Rural teacher Bai Jirong serves as a guide for children in the mountains

?A guide for children in the mountains

-- The story of rural teacher Bai Jirong, who has been rooted in a mountainous area for thirty years

"Zhu Fuyuan, you've become prettier; Gu Jinhao, your homework is very well done." Praising children at the start of a new semester is a habit of Bai Jirong. In her eyes, children are like seedlings on green mountains, full of vitality. Bai Jirong is a rural teacher in Ganyu County, Lianyungang, Jiangsu. For thirty years, she gave up opportunities to develop in big cities and was content to be a guide for children in the mountains. She holds the titles of "National Model Teacher" and "Good Person of China," yet she still maintains a simple and unadorned pure heart.

????A small hillock welcomes an evergreen tree

A school building patched together from mud and straw, doors and windows on the verge of collapse, desks and stools missing arms and legs... This was the scene Bai Jirong saw when she first came to Dashu Village Primary School.

In August 1986, after graduating from Lianyungang Haizhou Normal School at the age of 21, Bai Jirong was assigned to Dashu Village Primary School in Heilin Town, Ganyu County. Dashu Village is located in a remote mountainous area, with poor mountains and bare ridges, and it was notoriously impoverished. When Bai Jirong walked into the classroom, the children excitedly gathered around her. It turned out that Dashu Village could not keep teachers, and before Bai Jirong came, math classes had already been suspended for half a semester. When Principal Xiong Fangmian told her the truth, Bai Jirong, who was born in a rural area, felt deeply desolate.

"Once a tree is born, it stands there and holds its ground for a lifetime, without complaint or regret. Let me be such a tree!" That night, under a dim kerosene lamp, Bai Jirong recorded the course of her thoughts stroke by stroke, tears blurring the handwriting.

From then on, Bai Jirong began life in the mountains, eating meals at villagers' homes and living in a broken warehouse. Teaching was even more difficult: there were no teaching references, so she traveled a long distance to the county town to buy them; there were no teaching aids, so she made them herself; when doors, windows, desks and chairs were broken, she led the children to repair them... The villagers said that these thatched rooms were looking more and more like a school.

Over the course of 30 years, teachers at Dashu Village Primary School came and went, left and came again, but only Bai Jirong stayed. Relatives and friends tirelessly urged her to develop her career in the city, and some even cursed her to her face as a "fool" or an "idiot," but Bai Jirong said, "The children in the mountainous area need me most." It was this belief that supported her along the way.

A "husband-and-wife sentry post" holding fast to the three-foot podium

In 1987, Bai Jirong met Xiong Chuanjing, who was also a rural teacher. The two shared the same interests and fell in love. After marrying, they had a son and a daughter, and the family was happy and complete.

However, this family once faced collapse.

"Jirong, let's go to Shenzhen!" In 1993, during the wave of people going into business, Xiong Chuanjing was determined to go south. "If you want to go, then go! I can't abandon these children." Bai Jirong refused flatly. In her heart, the future of rural children was more important than life itself.

The two had a big argument and parted unhappily. The next day, Xiong Chuanjing packed his bags and went to Shenzhen. After that, although Bai Jirong repeatedly wrote letters begging her husband to come back, Xiong Chuanjing remained unmoved.

It was a "disaster" that unlocked Xiong Chuanjing's heart. One day in May 1994, Bai Jirong was preparing lessons when a group of people rushed into the office carrying a child. Bai Jirong looked carefully and saw that it was her son, not yet three years old! It turned out that while playing, her son had accidentally fallen into a rushing river, and it was her student Xiao Xu, who had cerebral palsy, who jumped into the water and brought her son back to shore.

"There are such good children here. How can you leave? Come back, and let's continue to be a rural teacher husband-and-wife sentry post." That night, the letter Bai Jirong wrote did not disappear without a response as usual, but instead brought her husband back to the mountain village. At that time, the photo studio Xiong Chuanjing had opened was doing brisk business. He said it was the simplicity and kindness of the mountain people that moved him and made him willing to become a teacher again.

Bai Jirong devoted the best years of her life to the children in the mountains. She not only taught and educated them, but also formed a "caring support group," cared for disabled children, and served as a "caring mother" to left-behind children... pouring every bit of care into every child in the mountainous area.

Bai Jirong wrote in her diary: "For the children in the mountainous area, I am willing to be a ferry for a lifetime, sending students one by one to the other shore of their ideals." (Reporter Zheng Jinming of this newspaper, correspondent Chen Mianqing of this newspaper)