11-year-old Xiaolong is a bright boy who lives in a Lisu village in Yulong County, Yunnan Province. Lisu Nationality, a minority mainly live in southwest China, whose people are famous for their skilled dancing and singing. In Xiaolong’s villager, every when big day comes, villagers will gather together, singing, dancing, and playing their special instrument. Growing up under such strong ethnic culture, Xiaolong also likes singing and dancing. "I dance when the music sounds. I like dancing”, said Xiaolong.

But such lively ethnic atmosphere started to fade away from his life since school life started. Like most of his schoolmates, Xiaolong lives in school from Monday to Friday, and goes back home only for weekends. Even though the majority students in the school are Lisu, they had rare opportunity to experience their own culture. The school is lacking in money to support any celebration activities. "We really want to sing and dance, if we can have some national costume to show our culture to more people, that will be great!" Xiaolong said.

Xiaolong is lucky, for his passion with Lisu culture touched his teacher Mr. He, who is also enthusiastic about the inheritance of ethnic cultures. To fulfill children's wish, Mr. He applied for support from World Vision. After learning and evaluation, World Vision donated some Lisu costumes to Xiaolong's school, invited specialist to hold workshop on costume knowledge and support the teachers and students carry out activities on Lisu culture in school.

Traditional Lisu costume requests for handmade decoration, which makes it too expensive for  ordinary families. For this reason, Xiaolong and his friends never have a chance to try on any costume. Therefore, since the very day that the beautiful costumes arrived in school, students all started to look forward to their ethnic celebration.

When it comes to Kuoshi festival, a traditional Lisu festival, Xiaolong took part in a Lisu fashion show with the costume donated by World Vision as representative of his school. He was the first model appeared on the stage, and his confident performance won him big applause. Xiaolong said, "I was nervous at beginning, but I really want to be on the stage for a little while longer". Mr. He said, "With these Lisu costume, we can take part in more activities like this in the future, so that we can let more people know about Lisu".

Not only the performance, themed workshop had also been brought to the school kids. After participating a workshop on Lisu costume, Xiaolong was very excited, and he said, "This is the first time we learned that there are so many knowledge lies behind our ethnic costume, such as the meaning of its different decoration. That is very interesting!"

Activities on ethnic cultures inheritance presents opportunity for Xiaolong and other Lisu children to know more about their culture, and bring them the sense of identity and belonging with their own ethnic. In the meantime, they are acting as the ambassador of their culture to let more people know about Lisu.

(Written by He Liyuan)