In the ten years since the Belt and Road Initiative was proposed, it has not only brought benefits to the people of the countries along the route, but also pushed the world towards the beautiful vision of achieving common prosperity and building a community with a shared future for mankind. During this period, a large number of young people from Chinese-funded institutions worked hard in foreign countries, sweating and contributing to the joint construction of the Belt and Road.

Wang Chao is an employee of China Civil Engineering Group East Africa Company. Since March 2021, Wang Chao has been the deputy project manager of the fifth bid section of the Tanzania Central Line Standard Gauge Railway. The project connects Mwanza, the economic center in northern Tanzania, and Ithaca, an important transportation node in the central and western regions, with a total length of 249 kilometers. The project camp where Wang Chao and the others are located is 150 kilometers away from the nearest big city.

Wang Chao said that construction like ours mainly belongs to infrastructure, and it directly faces the African grassland. In some particularly wild places, basically there is no ready-made water, no ready-made electricity, and no ready-made residence. We have to solve these problems by ourselves. It is also very common to encounter wild animals outdoors. We were driving at a project site, and we met elephants and rhinos on the road, and we passed through the site directly.

Wang Chao took a group photo with local workers at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Ubengo overpass project in Dar es Salaam

2023 will be Wang Chao's 11th year working in Tanzania. From railways to overpasses, from the presidential palace to laboratory buildings, he has participated in the construction of many local infrastructure projects. Overseas infrastructure projects often involve a large number of parties, which can exercise people's communication and coordination skills. At the same time, they need to learn how to adjust their own rhythm when they are working thousands of miles away from home.

Wang Chao said that the biggest growth is to learn how to communicate with all kinds of people, to understand them, and then to coordinate their work. As an engineer in Africa, you must know how to adapt to loneliness, how to adapt to your environment, and integrate into it to form a unique way of life.

During his eleven years in Tanzania, what impressed Wang Chao the most was the restoration and reconstruction project of the Tanzania Central Line meter-gauge railway. The Tanzania Central Line meter-gauge railway was built in 1888 and is one of the important transportation corridors in East Africa. The railway has been in disrepair for a long time, which has greatly affected the ability of the railway to serve the needs of the local people.

Wang Chao said that the originally designed speed of this railway should be more than 70 kilometers per hour, and it can only be driven at a speed of 30 kilometers per hour. In places with bad conditions, it may be possible to drive at a speed of 5 kilometers per hour. Sometimes they take a bus from Tabo It may take 3 or 4 days to travel 980 kilometers to reach the city, which is unimaginable in China.

Wang Chao conducts project environmental safety and social responsibility training in the Tanzania Office of the World Bank in Dar es Salaam

When he first arrived in Tanzania, Wang Chao worked on the maintenance project of the central line meter gauge railway. From May 2018 to the completion and handover of the project in early 2021, Wang Chao served as the deputy project manager of the Tanzania Central Line Meter Gauge Railway Restoration Project. It can be said that he spent about half of his time working with this dealing with railways. Wang Chao also witnessed how the railway was revitalized.

Tanzania is an important country for China and Africa to jointly build the Belt and Road Initiative. Since 2013, driven by the concepts of sincerity, reality, affinity and sincerity and the spirit of China-Africa friendship and cooperation, China and Tanzania have insisted on extensive consultation, joint construction and shared benefits, and strived to achieve high-standard, sustainable, and people-benefiting goals, and made solid progress in various fields. Practical cooperation. Wang Chao said that in the 1970s, China aided in the construction of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, which left many Tanzanian people with a good impression of China and the Chinese people. With the improvement of engineering construction equipment and technology, it is the direction of overseas project builders in the new era to help the local area train more skilled workers who can adapt to modern engineering construction.

Wang Chao said that now it is a new concept of overall project management, and it also has very strict safety and quality requirements. How to help the local society in the process of doing projects, train skilled workers who can adapt to modern construction, bring them better technology and better ideas, so that they can operate more advanced equipment, and use the latest technology to build To execute the project is a very important task when we are doing projects now.

Thanks to the Belt and Road Initiative, more and more overseas projects have given young people like Wang Chao more opportunities to grow. Wang Chao said that the national policy and the platform provided by the company have given me a chance to display my personal talents, which is a rare opportunity. In the course of my work, I have also gained a lot of friendship with local people, and I have established a deep friendship with many local people. This is a very good harvest.Editor/Ma Xue