Chinese seniors are still contributing their efforts towards the betterment of society.

THE sound of reading in English filled the air of Buchencun, a small rural village at Wujiang Town in East China’s Anhui province with slightly over 1, 000 families.

It was coming from a room of a single storey building.

In there, a silver-haired, tall and thin man was seen standing at one end of the room.

Behind him was a chalkboard written with English sentences and in front of him sat dozens of children of various age groups.

The man is Ye Lianping, a volunteer teacher who is still contributing his efforts towards society.

At 92, the retired teacher is still teaching five hours daily – three in the morning and two in the afternoon.

“I love my job. I wish the children could learn more about the outside world and have their own dreams using my limited time, ” he said with a sympathetic tone.

Most of his students are “left-behind children” whose parents are working in the cities far from home.

As of August last year, the Chinese Civil Affairs Ministry revealed that there are about seven million left-behind children in rural villages around China.

Ye and his wife live in another room next to the classroom. They have no children.

Every morning, he wakes up at 5am and prepares himself a simple instant noodle breakfast.

Then, he prepares for class, writing down his teaching materials on the blackboard with white chalk.

He has been repeating the routine for the past 19 years and has never taken a day off.

“I am racing against time. I may be speaking to you now and be gone tomorrow, no one knows how much time I still have.

“So, I want to spend it all on the children, ” he told Xinhua, China’s official news agency.

During the interview, two students walked in to borrow books and they greeted the teacher a good day.

“Did you hear what they just said?” Ye asked the reporter.

“The children greet me every time they see me. This is education.

“Teaching is just a means of education, its ultimate goal is to instil good morals and values in children, ” Ye added.

His efforts have not gone unappreciated.

The walls of the classroom are full of photographs he took with the children, thank you notes and letters from ex-students.

Born in Qingdao, Shandong province, Ye was forced to drop out of high school as he had to fend for his family during China’s conflict with Japan.

After the Japanese surrendered, he worked odd-jobs at the United States Embassy in Nanjing, where his father worked as a chef.

He was 18 then and worked for three-and-a-half-year, and this was when he learned English.

After that, he opened an evening school together with a few like-minded friends.

Ye arrived in Buchencun in 1978 after a friend recommended he take up a teaching post which had been left vacant for over a month.

After retiring, he continued providing home tuition free of charge for children.

In 2000, he took out his life savings of over 300, 000 yuan (RM180, 000) to open the “Home for Left-behind Children” at the village, converting a room at his house into a classroom to teach English while assisting students with their homework.

He also set up a foundation to help those from poor families.

So far, more than 1, 000 children have “graduated” from the home.

Apart from being a teacher, Ye was also their “nanny”.

He takes the children on educational tours, visits museums and science centres as well as to summer camps, during school break.

He also cooked for them and let them spend the night at his home.

“The children need me, ” Ye told China Daily, admitting that the poor quality of rural education and lack of volunteer teachers concerned him the most.

“Education is like farming; you simply need to plant the seeds without thinking too much about its yields, ” he said, adding he would swallow his last breath on the teaching podium.

As word of his good deeds spread, more and more undergraduates come to the village to teach during school breaks.

In the southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, another 92-year-old man was giving free essay-writing classes to children.

Known only as Teacher Song, the retired teacher has volunteered himself at four schools, providing three to four tutorial sessions per week over the past three decades.

Each class has about 50 students.

He also sent the good essays he came across to various newspapers and had more than 1, 350 of them published.

“I will continue to do it as long as I can still walk and talk, ” he said.