In late 2014 I signed up to Volunteer in China with the Scottish educational charity Project Trust after leaving school. As a very quiet kid in class this was a wholly unexpected decision, but it’s one of the best choices I’ve ever made. It gave me the space to grow and explore before I headed on to the next adventure (for me, university). I was placed in Xinjiang province, volunteering as a TEFL classroom teacher for Grade 8 students at Karamay Number 7 Middle School.

This is a personal blog, and therefore all comments and opinions are my own, not those of Project Trust.

I kept a weekly blog of my exploits, as well as occasional Travel, Culture, and 5 Things posts:

On this page:

The PT Journey

I found out about Project Trust in a school talk towards the end of my lower sixth. Initially, my interest was piqued at the mention of teaching in Japan (it was a phase, what can I say). The idea took hold – I think subconsciously at first – that it was something I might like to do; if nothing else, I reasoned, Selection Week sounded like a lot of fun, and it would be an excuse to visit the West coast of Scotland. Little did I know then, that I would end up in Edinburgh for University…

• Sep. ’14: Selection

  Calum and I were on the same course, so we flew up to Glasgow together, and took the train to Oban a few days before the ferry to Coll. The youth hostel had a volunteer special rate, and from the converted-church attic lounge we greeted the attendees as they arrived.

  What can I say about Selection? As little as possible, I should think; part of the fun was turning up and figuring things out on the fly. They kept us busy all week, and while I suspect that the spectre of constant surveillance kept some people on their toes, the jam-packed schedule was so much less intense than my usual academic workload that it honestly felt like a holiday. I felt comfortable just being myself: if I wasn’t a good fit for their programme, pretending to be someone else to get through Selection wasn’t going to help.

  On the penultimate night I remember rounding up as many volunteers as were willing to come stargaze with me – the sky was so clear I could scarcely see the constellations for the stars.

• Oct. ’14 – Jul. ’15: Fundraising

  Rumour has it that this figure increases every time John Fraser loses at cards, but when I went through we had to raise £5,900 before attending our projects. I was offered a provisional place in China, and following many, many lists of Pros and Cons, I decided to go for it. A word of advice: any University worth your time will wait. And that’s the tea.

  Raising close to six grand in – by this point – less than ten months, was a somewhat sobering task, but PT had plenty of advice. My first steps were to design a leaflet, negotiate prints-for-ads with a local printer company, and then write to as many potential charitable trusts as I could find.

  

  Consolidating those efforts into a single graphic like the one above is almost irreconcilable with the crushing weight I remember feeling at first, but I can say without any doubt that it was only possible because I had my family and friends behind me. Words cannot express my gratitude! Those Trusts really pulled through – and in April alone I made almost £1,000 from just two events; before Christmas, I’d barely broken the £200 mark.

• Jul. ’15: Training

  Training was a blur of nerves and excitement – I remember cycling through both extremes daily. As well as taking in as much as possible to prepare me for China, there was the social aspect: I’d just met the ~30 people I’d be shipping off with for the next year of my life, and wanted to make a good impression.

  But! It was a huge amount of fun: it felt in line with what I thought I’d signed up for, and left me eager to get out there and start teaching. I also met my volunteering partner, Tom. The only thing yet to warm up to was Karamay, in the desert – not least because everyone else had reams of information, but our info-pack seemed to be cobbled-together generic statements from other projects (believe me that we compared notes with other pairs). Our predecessors left us… nothing.

  Overall, Training was a chance to meet the China team, a crash-course in practical TEFL, a class in culture-shock 101 (write home, don’t call; explore, rest), and what to do if things went wrong (fluids, fluids, fluids!).

• Aug. ’15 – Jul. ’16: Placement

  I’ll stay quiet here – my Weekly blog covers this part! But I’ve made a timeline to outline my year at the bottom of this page.

• Aug. ’16: Debriefing

  Debriefing was a change to unpack, around one month after returning to the UK. We got to see the India volunteers too (with whom we had Training, back in July 2015), and share our experiences from the year we’d had.

  This was far from my last experience with Project Trust! I signed up to become a Returned Volunteer, and continued delivering school talks and attending careers fairs around Scotland during my degree. I also signed on as a fundraising mentor, a scheme from which I would have loved to benefit – so it felt appropriate to take part, having gained so much from my own experiences!

