It must be the most ludicrously painful feeling in the world to wake up, surrounded by familiarities and strangeness lying on your bed, as if everything that you have experienced in the past 21 days is nothing more than a long, but authentic dream, seemingly so real that you wake up and you cry to sleep, hoping to relive every moment in your memory. You know this will happen, you know this will happen, and yet you just hate yourself because you cannot stop it.

Now, I am going to tell you my story in Raleigh China...

It was as any other summer programs that you have attended. You were welcomed by different people wearing the same logo T-shirt, with the big smiley faces and other bunch of kids, whom later you will call friends. We asked about where the others come from, how their flights are, why they choose Raleigh China, seemingly getting to know one other as if we have been brothers and sisters all the time for the first 3 days or so until we are officially classified into our own branches, called Tangos (named after the military communication code), where each of us began to stick to one another, nonchalant about the rest of the groups.

The environment that we lived in is quite different from that of the city. After waking up in the sleeping bag, you have to be quick for the felicity of breakfast before there is nothing left. Lunch time will be after the training sessions of the proper usage of the safety backpack, the proper treatment for snake-bitten accidents in the wild and military radio communication rules, which is ensued by a group review, time for everyone to share their own personal stories, break the ice between strangers and debrief his or her life.

For our daily facilities, we do not have hot water for baths nor do we have anything similar to a shower; instead, what we usually share with each other for a proper shower is a plastic tube delivering cold water to our body, which greatly truncated the shower time for each one of us boys (I guess it is the same for the girls). Our restroom is the worst and most memorable part of this experience in Raleigh China. Simply put, our toilet is nothing but a pit and a tube with a variety of shapes of human waste piling up the pit when more than one people are using them at the same time. For the sake of the stench and the scene, I lacked the audacity to use them just for the risk of falling into one of them and choke to death by what I cannot even imagine.

As part of the team, we are also in charge of certain maintenance of the main base including cleaning the bathroom part. Well, all I can say about that work is that I did not flee from it, even though every time when I looked at the pile of excrements creeping with flies and other little nasty creatures enjoy their moments on this suitable mountain, I coerced myself not to think about falling and drowning myself in one of them. Whenever I pour water into our toilet, there will be some of them being splattered out and cavorting around while eventually choose stay on the lower part of my pants, which is also the reason I refused to touch my boots after work. The last day we spent there and I was so happy that I can escape from this place and go to whatever new adventures that is presumably more enjoyable than what I am treated with right now. Sadly, I was wrong eventually about the last part.

To be perfectly honest, I am not even satisfied with the imaginable ease and effortlessness of our first task, the idea of which was substantially disproven by our fruitless result of not planting a single actual tree in the area designated as you shall see soon enough.

On our first day, we arrived at our destination by bus, which is driven at a frightening speed around the hazardous mountain. The zigzag road on which our bus is speeding both in forward and upward directions fits the topography of Gui Zhou perfectly. Thousands of the mountains thrusted into the clouds, around which the road is twisted with trees and cliffs as if a silk around upstraight old tree wrapped in wrinkled skin. As I recalled, the journey on bus was particularly refreshing when 40-50 people were stuck in a bus a little bit larger than a SUV with all our baggages and our monstrous equipments stuck together so smothering that we are left with no other options but to open the giant window and while precautious for not falling asleep and falling out of the bus at each sharp turn. After 3 hours of the excitements of such kind, we survived to our destination in the afternoon. Under the overwhelming bright sunlight, the world vastly broadened itself before us after we squeeze out of that claustrophobic tiny space of the bus.

The school was build entirely on the sloped side of a mountain. Living there makes you forget what it feels like to be on the flat ground, which also strangely created a delusion  of steepness when we came back from that lopesided world (as if a sailor coming from his old life on the boat). Beyond our original realization, the first thing that we greatly need to worry about is not the actual work assigned for us, but to survive in this foul place and make this place livid with humankind again.

Since the teachers and the students were all on vacations, the school should be abandoned no more than two months ago; the place looks disastrous. Dust, constant thickened dust piled up everywhere from the desk, chairs and floors, on which we later, in a great despair, found hardened excrements of unidentified creatures (possibly human) and on which numerous splattered, torn books and pages lay themselves unattended. The kitchen, where we were supposed to feed ourselves from, has became the natural nest for c***roaches. I have never seen so much c***roaches through the course of my life (admittedly and humbly 16 years) that they are nested in the every inch that is not exposed to sunlight. They are in the bowls that we are eating from, under the utensils that we were supposed to handle food with, swarmed in the cauldron that we were supposed to cook our food from, nested in the water pipes that what comes out of the pipe when you turn it on are living things, instead of water (I know this because I have tried) and our long unused bathroom is so fetid and overwhelmingly disgusting that I would not easily dare to use it, except under life-concerning circumstances. We, Alpha 2, began our 7-days work right in this pot of impediments which surely shall challenge all of our limits and preconception of living and survive.

The first day we hardly have fully recovered from the shock of all the discoveries made from yesterday; but now, we are going to fix this nasty place that is not due to our cause. Firstly, there are several categories of professions that we need to divide our people into: chopping the wood, which is the wasted desks and chairs (a fun process), starting the fire, planting the trees (which is far more complicated and gruesome than we thought it would be), feeding the people (the cook).

