Corruption

Last night Ned and I went to eat dinner with our Pakistani friends in their dormitory.


Their dorm rooms resemble an American dorm: two beds, a tv, a table, a bathroom, two closets, small shelves. On each floor there is a kitchen for cooking. This is much more than the Chinese students have. They live 6 to a room, without a tv, table, private bathroom, no showers at all in the building, minimal closet space, and no kitchen.

Our Pakistani friends: Jackson, Harry and Sufi made us a large, wonderful traditional Pakistani meal including chicken kabobs, roti--a flat bread, rice, this tasty spicy chicken tomato dish, pakoras--spicy potato patties, and a salad of tomatoes and cucumbers. We sat on two twin beds pushed together and ate the big meal on the bed.

We inquired about the life of Pakistani students. They all study medicine. There are about 100 of them. How much do they pay for tuition? What do they learn?

Our questions were met were shocking answers. The Pakistani's pay more than 10x the amount of tuition than Chinese students do. They study "medicine" but in three semesters they have only been in a lab half a dozen times. Their teachers speak poor English, so they can't understand them, and since their books are in English, it is very important to understand what their teachers are saying. If they have a question, their teacher cannot explain himself properly in English, so he writes their questions down and answers them in the next class. In this way, they lose a lot ot time. They also say that they are taught entire books that are supossed to take one year to teach, and they are taught all the information in a matter of 24 days! Nobody learns anything, and of course they have complained, and they've taken their complaints all the way to the Vice President of the university, only to be met by the Foreign Exchange Director, and threatened that if they open their mouths again, they will have their visas revoked.

There are many other small problems, such as some students want to live off campus. One, because it's cheaper. Another because they are Muslims, and must take care in preparing their food a certain way. Eating from the mess hall is no good for them because they have too many restrictions on what they can eat. So, the director tells them they must get permission from the police, and the police tell them they must get permission from the school, but when they tell this to the school, nobody cares enough to take their concern seriously. So there is really nothing they can do.

We calcuated that with 100 Pakistani students, paying $5,000 dollars a year for tuition, not including fees and dorm, that the director makes half a million dollars a year! The students are not learning anything, except how to speak basic Chinese, and they feel too guilty to tell their parents back home because they have sacrificed so much to send them abroad for an education. Their parents think they will come home, and be doctors, but my friends are terrified of the future, because they know they haven't learned anything, and they must pass a big test in Pakistan to be doctors, and they really have no preparation or experience.

Ralph, one Pakistani said, "So what we will do is kill a lot of people in hospitals. We don't know anything except for theory." Of course he was kidding, but only slightly.

Really, what they are studying could be called, biology--but without the proper labratory experience.

Sufi said, "Sometimes we call ourselves prisoners. We are stuck here. We can do nothing."

They make the most out of it though. They learn Chinese. They play ping-pong, and cricket. They learn to cook for themselves, and wash and iron their own clothes. They make foreign friends, sometimes girlfriends.

I feel sorry for them though. What corruption. The more experience I gather about Chinese institutions the more corruption I find.