Sue Deraney

Note by Technical Support: This is not a personal history web page like most of the others.
Rather it is a letter that Sue sent to Friends (which we are) and Family about some of her recent work.
But it poignantly illustrates what Sue has been up to.

I have recently returned to China to go with a team of students to a Hani ethnic minority village on a mountain about an hour from the Chinese/Laotian border. I left my apartment at 7 am to take a bus to the bus stop where I was to meet one of my staff people. That was the first of a series of 5 buses and other modes of transportation that would ultimately, 11 hours later, bring us to the village where we would be working to help the villagers protect their minority culture. The long distance bus (bus #3) sped us out of the city into the countryside surrounding Kunming. More and more greenhouses are sprouting up near the city, producing the local fabulous produce which I appreciate so much, and we passed miles and miles of them until we began to pass older small villages and towns and an occasional small city. The bus was taking us to Mojiang, the county seat for the Hani village we were going to, but a full 3 hrs from the small town at the base of the mountain. This village is the furthest away of any village we have worked with, but we set up the project last year at the behest of a Kunming school principal we have worked with, who comes from that village. Last year, i was sidelined by my mini-strokes and was unable to come to China until May, so I missed going to this village. At Mojiang we hurried to a small restaurant near the bus station to eat our lunch, before boarding an 18 person small bus we had rented for the mountainous ride to the local town. It's the kind of bus that you slide off the seat as you go around a curve, and this trip was all curves. Some of the students looked a bit green around the gills, but luckily my stomach held. The view, however, from the road was spectacular. Cascades of mountains, softened by the smoke of burning fires, terrace rice and tea fields cascading down their sides for 1000 feet, village people walking on the side of the road back home from the fields. It was beautiful, even if we all hand to hang on tight. We arrived in the town as it dusk was descending. Four members of the team had left for the village 5 days before and had made all the preparations (and dinner for us), but there was quite a way to go yet. The whole team left the bus, picked up their packs and began the 2 hour hike, in the dark, up the mountain to the village. Except me and the student who was to be my translator. Arrangements had been made for two motorcycles to come down from the village and bring us back up, along with a couple of heavier suitcases. As Song Yuan and I waited for them, it got darker and darker.. We really weren't sure what we had gotten ourselves into, but there was nothing to do but wait by the side of the road. I must say, I was really grateful that I wasn't left alone there, unable to talk to anyone, but it was a challenge for her too, because she was from another province and was having difficulty understanding the local dialect. But we could cheer each other as we waited. Finally, two villagers showed up on motorcycles, quickly loaded up the baggage and put us each on one of motorcycles and off we went. It was really fully dark now and as we left the town, it was clear that the dirt road was really in bad shape. It is one lane wide, but often half of that is so washed out that it is impassable. All we could see was the circle of light made by the head light as we swerved around boulders and wash outs. I had been on this road 2 years earlier when we went to investigate the village in the first place, and then too on a motorcycle, so I knew that along most of the road there was a 1000 ft drop off and no barrier of any kind. But blessedly, we could not see that on this trip. We could barely see anything. About 1/3 of the way up, we passed the team walking with flashlights, something we would become extremely accustomed to. But it was a slow ride too, as the drivers worked to negotiate the difficulties of the road. About an hour after we got on the cycles, we finally arrived at the village, barely able to stand, and were taken to the outdoor kitchen where the team leaders were preparing dinner woks over open fires. It took the rest of the team another 1 1/2 to get there. We had finally arrived!

The amazing thing is that no one complained about anything, not the walk, nor the conditions in the village. Song Yuan and I were given a bed to share (a size somewhere between a single and a double) in a spare room, whose other half was filled with pig feed. The room itself was about 8x10. The rest of the team was sleeping on hard low tables the same size with one quilt each, 2 to a table. All the girls in one room, the boys in the other. The outhouses were a bit of a way from the sleeping quarters and very primitive. After dinner we went to our respective places, us on the motorcycles who had waited for us, the rest walking down the mountain to the village. The head man of the village and the other leaders had come to join us for dinner, along with our drivers and welcomed us with toasts. It is hard to imagine American students managing all this, and particularly remaining cheerful. But it was to remain this way throughout the 10 day trip, with everyone tired, yes, but without complaint.

