Wokai Blog: My journey into China's Southwest: Wokai China Microfinance Blog

This blog entry was written by Evan Kornbluh, our Wokai Fellow with ARDY in Sichuan.

Wokai Fellow, Evan Kornbluh

My name is Evan Kornbluh, I am a recent college graduate currently serving as a Wokai fellow at ARDY, Wokai’s partner organization in Sichuan province. I will be blogging about my experiences in Sichuan throughout the fall.

I've now been in Yilong County (???), Sichuan for just a couple of days, and while nothing particularly remarkable has happened the new surroundings have been overwhelming enough. It was a long haul to get here--a 29 hour train from Beijing to Chengdu followed by a 7-hour bus ride into Yilong. As the small bus followed the asphalt capillaries farther out of the city and into the mountains the slopes got steeper and the curves sharper. For the most part, I was struck by how frequently the roads seem to be maintained here. While some small patches were riddled with potholes, the road was for the most part smooth, and we frequently passed work crews repairing small stretches of pavement. Often the bus would approach an area where one half of the road was being repaired, leaving a stretch just barely wide enough for one vehicle to pass through. Once we approached one of these areas at the same time as a sedan from the other direction; a game of "chicken" ensued where both vehicles sped up toward the gap, not wanting to have to wait for the other vehicle to pass through. The sedan won, and we were left to wait in disgrace as it zipped around us.

The valley outside Jincheng

The scenery thus far has been absolutely incredible. As the bus takes a hairpin turn one is offered a momentary glimpse of steep green valleys, sparsely dotted with concrete dwellings. The hillsides themselves are quite heavily forested, with most actual farming taking place only at the bottoms of valleys and on small terraced patches on areas with shallow slopes.

A small terraced field outside Jincheng

The whole of Sichuan province itself is a basin—the center of the province is flat and quite fertile, able to support a large population. However, Yilong County is in the much more mountainous Northeastern part of the province. The landscape is generally quite steep, and as a result most of it is not suitable for agriculture. This landscape is one of the major obstacles facing rural development efforts in the area. In Jincheng ??, the former county seat out of which ARDY’s main office operates, this challenging environment is readily apparent. The town itself is literally built into the side of a mountain, and most of the roads are built on steep slopes. It is an environment unlike any in which I have ever lived, and one about which I still have much to learn.