CONNOQUENESSING — It's not unusual for recent graduates to have to move away to take that first job.

What is unusual is when the move is nearly 8,000 miles.

That's the distance Merritt Wuchina, a 2008 Butler High School graduate, will cover when she leaves Tuesday to take up a two-year teaching stint in Yunnan province in southwest China.

The daughter of David and Robin Wuchina of 130 Sunset Drive is packing for a trip she expects will take nearly three days of air travel before she arrives in Kunming City, where she will be tutored in the Chinese language and classroom techniques before taking up her assignment to teach English to grade school children.

Wuchina, a 2012 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in English writing and anthropology and a certificate in global studies, said, “Actually I found out about it online through my Web searching. I had been tutoring students with the Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council. I just really enjoyed that, and I decided I wanted to look for opportunities to teach English abroad.”

She found her opportunity with Teach For China, a global nonprofit that works in the United States recruiting teachers from both countries.

“Students in China are required to learn English in the third grade. That is the problem, there aren't enough English teachers,” Wuchina said.

She said there is a gap in the educational opportunities between rich and poor Chinese, and the agency seeks to remedy that by finding English teachers for rural schools or schools in high- poverty areas.

“I think she is ready for this. We certainly will miss her,” said Robin Wuchina, an English teacher at Seneca Valley High School. “I am excited for her.”

The Wuchinas became familiar with China through David Wuchina's job as an English integration teacher at the A.W. Beattie Career Center in the North Hills.

David Wuchina said the center has been working with the Confucius Institute in China for the past six years, bringing 22 instructors here from China to be language teachers.

The Wuchinas said the teachers meet at their house during holidays and one, Shen Xing Hua, lived with them during the summer of 2009.

“I asked her if it was that program that kindled a desire to go to China and she said yes,” said David Wuchina.

“I've been taught more about Chinese culture than I think most Americans have had a chance to learn about it,” Merritt Wuchina said.

She's been trying to learn the basics of the Chinese language before she leaves.

“I have been studying Chinese on my own. Teach For China strongly encourages us to learn Mandarin Chinese,” she said.

“It's a tonal language,” she said. “There are four tones that change the meaning of the word. Once you train your ear to hear it, it's not that hard.

“Musicians pick up on the tones easier. Their ears are a little more attuned to those inflections,” she added, hoping her years of playing the saxophone will pay off in her study of the Chinese language.

She said she will receive language training in Kunming City and teacher training in Baoshan before being assigned a teaching position somewhere in Yunnan province.

Wuchina expects to be living in a hostel for training and then live in a dorm or apartment during her teaching assignment.

She believes her teaching assignment will be in Kunming City, a center of six million people, known for its manufacturing, universities and green policies.

“It's biggest export is tea,” she said. “When they say 'All the tea in China,' this is where they mean.”

Right now she is packing and loading up on over-the-counter medications such as Pepto-Bismol and vitamins that might be difficult or expensive to get in China.

She said she is looking forward to her teaching assignment. “That's what I wanted to do, connecting with the kids and getting to know the local people,” she said.

The Chinese schools let out for July and August, she said, and there is a 10-day vacation in February for the Chinese New Year, but rather than come back to the U.S., she said, “I'd really like to travel through China. I have friends in other cities in China.”

She said those friends include people she met through the Beattie Center and through her language tutoring.

Asked if they have plans to visit their daughter in China, her father said, “We don't yet, but we have thought if she doesn't come home next summer we are talking about visiting if it all goes well.”

She said after two years of living in China she may become proficient enough in Chinese that she might then have the option of teaching Chinese in the United States.

But her main focus right now is on teaching English in China.

“It's a lot different from studying abroad because I have a job to complete,” said Wuchina, who spent five months in Argentina in 2011 while a student at Pitt. “I have to uphold my responsibility to the children.”