Projects

This project is to buy a reaping machine for 160 households in Tagrig village to alleviate their works and financial burden as well as family living condition.

Funds needed: $7,560 (51,625rmb)

Kajee Gyal is from Tagrig Village, Shar Long Township, Guide County, Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, China. She completed an associated degree in English at the Qinghai Normal University Nationalities Department English Training Program.

Project location

Tagrig Village is a semi-nomadic village located in Shar Long Township, Guide County, Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, in PR China. Tagrig Village is about 8 kilometers from Shar Long Township, and it is around 143 kilometers from Shar Long Township to Xining city.

Population
There are approximately 160 households and 868 people in Tagrig Village: 320 women, 368 men and 180 children.EducationIn this village, 20 percent of the people are literate (not including students). Most of the people went to primary school and then stopped going school. Ninety percent of children are attending school; there are 17 university students, 5 high school students, 10 middle school students and 60 primary students. On average, one child in each family attends school currently. Some students did not finish their high school education because their parents cannot afford their school fees. If a family has a high school student, then her or his parents need to pay 2,500 RMB for her or his tuition fee for one year.

Cash income

Ninety-six percent of villagers are farmers and 4 percent of villagers are students and government officials in Tagrig. The local villagers plant barley, wheat, potatoes and beans and also raise domestic animals such as pigs and cows. On average each family owns seven mu of land (1 mu = 0.0666 hectares) and most families own only one cow. The villagers produce butter and cheese from the cow’s milk, but because of the hot weather, there is not enough grass to feed the livestock, and they don’t produce much butter and cheese to sell.

The first way of earning cash is from migrant laborers. Adults who are able to work usually go to urban areas and do constructions work for two or three months during the summer. One person can earn up to 30 RMB per day (women can earn 25 RMB and men can earn 30 RMB per day); however, the work is very dangerous, and we have heard of many people injured or killed from construction work.

The second way to earn money is to dig caterpillar fungus. The people mostly go to Golok Prefecture, which is approximately 200 kilometers from Tagrig Village. On average one person can earn 3,000 RMB from digging caterpillar fungus. In 2007, the government established a new policy, which does not allow people to dig caterpillar fungus anymore. The policy is aimed at protecting the environment, and anyone who breaks this rule is strictly punished by the government. Since the new rule was implemented, people prefer to work near the city and no longer go Golok.

Herding Tagrig Village is a farming village; most of villagers own a few livestock. An average, each household owns one cow, one pig, and one sheep. These animals are used for milking and meat. Agriculture Tagrig Village is the biggest village in Guide County, and villagers do not have enough fields. Many of the fields are arid farmland, so people do not have extra wheat to sell to others. In addition, there is not much grass on the mountains due to the lack of rainfall.Project goals The immediate goal of this project is to buy one reaping machine for 160 households in Tagrig Village, and alleviate their burden.The overarching goal of this project is to improve all the villagers’ living conditions, and alleviate villagers’ work and financial burden.Problems• No income: Ninety-six percent of Tagrig families are total farmers, and majority of them can‘t earn any money from livestock. As a result, most of the Tagrig villagers depend on their land to subsist. However, the village is located in a place where the rainfall is very low. Therefore, villagers often don’t have enough water for irrigation, making it hard for them to farm the land. Also, since the villagers need to spend lots of time on harvesting, they can’t go out to earn extra money. In addition, they have to wait for the village’s public threshing machine to thresh their crops after they reap all the crops by hand. Because there are only three threshing machines for 160 households in Tagrig Village, all the villagers have to wait their turn. This process is very long, and the villagers need to spend 25 days threshing their crops. The villagers would like to hire a reaping machine to reap and thresh their crops at the same time, then use the extra time to go to an urban area to earn money. But the problem is they can’t get the reaping machine during the harvest time. Finally, all of the family members have to work together on their field by hand, which takes around two months. If they had a reaping machine, then it could reap and thresh at the same time and they wouldn’t need to do extra work.

• Time consuming: During the harvest time, people often spend more than two and half months reaping and threshing crops. In Tagrig Village, each subgroup only has one threshing machine to thresh all the crops, and often the village has electricity outages caused by the poor quality of the electrical lines, which can mean many hours of delay for the villagers. Sometimes there are sudden storms that soak and sometimes even destroy all the crops. Then the villagers have to wait three or four days to dry the crops, and if it takes too long then there is the danger that the crops will go bad, decreasing the village’s agricultural productivity and putting the villagers in a difficult situation.

• Heavy labor: Harvesting is a very big workload for the villagers, but especially for the women, as this village’s custom is for the women to do all the reaping. Frequently they get up around 6 a.m. and spend 14 hours a day harvesting. During the day, the weather is very hot and many of women are exhausted from their day’s work, but they still have to do the housework, such as cooking, taking care of children, etc. In addition, after they collect their crops in their yards, both men and women need to work in thick dust to thresh the crops. The women have to carry grass to the caves for storage and also throw crops in the air in order to clean or separate the grain. Then they have to dry it on the ground by carrying the crops on their backs, and then again they have to collect crops at sunset. They do all of this work by hand.

• Health problems: As mentioned before, villagers need to spend a large amount of time harvesting, and women need to work whole days from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the field during the harvest period because of the shortage of workers. Because of the hot weather, they need to drink cold water a lot despite the fact that a local doctor suggested local women not drink cold water. So local women have health problems, such as stomachaches, backaches, headaches, and sore limbs from bending in the fields for so long every day in the heat.

