Adapting to culture

Language was the biggest challenge for Ye, whose mother tongue is Mandarin, while the local people mostly speak Uygur. "It was challenging to get their trust because of our different appearance and the languages we spoke," he says.

During the past two years in Xinjiang, a strong-minded wealth creator with a disability, Wupuer, impressed him the most. The man's life should have gotten better as funds and technologies were ready to help him raise chickens. However, a pandemic lockdown of five months in 2020 cut all his hope. Without adequate forage and medicines, all he could do was watch the chicks die one after another.

"It was hard to communicate because he could speak very little Mandarin. When we visited his farm, he could only grab my hands, with tears in his eyes," Ye recalls of the time they tried to recover the losses.

Fortunately, with the support of more funds and a strategy adjustment, Wupuer became one of the biggest chicken breeders in the county, with revenue of about 400,000 yuan in the second year.

The project not only brought Wupuer access to wealth, but also a greater motivation to learn. He started learning Mandarin and now can communicate in the language without barriers.

"It was totally beyond our expectation that a person could change so much in terms of his living standard, and also his spirituality within just two years," Ye says, smiling.

Women's social status is also taken into consideration when selecting candidates. According to Ye, in the past, domestic inequality affected some local women, some of whom even suffered from domestic abuse.

"At the beginning of this century, there was no legal marriage and divorce in the region. Their marriage would be witnessed by a Muslim leader. When they got a divorce, women could only take what they carried with them," Ye says.

Thanks to legal popularization and ideological emancipation, the situation has improved. In addition, the project provides more economic support for women. For example, a local female wealth creator opened a dried fruit processing plant, enabling more women to work with their own hands.