Without a decent road, he remembers, one person died while holed up at home, too ill to make the difficult journey to a hospital. In a bin above the main room, Li has corn stored for the winter. The floors are dirt, and there is no running water. A bull he uses for plowing stays in an attached room. Li now teaches at the school, and 52 children attend.
Many students now can.
And now we have education about how to protect the environment. Normally outspoken, Deng turns noticeably red when the subject turns to the earlier confrontation over fishing nets. The government taught us to think the villagers had to obey us. We thought the reserve belonged to us. Then it was easy to change.