Islands nation a staging post for aid

A Chinese volunteer puts her shoulder to the wheel in the Seychelles

Liang Yikun says she feels lucky she was the only engineer among 18 volunteers sent from Guangzhou to the Seychelles last year. She has found the one-year experience rewarding.

Assigned to project budgeting for the country's Ministry of Land Use and Housing, Liang says she budgeted 22 projects on her own and took part in four major projects, including the largest primary school in the 115-island country.

She also wrote invitations and notices for tender, analysis reports on thoses tenders and progress payment approvals in her voluntary work, which ended in September.

Liang, 33, says that at the start her boss at the ministry felt she did not appear to be fully up to the task.

"I was asked whether I knew the British Commonwealth system (in project budgeting) when I met him for the first time. I was lucky that I had learned about the system at my Hong Kong-invested company. He found my English was fine."

The boss decided Liang would start with small projects.

Liang says she applied for a whole set of the series Standard Method of Measurement of Buildings 7th Edition and memorized the general requirements in projects in the first three days. Minor changes to the code are applied in Seychelles.

With little professional training, Liang started to work on her fourth day at the ministry.

She displayed her ability in discussions of other projects and was later allowed to work on projects on her own and assigned jobs outside project budgeting.

Among the projects she was involved in, which included offices, roads and landscaping, Liang says she found work with hillside shanties the most remarkable.

Houses were set up on poles and wrapped in iron sheeting, and many of them toppled in floods at the end of last year, she says.

The ministry was called upon to renovate or rebuild several hundred such houses a day. Liang says she had to work overtime to cope with the work, which involved bumpy rides in a four-wheel drive to do field work.

She worked with many volunteers and expatriates from other countries at the ministry, she says.

There are too few subjects on offer at the local university, and the country lacks talent in project budgeting, she says. Some locals study construction-related subjects overseas but don't return to Seychelles, she says.

The shortage of such talent is all the more the pity considering that plenty of building projects are in the works, she says.

Liang says that while the main island of Mahe, on which she lived, is blessed with eye-catching scenery, living there posed many daily challenges.

Since most of the food items in the Seychelles are imported, prices are a lot higher than in Guangzhou, she says. An egg cost 2 yuan when supply was tight. Vegetables and fruits were often two to three times the cost of those in Guangzhou, and at one stage tomatoes were selling for 40 yuan ($6.6) a kilogram.

Water supply is rudimentary, Liang says, and seven of the Guangzhou volunteers had to share one tap in their living quarters.

When she applied as a volunteer, she told her mother, who had done social work and voluntary work, but kept it from her father, thinking he might object.

"I had read news reports about the project before and found it interesting. I thought it would make sense for me to put my knowledge to use in this way."

Over the year, Liang says, the job helped her broaden her outlook.

"I used to be restless and complain a lot. I realized that some people are less well off than I am, but they soldier on."

As a deputy team leader, Liang also helped arrange outings and parties of the Guangzhou volunteers and a visit to a nursery home.

Liang's team included a Chinese teacher, a music teacher, a piano teacher and 14 medical workers.

Fu Yajing took 70 percent of the bus routes on Mahe to teach Chinese at 13 primary and middle schools.

The doctors had nearly 80,000 patient visits over the year, which is just 6,000 less than the population of the Seychelles, and performed 1,250 surgical operations, says Xiong Guanhua, the team leader.

Lu Bin, a community doctor, was stationed alone on another two islands for three months.

Since 2007, 88 volunteers have been sent from Guangdong province to Africa, according to Guangdong Youth Volunteer Action Guiding Center.

liwenfang@chinadaily.com.cn

Above: Liang Yikun at work. She says being a volunteer helped her broaden her outlook. Below: Liang with other volunteers on the construction project. Provided to China Daily

(China Daily Africa Weekly 11/01/2013 page29)