• Limiting educational opportunities: During harvest time, many households want help from their children who are attending schools. So they often take their children out of school, which makes students more stressed and causes them to get lower scores. As a result, their chance of getting into middle school is lower, because the middle school teachers select students depending on their study scores in primary school.

Benefits
1. Help villagers to earn income:
If Tagrig villagers get a reaping machine, they will be able to spend less time on the reaping and threshing. In that way, villagers would have more time to spend seeking work in urban areas to earn income for the families, thus improving their families’ conditions.
2. Reduce time: Tagrig villagers could save time by using this machine, because this machine would reduce the time that they have spent reaping and threshing in the past. Also, if they are able to do the reaping and threshing quickly, then they won’t need to worry about crops getting wet or being destroyed by a storm.
3. Alleviate heavy labor: If Tagrig villagers had this machine, then they wouldn’t need to reap and thresh the crops by hand, which would not only can reduce the heavy labor in the fields, but also save the women lots of time for finishing the housework earlier and having some leisure time.
4. Improve health: If they had this machine, it would help local women to improve their health, because it would reduce the amount of time women spend in the hot weather. Also, since they wouldn’t need to work whole days in the field, they would not need to drink as much cold water, which could be an important factor in improving their health.
5. Education: If the villagers had this machine, parents wouldn’t need to interrupt their children’s studies. So children could improve their scores by using their time to study, eventually increasing their chances to go to a better middle school.

Beneficiaries
This reaping machine would mainly help 160 households in Tagrig Village. On average each family has five people, and the total population is 868.

Gender equality
During harvest time, all the village women are responsible for reaping their fields in the hot weather. According to the village’s custom, men do not join in this kind of activity; they are only responsible for collecting the barley and wheat from their fields with a handcart. But women and girls need to reap, collect wheat and barley, and dry rapeseed. These days it is a common for some female middle school students and college students to return late to their schools during harvest time, because there is so much work to do. It takes approximately two months to reap and thresh their crops. If the harvest was completed in less time, then female students could go to school on time; and it would also alleviate the labor burden on the local villagers, especially women.

Government approval
Every year the local government gives some almsgiving to Tagrig villagers, such as barley, but it cannot solve their financial problems and also it cannot reduce their heavy workload. If we can secure funding, the government fully supports the implementation of this project. The project manager asked permission from Shar long township government leader Huakejia to implement the project and he supports this project wholeheartedly because they really want this project to happen and hope all the poor families become rich.

The steps of project:
1. Ask villagers about the problems they face by meeting with locals and the leaders. (Done)
2. Collect data from Tagrig Village for this proposal. (Done)
3. Find out the price of the machine. (Done. The machine costs 75,000 RMB)
4. Take pictures and write proposal.
6. Receive funds.
7. Purchase machine from an agricultural machine factory in the city of Danyang in the Jiangsu Province with the village leaders.
8. Distribute the machine to the villagers and give them instructions for using it correctly.
9. Have a meeting with the village leaders about the sustainability of the project.
10. Take photos and interview the villagers about the impact of the project.11. Submit final report.Time FrameThis project will take 11 days to complete.

Four days: Purchase machine from the city of Danyang in the Jiangsu Province and transport it to the Tagrig Village.
Six days: Tell the villager leader and subgroup leaders about the sustainability of each machine and how to use them. Take photos and let them write a letter of thanks to the donor. Hold a meeting for all the villagers and let them know that every year I will visit Tagrig and interview them about how the harvest is going.
One day: Interview the beneficiaries of the project.

Project Finance

Total donor contribution is 51,625 RMBLocal contribution: Each household contributes 150 RMB to this project; the total in RMB is (160 households) × (150 RMB) = 24,000 RMB

Project sustainability
This machine will have positive impacts on both women and men. It also can be a long-term alternative for all the Tagrig villagers to improve their living conditions year by year. Moreover, this project is supported by both villagers and the village leader. They see this as a beneficial project that will reduce their burden. In addition, they will not sell the machine, because the machine will be kept by Khajee Gyal and the village leader, and we will keep the machine in Tagrig Village’s public house. We have already chosen a good quality reaping machine in a Xining agricultural factory, and the factory boss told us he guarantees repairs on the machine for at least 10 years, so during that period we won’t need to pay money for repairing the machine. In order to make sure he keeps his word, we will sign a contract when we buy the machine. Every year Khajee Gyal, the project manger, will interview the villagers about the impact of the project, and report the project outcome to Shem Women’s Group.

Map of the project location

Photos

This is a deaf man called Lhaqianjia who is from Tagrig Village. There are only three people in his family: his sister, brother and himself. Because of their poverty, none of them are married now. When he was 15 years old, he got a disease that caused him to become deaf. At that time there were medicines to treat his illness, but because of their poverty, they couldn’t afford the treatments.

This is an aged blind women called Laguoji from Tagrig Village. She has a daughter, but no husband; because of their poverty, her daughter herded livestock for another family in order to fill their stomachs. In 1998, she left her family and went to urban area, and her mother Laguoji still doesn’t know where she has gone. However, some kindhearted villagers help her to do her work, such as reaping the field, threshing crops, drying wheat, and so on.


This is a 70-year-old woman from Tagrig Village. She has a son and daughter-in-low in her family; all of her other daughters and sons are married and they have their own families. Her granddaughter is a primary school student, and her son is still not married. There is no cash income to augment their family’s living condition, and now her daughter-in-law may not be able to continue her studies.