Benefactor with big heart aids impoverished children
By Lu Feiran |
October 27, 2012, Saturday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
YIN Mugang, 68, a retired teacher living in Minhang, could teach everyone a thing or two about the true spirit of charity.
For decades, he has been involved in supporting needy students in remote, impoverished areas of China, like Qinghai Province. It's a personal commitment he has maintained despite suffering strokes in his later years.
Yin first became acquainted with the dire poverty in the western province of Qinghai after he graduated from junior middle school in 1958. At that time, Qinghai No. 2 Health School came to Shanghai to recruit students to help the province, and the 14-year-old Yin signed up immediately.
"I told my parents I wanted to respond to the government's call encouraging young people to go to the remote areas," said Yin. "What I didn't tell them was that I wanted to leave Shanghai to go out and see the broader world."
His youthful sense of adventure was in for a shock. Life in Qinghai wasn't what he expected. The semi-arid province, which holds the headwaters of the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong rivers and has an average elevation of 3,000 meters, hosts a fierce climate. What passed for streets were no more than rutted mud. Daily life was a subsistence grind. But amid all the squalor and hardness, he found great warmth among the local people.
Undeterred, Yin worked for the Qinghai Province Plague Prevention and Cure office for several years. He visited places like Huangzhong County, where most of the residents were Tibetans living under harsh conditions.
"The villagers were very friendly and kind-hearted," he said. "They filled bowls with buttered tea and presented them to me respectfully."
The plight of the children there wrenched his heart.
"They didn't have many clothes and the ones they wore were dirty and flea-infested," he recalled. "They didn't have toys. The livestock on the grasslands were their companions."
When Yin later returned to Shanghai, Qinghai had etched itself in his heart. He began working as an accountant and later became a schoolteacher, but he never abandoned thoughts of Qinghai. In 1993, when the government started Hope Project to help disadvantaged areas of the country, Yin signed up immediately and told project officials he wanted to help ethnic minority children in Qinghai.
Hope project
"I knew those children, especially the girls, would have little opportunity of receiving an education," he said. "I wanted to sponsor some of the students to help them overcome their family poverty."
His first sponsored child was Tibetan girl named Li Maocuo. She came from a family of six and was forced to leave school after the first grade to help at home.
Yin mailed Li a year's school tuition, and his sponsorship didn't stop until Li graduated from college. In 1994, Yin visited Li and her family. It was heartbreaking, he said, to find a skinny girl living a household that subsisted on practically nothing. To greet Yin in the Tibetan tradition, Li's father borrowed a hada - a piece of silk commonly used as a welcoming gift - and borrowed some barley wine for dinner.
The condition of Li's school dormitory was deplorable. Cold gales poured through cracks in the building, with the temperature dropping to minus 20 degrees Celsius on winter nights. Students with thin bedding huddled together at night to stave off freezing.
The school had no canteen, and students had to line up in the wintry outdoors to get a meager meal.
"I suggested that the school let students wait for their lunches in the classroom, and I recommended filling in the cracks to keep the wind out," Yin said. "Then I sponsored the construction of a small root cellar in the school to preserve vegetables for the students."
He also brought farm tools, seeds and other household necessities for the family.
Li eventually won a place in the Qinghai Province Normal University and now works as a middle school teacher in the southern tropical island province of Hainan.
"Yin changed my destiny," said Li, who visited her benefactor in hospital after he suffered one of his strokes. "Without his help I couldn't have even finished primary school. Someday, I will devote myself to helping needy children, just the way Yin did for me."
Li was not the only student Yin has sponsored in the past 20 years. There were others in remote rural areas of Yunnan and Hubei provinces who also have benefited from his help.
Although Yin now suffers a speech impairment from his last stroke, he still managed to visit students he is sponsoring last year. "I brought them tuition money and some clothes I collected from my relatives and friends," he said. "I couldn't just leave them neglected. That's just not me."
For decades, he has been involved in supporting needy students in remote, impoverished areas of China, like Qinghai Province. It's a personal commitment he has maintained despite suffering strokes in his later years.
Yin first became acquainted with the dire poverty in the western province of Qinghai after he graduated from junior middle school in 1958. At that time, Qinghai No. 2 Health School came to Shanghai to recruit students to help the province, and the 14-year-old Yin signed up immediately.
"I told my parents I wanted to respond to the government's call encouraging young people to go to the remote areas," said Yin. "What I didn't tell them was that I wanted to leave Shanghai to go out and see the broader world."
His youthful sense of adventure was in for a shock. Life in Qinghai wasn't what he expected. The semi-arid province, which holds the headwaters of the Yellow, Yangtze and Mekong rivers and has an average elevation of 3,000 meters, hosts a fierce climate. What passed for streets were no more than rutted mud. Daily life was a subsistence grind. But amid all the squalor and hardness, he found great warmth among the local people.
Undeterred, Yin worked for the Qinghai Province Plague Prevention and Cure office for several years. He visited places like Huangzhong County, where most of the residents were Tibetans living under harsh conditions.
"The villagers were very friendly and kind-hearted," he said. "They filled bowls with buttered tea and presented them to me respectfully."
The plight of the children there wrenched his heart.
"They didn't have many clothes and the ones they wore were dirty and flea-infested," he recalled. "They didn't have toys. The livestock on the grasslands were their companions."
When Yin later returned to Shanghai, Qinghai had etched itself in his heart. He began working as an accountant and later became a schoolteacher, but he never abandoned thoughts of Qinghai. In 1993, when the government started Hope Project to help disadvantaged areas of the country, Yin signed up immediately and told project officials he wanted to help ethnic minority children in Qinghai.
Hope project
"I knew those children, especially the girls, would have little opportunity of receiving an education," he said. "I wanted to sponsor some of the students to help them overcome their family poverty."
His first sponsored child was Tibetan girl named Li Maocuo. She came from a family of six and was forced to leave school after the first grade to help at home.
Yin mailed Li a year's school tuition, and his sponsorship didn't stop until Li graduated from college. In 1994, Yin visited Li and her family. It was heartbreaking, he said, to find a skinny girl living a household that subsisted on practically nothing. To greet Yin in the Tibetan tradition, Li's father borrowed a hada - a piece of silk commonly used as a welcoming gift - and borrowed some barley wine for dinner.
The condition of Li's school dormitory was deplorable. Cold gales poured through cracks in the building, with the temperature dropping to minus 20 degrees Celsius on winter nights. Students with thin bedding huddled together at night to stave off freezing.
The school had no canteen, and students had to line up in the wintry outdoors to get a meager meal.
"I suggested that the school let students wait for their lunches in the classroom, and I recommended filling in the cracks to keep the wind out," Yin said. "Then I sponsored the construction of a small root cellar in the school to preserve vegetables for the students."
He also brought farm tools, seeds and other household necessities for the family.
Li eventually won a place in the Qinghai Province Normal University and now works as a middle school teacher in the southern tropical island province of Hainan.
"Yin changed my destiny," said Li, who visited her benefactor in hospital after he suffered one of his strokes. "Without his help I couldn't have even finished primary school. Someday, I will devote myself to helping needy children, just the way Yin did for me."
Li was not the only student Yin has sponsored in the past 20 years. There were others in remote rural areas of Yunnan and Hubei provinces who also have benefited from his help.
Although Yin now suffers a speech impairment from his last stroke, he still managed to visit students he is sponsoring last year. "I brought them tuition money and some clothes I collected from my relatives and friends," he said. "I couldn't just leave them neglected. That's just not me."
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