Nuosu people love jewelry. Young women adorned in silver display not only their youth and beauty but their family’s wealth. Older women are more modest in their display, but still sport a pair of silver earrings, a ring or two, and a silver collar. Men customarily wore a silver earring in the left ear, as [...]
We’re delighted to report that our 2016 Cool Mountain Education Fund calendars are at the printers, and should be here by December 7 at the latest. Calendars are still only $20, plus $5 shipping for an order of any size, or you can pick it up from a board member for free. Order it here! [...]
Thanks to the generosity of many of our donors (listed below), we have met our goal of raising enough funds to provide seven more college scholarships and nine more high school scholarships to students whose names were unavailable to us when we carried out our last scholarship ceremony in late August. Our new board [...]
On August 22, we arrived in Yangjuan for our latest yearly visit: Our newest board member, He Wenhai; Nuosu education researcher Aga Rehamo, who will be spending the next two years at UW; old friends Tom Hinckley, Sara Jo Viraldo, Keala Hagmann, and I. We came in the wake of a flood that devastated Apiladda [...]
My Nuosu colleague Aga Rehamo (now a professor at Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu) and I wrote an article about the changing ways Nuosu people are adapting to education, as many parents’ goal for their has risen from “going to school” to “going to a good school,” which at the high school level means going [...]
Our 2015 Calendar is almost ready. This year, we asked Kaitlin, who has been doing a lot of really interesting photography in Yangjuan and with Yangjuan graduates in other places, to design the calendar around her pictures. She was particularly interested in using square-format pictures that she takes with her professional 2×2 dual-lens reflex film [...]
Ma Xiaoyang, Yangjuan graduate and elementary school teacher. I met Ma Xiaoyang for the first time on a hot summer day at his college in Guang’an. The first thing I noticed about him was that he seemed older than the other Yangjuan students there. Everyone seemed to follow his lead and he helped me carry [...]
On September 4th and 5th, I had the opportunity to share some lessons from our experience in Yangjuan with audiences of teachers, researchers, and students at two educational institutions in Chengdu: The College of Yi Studies at Southwest University for Nationalities or 西南民族大学, and the Institute for Multicultural Education at Sichuan Normal University, or 四川师范大学。 [...]
What is our scholarship money really doing? This is a very legitimate question in light of the fact that incomes are increasing in Liangshan, including the Baiwu Valley where Yangjuan and Pianshui lie, and in light of the fact that Nuosu students from other nearby places also go to college. In order to answer this [...]
I’m pleased to report that we had a successful time at Yangjuan School in late August, including re-connecting with many old friends, introducing new friends to Yangjuan and to the community, and most importantly, giving out our scholarships for 2014-25. This success came about due to the diligent efforts of Professor Li Xingxing and our [...]