Gansu

My service trip to Gansu, along with middle school classmates, brought me to Gansu, where I went into western China and saw true poverty for the first time.
On the trip, we went to a school for disadvantaged children — there we were tasked with teaching English, handing out donated supplies, and visiting their families. The economic conditions were dire in Gansu: many lived in mud houses, there was inadequate medical care for the sick, and there were frequent droughts that year that destroyed many crops.
In Gansu I realized that poverty cannot be simply quantified with statistics; people cannot be captured through numbers alone. With this in mind, I sought to display the human stories of optimism and resilience which I saw all around me.