Karamay

It’s also very dusty: it’s in a desert. In Winter it turns white under feet of snow, but only for a few days (before a team of cleaners sweep every road and path clean). Once the resulting snowdrifts finally clear in the Spring (which lasts about two weeks, before full-on Summer), everything is lush and green; by late Summer (or as we Brits call it, early Winter), around the time of year I first arrived, everything is yellow-grey from the dusty desert Summer winds.

I fear that I gave the impression of being always keen to leave town, but the truth is I wanted to see as much of as many places as possible. In the first few months, we knew very few people, and it seemed just as well to me to go South to Kuitun, or even Ürümqi, and meet up with other volunteers. You could live in the most interesting city on Earth, but with no-one to share it with, I could still have more fun in a run-down backwater. Which is to say nothing against backwaters, except that on surface levels they are often judged the most harshly.

Karamay is off the beaten track, and probably holds little of value for tourists. But there was so much comfort in its familiar streets and battered apartment blocks: I really wish I’d had two years, or more, to get the measure of it. Plus, once we properly met the expat community (small enough to fit in a single room, as they did on many occasions), every day was a party!

A postscript, especially concerning comments in the previous paragraph, knowing now what I do: it is sobering in the least to learn what was happening not miles from where I lived, blissfully unaware and supremely privileged. With my English perspective, there was inequality and rampant racism, but nothing of the scope or scale that has filtered into Western media reports since I think 2018. I actually returned to Karamay and Xinjiang – still ignorant – in the Summer of 2018, and really all I can say is that I believe what we are hearing. Sure, everyone has a bias, and every state has an agenda. But the stories and reports from individuals are in line with everything I saw and everything I heard when I was there. Listen to those that have actually been. I hesitate to write this, but, Xinjiang is so different to the rest of China that even a Chinese national who has not personally visited or lived in XJ probably does not have more authority on the conditions there than another foreigner who also has not personally been.

Travelling

The two main holidays during my year were in February and July; I tend to retrospectively refer to them as Winter and Summer travelling, but the former was the Chinese New Year, when schools break for around a month (instead of two weeks at Christmas), and the latter coincided approximately with school Summer holidays.

The slider below offers an overview of my Winter and Summer travelling routes. In the Winter, I fled South with Calum to trade Xinjiang’s average -20˚C, for the relative comfort of low-to-mid 20s; in the Summer, the Xinjiang volunteers explored our adoptive province before finishing our year with a boozy fortnight up the East coast.

The first Weekly post for both sets of travels are below – there’s no point in me telling the same story twice!

My Year, in Brief

• Setting Out

  AUGUST 13^TH

  A-Level results day – meet at Heathrow at 3am, to fly to Beijing (via Amsterdam).

  See The Day That Would Not End.

• Beijing

  AUGUST 14-31^ST

  Our theoretical induction and practical crash-course: Mi Yun Summer Camp.

  Weeks 1–3.

• Xinjiang-bound

  AUGUST 31^ST – SEPTEMBER 1^ST

  A baptism-by-fire of long-distance rail – all 32 hours of it.

• Autumn in Karamay

  SEPTEMBER – JANUARY

  Settling into our new digs in Karamay. Highlights include the October Golden Week (a national holiday), Christmas in Karamay Fukang, and experiencing high-speed rail for the first time.

  Weeks 4–22.

• Winter Travelling

  JANUARY 13^TH – FEBRUARY 28^TH

  Where to start? If memory serves, the answer is: a night on the floor of Ürümqi railway station. Such fun!

  Weeks 23–29.

• Karamay Comes Into Its Own

  MARCH – JUNE

  Semester 2 of the academic calendar! We really feel at home and get to know our neighbours. The colour run for Calum’s birthday and school trip to Gansu province stand out for me.

  Weeks 30–45.

• Summer Travelling

  JUNE 24^TH – JULY 27^TH

  A Xinjiang farewell tour which ends in Beijing, with all 27 volunteers.

  Weeks 46–50.

Videos

I filmed a lot during my year, some of which ended up in a set of videos, on YouTube. I tend to put them to a soundtrack, so much of it has since been restricted on the platform, but I include a few that can be viewed below.

–TJC