Chopping the woods or splitting and destroying the desks and chairs into pieces is pretty fun, although some level of violence and destruction is helplessly involved(which in turn in helpful in alleviating the pressure and distress I supposed?). Since we have got absolutely no tools other than the short knives, we all have to appreciate Archimedes for the lever principle that he discovered in benefiting us in means of destruction. If you go there and actually participate in such procedure in which we usually acquire our necessities for cooking and thereby, for life, soon enough you will find yourself on the verge of suspicious violent mania.

I was firstly selected as the "igniter" simply for the tiny portion of my past, in which I found myself extremely in favor of burning stuff and do so-called experiments. The approach that I had in mind and then actually did was later considered by myself foolish, inefficient, redundant and harmful in every possible detail; however, it is apparently not to be hided from my audience (if I ever have any).

With a heart filled with excitement and pride of professional occupation, I stepped into the pitch-black, charcoal-smelling room of iron (which is later the scent of mine) and sat down beside a pile of splintered pieces of former desks and chairs. Thinking: first, you have to ignite a small quantity of paper to further the fire onto small pieces of woods in the open air (not in the enclosed stow, for there is more air), and then using this fire source, you can spread the fire onto larger pieces and then larger and larger... until at one point you will have a pile of burning fiery woods, which ought to be the time when you slowly move the whole thing steadily into the stow, while at the same time turn on the ventilation fan. After that, you ought to see the wood successfully burnt efficiently under the fierce flow of ventilation oxygen. A seemingly perfect theory, and that is exactly what I did. A “simple” process theoretically taking several minutes, would then cost me three hours stuck with smoke and half-burning wood inside that abyss of eternal darkness. My eye are usually red, filled with capillary vessels whenever my eyes directly made contact with smoke and I felt my lungs were usually choked with particles of the smoke that I, from time to time, have to quit the job for fresh air; but when I came back, the fire would go off, leaving a pile of black, burnt, wasted woods and me standing right besides them.

Just while I was in doubt whether to continue such a harmful duty (as so far the only successful but stupid igniter in the team), I was saved by our team leader, whose former experience in being such occupation remains a mystery to me. Instead of all that redundant procedures, simple loads of paper plus loads of woods will do just fine. This renovation gave us a burning stove ready for cooking every time and everyone else also acquired the skill in a short time, though still incapable of dealing changes of circumstances. Just as how mankind has succeeded in the agricultural revolution, A2 has solved their meal problem and have more and more time to worry about their pending due date of their true tasks and, finally, I was being switched off with other substitutes yearning for the job.

Deep down inside me, I am perfectly aware of the fact of our powerlessness in changing anything in whatever unfairness that time has shaped into, between different people being born in different places. Even with that notion, there is absolutely no point in re-living your life if you came here merely for the purpose of re-living your life again; you have to aim for higher and make your own gain only a portion of what you have truly obtained from the program.

Bearing such faith in me, the second job had been proven far nastier than what I had in mind—simple process of digging holes, planting the tree and then burying the holes. Instead of flat ground of fertile soil, what awaits ahead is simply a pool half filled with dust on which flourished the plants and bugs of wilderness that has firmly connect themselves to the soil deep down below. With this barren ground and the stones deeply buried inside being the actuality and our seemingly depressing future, we carried shovels to the hill in the morning, repeating the similar movement of kicking our shovels into the ground and then unearth the plant along with its root with the incredible discoveries of stones of various hardness and size for 3 hours in the morning and 5 hours after lunch in the afternoon.

This lifestyle continued for nearly all the rest of the tree-planting project till we have fully prepared the soil for the second team to plant the actual trees. The work of digging roots seems extraordinarily tedious and unprofitable in prospective as well, especially when almost every time when you push the shovel firmly into the ground and what waits ahead is an even more demolishing sound and vibration signaling a new discovery of obsolete kind of rock. The promising hope of this boredom gradually abandoned us because this steps seems to be the step forever and all of our patience are being impaired piece by piece when there is just another rock down below your shovel. As I clearly remembered, at the end of this first step, the progress seemed so fruitless that all we did every day is laying and drooling on the ground without a sound, digging the dusts by our hands, unplugging each small root of wild grass bit by bit, as if the infamous Penelope has discreetly undid the huge web that we weaved by night.

The situation like this continued for several days and gradually we have turned the soil deeply buried underneath the surface up to the surface. Perhaps no one will believe that it actually takes so much effort to make the small changes like this; on the last day of our presence there, we are still busying ourselves cleaning the soils of all sorts of rocks, fully conscious of what the second team will think of all the work we have done: “You did not plant a single tree, and therefore, you have done nothing.”

After that long day of work, we all came back to our camp with our hands red and swelling. In the evening of that very last day before our departure, we sat together around the campfire all night without sleep, telling stories and feeling the presence of each other, trying to memorize every last detail of this lovely place that we saw as our home for the past week, the place where we have spilled so much sweat. I believe that is one of my more memorable moment of Raleigh China, the purpose of which, for me personally, is just friendship. Our first farewell with our camp cruelly reminded us of that pending day of departure that will tear us apart from each other’s presence, the topic of conversation which we have been avoiding ever since we started to love the presence of each other, love this team.

After a short dreamless night, we got packed in the morning and got on the same frivolous bus by which we came here. When I looked up in the sky, azure as ever, with the unborn sun still lay dormant in the warmth of the clouds, the breeze smells like morning. Under a still lingering doom of pale gloaming, we headed on our journey side by side and we will not turn back, knowing that tomorrow will just be as hopeful as ever.