The next morning, we were finally able to see the whole village, since we had to hike back up the mountain to get our breakfast. We would have to do this 3 times a day. It was definitely a challenge for me. No other village I had been to was situated in this way, on a mountainside. When we arrived what awaited us was a spectacular view, much like what we had seen in that last small bus, but this time, with morning mists between the mountains and a newly rising sun. We were in awe. This is the view that greeted us at each meal. Our tables were lined up to look out at that while we ate. It was incredibly peaceful, only the sound of roosters and dogs and then of course, the occasional motorcycle on the way to the town, Chinese pop blaring from the portable recorders. Is there any place in the world still immune to this? I would guess not. The task for most of the team that day was to tour the village, meet some of the villagers and then to spend the afternoon climbing higher up the mountain to gather firewood for the cooks. It took hours but they returned with enough for most of the week. The villagers were very welcoming, asking us to eat with them, giving us candies, inviting us into their houses to sit. We were all invited to the headman's house for a welcome dinner outdoors on the cement "patio" that separated the house from the chickens and the pigs and the kitchen gardens. Most of the houses in this village are in good shape, relatively speaking though, only the old section of the village is in need of much repair and the people there live a pretty difficult life.

Our main project is one of cultural preservation. It takes two forms, the building of a large cement area where the whole village can gather for weddings, dances, ceremonies, and of course, basketball (it is an obsession in china among men and boys), and the setting up of a structure by which the elders (or at least middle aged) teach the children and young girls about the culture (something they are not so interested in learning). We spent our mornings going from household to household collecting information about the Hani culture, the dances, songs, clothes, ceremonies, and food. We wanted to find out who knew these things too, so that we could set up the village team that would go on training the younger ones. We took family photos of each family and if someone in the family had the traditional clothes, we asked them to put them on for the photo. This has become a very popular thing that we have been doing in all of our villages. Village families have never had photos of themselves, nor cameras for that matter. Most have never seen themselves in a picture, and ALL of them want the photos taken. We had only managed to take photos of about 1.2 the families last year and all of those families had them prominently displayed in their houses. Some of the team was designated to gather the children in the village and to take them to the community house to play and draw as a way of getting to know them. They went door to door and at first not many of the children would come, but as the days went by, more and more of them would arrive, and often their mothers or grandmothers would come too, many with babies on their backs. We had asked the head man's wife and her best friend, both of whom had the traditional clothes and knew the dances, to come one morning and show the clothes to the young girls. We had also put pictures of last years trip up on the wall. It was amazing. More and more of the women and children kept arriving, to learn and to look at the pictures of themselves and friends. There was such an excitement in the air. At first, none of the girls were willing to try on the clothes, but one of the university students REALLY wanted to and did, and you could watch the girls become more interested. Finally, one of the village girls decided that she too wanted to put on the clothes and have her picture taken. Step by step. But we have noticed that when the university students show interest in the culture and honor it, the villagers begin to see that it might be valuable after all, rather than just backward. When we were leaving, I heard the daughter of one of the two teachers ask her mom if she would teach her to do the embroidery. it was clear that she had never been interested before, even though she had to be about 35. It is an interesting process. We still don't know where it will end up-it is not known if a minority culture can keep itself from being absorbed into the mainstream culture. There is much of value to learn from these indigenous people and mainstream cultures are poorer without this knowledge. We can only give it our best effort.

