By Cali Bagby

Jessica Burton has hundreds of memories from her time in China, but one that sticks out is teaching a young blind girl to play basketball. As the girl shot and missed the net for nearly a half-hour, other students came to cheer her on.  Finally, the ball went in. The crowd went wild. Another girl, who lived an extremely impoverished life, said to Burton, “It makes me so happy that someone that has so little can achieve something so amazing.”

It made 17-year-old Burton look at the world differently – with new-found perspective.

“I really grew,” Burton said about the year she spent in China teaching the blind and poor minority Chinese students at the GuiZhou Forerunner College in a rural province of southern China.

Her parents, Nigel and Anne Burton, have been volunteering for the China Red Cross for the Blind – Bright Angel Fund for years. In the last two years, they have worked to build the school and help fund tuition. Opened in 2011, GuiZhou is the first college in China that is not government operated, but has official degrees recognized by the ministry of education.

Anne said it may be hard for blind students to get a job even if they graduate, but the Bright Angel Fund is working with international companies like Microsoft to set up work possibilities.

“The biggest problem in China for blind kids is that they basically get education up to middle school,” Anne said. “In poorer provinces, there are two problems: poor kids don’t go to high school and secondly for blind kids there is not a blind high school and exams there [similar to the American SAT] are not in Braille.”

And for the crucial first year of the school, the whole Burton family, including 14-year-old Sophie, relocated to China to help.

“More blind students need a lot of staff, part of the building was still under construction. Volunteers are needed to make sure the environment is safe,” Anne said. “It was complicated … we needed to be there for the first year.”

And in the school’s debut 300 students including 32 blind students were in attendance.

For the Burtons, living abroad was nothing new. They had lived in Beijing previously, but the rural and isolated mountain landscape of the school’s location created a set of new challenges. A nearby chemical factory often exploded, which cut off the Internet, and many sites were blocked by the government, making long-distance school studies for the girls difficult.

On top of a full course load, Jessica started training to become an instructor and spent 15 hours a week in the classroom with students older than herself. Jessica was a sought-after volunteer because of her fluency in Mandarin and ability to read and write Chinese characters.

In January, the family took a break and returned to Lopez. The girls re-enrolled in school and Jessica helped organize a high school dance, donating the funds to GuiZhou. When a Chinese student there had kidney failure, the funds went toward her surgery, which inspired other GuiZhou students and the community to chip in what little money they had.

The student survived the surgery and is now back at school.

The connection between China and the island grew even closer when students from Lopez visited China on a recent trip and volunteered at the school.

Now back on Lopez, Jessica hopes that she can help the relationship between the island and China grow by focusing her senior project on the college.

There are many lessons she has learned from her time in China, but now that she’s sitting at the desk instead of standing at the chalkboard, she appreciates the hard work it takes to be a teacher.

“I can’t believe how much time is put in and how much of your life is given to the students,” she said. “It’s amazing that someone takes on this job to help others grow.”

For more info, visit www.forerunnercollege.com/en/.