HEADED EAST

Zoe Healy is on a mission. She has just eight weeks to find more than two hundred penfriends for students at the college in Inner Mongolia where she teaches English. Zoe joined the Inner Mongolia University for the Nationalities five months ago, after completing a sociology degree at Edinburgh University. She works in the city of Tongliao as an oral English teacher, using drama and conversation to help her 250 students learn colloquial English. "It's not easy for people in China to get visas to travel, and it's also very expensive, so they don't get much of a chance to practice the English they learn," says Zoe.

"At the beginning of term everyone sounded like a Jane Austen novel. It was all very formal, 'how do you do?' - and that makes it hard for them to communicate with native English speakers.

"Part of my role is to help them learn ordinary phrases, and to give them a chance to learn about the West by asking questions."

Inner Mongolia is officially a part of China. Most of Zoe's students are Han Chinese or ethnic Mongolians. All the students are preparing to be teachers themselves when they graduate.

It's a far cry from the gentle countryside of Cambridgeshire, where Zoe grew up in a Baha'i family. But she's thrilled to be living in China.

"I was 17 when the wall between East and West Germany came down, and like everyone else I was stunned to think that a whole way of life in Europe was coming to an end. Right away I decided to live someday in a communist country for a while, to try and understand life from that perspective. And I wanted to be somewhere completely challenging - as different to Britain as possible - and Inner Mongolia is perfect for both those reasons."

Travelling and working in education go hand in hand with being a Baha'i, Zoe says.

"Baha'u'llah wrote a great deal about the oneness of humanity, the equality of all human beings no matter which country or culture they're from. And to understand what this idea of 'oneness' means, I think you need to try and see the world from as many different viewpoints as possible, and experience different cultures and histories, to learn the true meaning of what it is to be a human being, before you can understand what 'one human race' might mean.

"Meeting people from all over the world is a little bit like learning that white light is made up of all the other colours - green, yellow, blue and so on, and to me that's a good allegory for a Baha'i idea of oneness, like a beautiful diamond flashing different colours.

"It's also a good description of my students. Baha'u'llah describes each person as 'a mine rich in gems of inestimable value', and that's what teachers should be doing - helping each person learn to think for themselves, and realise the tremendous potential they have."

If you know someone aged 18-24 who would like a penfriend from Inner Mongolia, you can write to Zoe at: mongolianpenfriends@yahoo.co.uk