“YYGS has equipped me, someone who comes from a small city in the east coast of China, with a global vision and an open mind. YYGS has changed me from an individual who mostly focuses on personal affairs to an actual builder and leader of a community, to someone who can bring about positive influences to people around. YYGS has also inspired my academic passion in literature, in reading, and in the discovery of mankind and humanity.”
A few days after YYGS, I arrived at a special forest school for volunteers located in a secluded Tibetan village in a mountainous region in Sichuan, China after a ten hour flight. In the ten-day volunteer-experience, I learnt about Tibetan cultures, religions, and geographies and dug a canal to mitigate the lack of drinking water in local areas. There I met Huajiao, our peer mentor at the school in the forest. Apart from lecturing us on Tibetan religions, minority groups, and demographics, Huajiao fluently spoke to us in three languages: Mandarin, the Tibetan dialect, and English. From his lectures, I could see that Huajiao valued piety and regarded the Tibetan divinity with utmost sincerity. He led a pastoral life and I could see that he loved and contributed to the land that nurtured him. He was like many other virtuous Tibetan boys, yet he wasn’t that ordinary. Having grown up in the plateau of Qinghai, China, this young man possessed qualities that each pious pastoralist possesses. Yet because of his father’s fortune and his family, he moved to Chengdu, the most economically prosperous city in Sichuan Province, for some years and received a high-quality education. I was impressed by his vision as a plain shepherd in remote villages and a modern, globally-minded young citizen. He told me that he was still inclined to peaceful and tranquil pastoralism rather than the metropolis despite years living in Chengdu’s center. Huajiao told me that according to his faith, every individual in this world can be seen and comprehended as the accumulation of one’s habit, experience, and culture.
I also believe that this concept makes everyone unique and makes every YYGS attendee unique. I am shaped by people around me: my parents, friends, and my school. In some senses, I believe that YYGS is cultivating community builders who can influence a larger population. In the end, I envision that when the spring softly arrives, the breeze gently blows, and the snow and ice in the mountain thaw into verdure, and highways reopen, I will revisit the place and, this time, I will become a community builder.