In the afternoons, we worked on the ceremonial area. That consisted of gathering rocks from the mountainside with large chains of both volunteers and villagers passing rocks up the line. That task took a couple of days and then the rock had to be brought down in the one village truck to the area. But it was wonderful to see. There was such a team spirit. It was set up with one line of villagers and one line of volunteers and a third of villagers down the road a bit. The villagers would sing a song and then the students would sing one back to them. At one moment when there was a lull, a lovely mans voice floated around the bend from the third team, singing a traditional Hani song to us all. I find that there is something very special in this. The other task was to level a large area. It sound simple, but it wasn't. In both the rock gathering activity and the levelling activity, there were 60 or more people involved for several days. Each village family was required to provide one member for this task, plus all the volunteer team. We had only pick axes and hoes, and a kind of levelling blade made by the villagers and operated by one person pushing a handle and two people pulling on ropes in the front. We would hoe up mounds and they would pull the mounds across the area to fill in the lower parts. Ingenious!. It was gruelling work. We only worked in the afternoons, but the villagers worked from 10 to 5. They only eat 2 meals a day, one at about 9:30, the other at about 5:30. They are amazing workers, both men and women, and very, very strong. But our students, untrained as they are and having spent their whole lives studying, worked hard to keep up.

There were challenges too. Unbeknownst to us, the village was celebrating the New Year quite a bit earlier than the traditional Chines Han celebration, and thus occurring during our time in the village, meaning that 2 days would be lost on the building of the ceremonial area since the villagers would not be available to work. This meant that the project was not done when we left, something we really try not to do, because there is no completion for the team and for some it is very disappointing. We did however, get to celebrate with the villagers. Each family killed a pig on their front door step. In the house where we were staying, it was at dawn right outside our bedroom door. It is a screaming affair and quite unnerving to a novice to the practice. Every household was cutting up pig in front of their houses when we came to visit. Many gave us pork for our meals. The other thing that delayed our plans was that one of the elder women died the second night we were there. We had met her the first day. The students were quite upset about this and of course, the whole village had to stop everything it was doing to go to the funeral ceremony the next day and then the burial o the mountain. All in all we lost 3 of our working days. There was nothing that could be done about it. And for me, there was the physical challenge of hiking up and down the mountain, often on slippery, rocky trails. I fell twice. The students took to holding my hand on the steep places. I felt old and incapable and didn't like the feeling.

Each evening, the team had a sharing meeting where each person shared some special experience of the day or their feelings about something. Song Yuan had to simultaneously translate for a full hour and a half each night. She was a real trooper, and because we were sharing a bed also, we became friends. She was a great team member too. They also gave out an award to some outstanding effort to one of the team. One night they gave to me for inspiring them while we were working on the levelling of the ceremonial area. They told me that every time they wanted to stop, they would look over and see me continuously hoeing or moving earth and it would keep them going. They were amazed that I could do the work. Somehow, that softened the feelings I had been feeling with the mountain hiking. As the days progressed, more and more villagers would show up at our kitchen area after dinner. Some of them were practicing for the performance on the last night, others came to talk. There were mixed groups of volunteers and village young people working on a dancing and singing routine, while a mixed group of boys were working on a kungfu routine, I was working on an English song with a couple of the team leaders. One night about 8 young villagers and another group of about 6 older villagers stayed and we built a big fire to sit around together. Again the volunteers and the villagers took turns singing to each other. One man played a flute and another an harmonica. One villager sang us traditional Hani songs. We did Hani dancing around the fire, all of us together at the end. It was always quite dark when we finished, but this night we went on to have our sharing meeting, albeit a bit shortened. It was a magical evening.

Perhaps the saddest thing that happened on the trip was that it poured on the last night and we were unable to hold the final celebration everyone had been working so hard on. I feared that there would be a lot of moping around, but not one person did. They took it all in stride. The next morning we were to walk back up the mountain and out, a trip of 3 hours. It would make us late for our bus to Mojiang. But as dawn began 16 motorcycles and a 4 wheel drive SUV were waiting to take all of us out. It included one with the head man and the car was driven by the principal from the school in Kunming who had come to help. So, though there was no whole village gathering the night before with us, the generosity and gratitude of this village was expressed in another way- motorcycles!

Children's Art Class

Class on Traditional Clothes

Hani Girl and Volunteer