital serving an indigent population. Speaking to professors, teachers and other acquaintances from my time in Beijing, I was introduced to Zhang Xiuyu, the charge nurse at the County Hospital of Yongtai, a rural hospital one hour outside of Fuzhou. However, despite my excitement and time spent planning a year abroad, as a graduating student I was unsuccessful at finding sources of funding. Thankfully, I found the Christianson Grant and was ecstatic when I learned that financial circumstances would not prevent me from being able to undertake a year of service in China. I am eternally indebted to the Interexchange Foundation for making this life altering experience possible. During the summer of 2009, after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Neurobiology, a minor in East Asian Studies, and a language citation in Mandarin Chinese, I left Los Angeles for Fuzhou.

Traveling to Yongtai County, I was overwhelmed by the glaring contrast between the relentless development of metropolises like Shanghai and Beijing and the poverty of the Chinese countryside. Despite having studied the equivalent of four years of Mandarin in college, arriving in Yongtai filled me with uncertainty. The countryside home overlooked rice fields and a flowing river. Along the river were forested mountains with altars built into the mountainside by local families to honor their ancestors. Chickens roamed the front porch and rice, cabbages, and other vegetables were cultivated in plots contiguous to scattered homes. My host father and his entire family had pooled their savings together to build a new house. The family had moved into the home two years prior from a very old and modest house adjacent to it, where my host father’s grandparents had first lived. The old, crumbling countryside homes were full of history. The walls were replete with fading slogans such as “Ten Thousand Years for Chairman Mao” and “In agriculture, learn from Dazhai,” a village in Shanxi Province which was held up as a model of collectivization during the Cultural Revolution. My host parents had met in the same rice fields during the chaos and violence of the Cultural Revolution. Universities and schools were closed down and urban youth were sent to the countryside to learn from the peasants and become true revolutionaries. My host mother was sent from Shanghai to the countryside, where she met my host father, a young farmer at the time.

When I arrived at the County Hospital of Yongtai, patients and their families stared at me like I was an alien from another world. I often had a similar experience during my time teaching in Pinghu, where at one time a group of construction laborers simultaneously stopped working and intently stared at us laowai (foreigners) as we passed by. This did not happen in major cities like Beijing or Shanghai, but in rural areas like Yongtai people are still awestruck when they see a foreigner. Although I did not feel awkward by the attention, at first I feared my presence would prove a distraction to the patients and their caregivers. I shadowed Nurse Zhang around the medical walk-in clinic, helped with medical records, and escorted patients to their appointments.

Although I was able to communicate and understand basic ideas, perform simple tasks at the clinic, and learn by watching and shadowing, I felt that the language barrier was preventing me from learning in depth. It had taken over two years of intensive coursework to learn Mandarin Chinese, so I knew that even with complete immersion and focused study most of the year would go by before I felt competent in Fuzhouhua. I spoke to my host mother who contacted Dr. Weiya, a radiologist working at the Fuzhou Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital. Also known as the Fuzhou People’s Hospital, it is an affiliated teaching hospital of the Fujian University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. I was thrilled by the possibility of interning in a foreign medical academic environment at a hospital dedicated to an alternative medical philosophy, which I would not have exposure to as a future student in an American allopathic medical school. A couple of weeks later, after receiving approval from the hospital administration, I returned to Fuzhou. I began my internship at the Fuzhou Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital shadowing Dr. Xiao, a leading pediatrician of Fujian Province who employs both Western and traditional Chinese medicine.

Read more on Gibran’s experiences volunteering in China.

Interested in becoming a Volunteer in China?  Visit the InterExchange Working Abroad website for Teaching English and other opportunities to volunteer or work abroad.