Students in remote Yunnan area take to the air on radio

Top: Students at Wujie Primary School are all smiles while holding the nameplate which says “Mountain Village School Radio Station.” Above: A student anchor conducts an interview with her fellow student at the school radio station for a live broadcast.

“WE will tell our stories to the big mountain and to Shanghai friends 2,500 kilometers away through the radio,” exclaimed a student from the Wujie Primary School Radio Station.

Thanks to the joint efforts of Shanghai’s Jiading district and nanhua County, which falls under Chuxiong Yi autonomous Prefec-ture in southwest China’s Yunnan Province, the radio station in Wujie Town of nanhua County was launched recently at the Wujie Pri-mary School, with the first special program broadcast smoothly.

Preparations for the radio station started in July. The project lasted nearly five months from the selec-tion of school, the procurement of equipment, the installation of equip-ment and lines to the opening of the station in nanhua County.

in mid november, the volunteers who helped to build the radio station flew from Shanghai to Yunnan.

The volunteers also held a launch ceremony for the radio station, where the headmaster formally accepted the nameplate of “Wujie Primary School • Mountain Village School Radio Station” and hung it on the exterior wall of the broadcast room.

anchors from Shanghai and Chuxiong, together with two young anchors from the Wujie Primary School, Zhang Xueqi and Xia Long-da, hosted the first program of the radio station.

although the program lasted only an hour, it took four hours to record.

“during the recording, the chil-dren talked about the sound in the mountains, their interests and hobbies, unforgettable little things and their imagination of the fu-ture,” recalled an anchor from Shanghai.

The Wujie Primary School Radio Station is one of Jiading’s public welfare projects to prepare campus radio stations for schools in remote areas.

“We will also set up online train-ing courses related to broadcasting, so that the school with the complete sets of equipment for broadcast-ing stations can have the ability to collect, edit and broadcast radio programs,” said an official with the Jiading district Party Construction Service Center.

“This is also the original aspiration of the public welfare project, which transforms donation to schools in remote areas into supporting the construction of hardware plus train-ing, so as to promote the all-round development of children there.”