Students lend helping hand to less privileged peers
Print Edition
Instead of playing computer games or hanging out at the shopping mall, more and more young people dedicate their spare time to a more meaningful cause. With the best intentions in mind, they travel to faraway countries like Kenya or to remote areas in Hunan Province, give free English lessons over the Internet or send text books. Their goal: To help their less privileged peers and their communities, while getting a better grasp of their own privileges.
SPARK
SPARK, a non-profit organization founded by high school students, aims to improve English education of children in rural areas in China which will help them boost their competitiveness on the labor market. The volunteers, most of them from China, the US, Canada and the UK, don’t travel to teach, but attend the classroom through online conferences, making it possible to help out at a rural school throughout the year.
Kitty Zheng, a Shanghai United International School Wanyuan campus student who is currently a volunteer with the program, holds English lessons for students from an elementary school in Yunnan Province once a week. The Grade 9 student says she’s deeply passionate about the program and enjoys working with the other 30 students in the group. Tasks are split up. While Zheng teaches, others are responsible for collecting donations or marketing.
“At the school where I’m teaching, there are only a few English teachers with good pronunciation and handwriting, and the students’ sense of English is poor,” Zheng says. “Usually, a Grade 3 student still can’t recognize the English alphabet properly and even when they reach a higher grade, they have only one English class per week.”
Besides teaching English, the program also supports the school with essential hardware such as computers, projectors and English textbooks. During the summer holiday, the volunteers offer one-on-one online classes.
Financially supported by Boston Education International and China Social Assistance Foundation, SPARK started a year ago and is still small in its scale. Less than 100 volunteers work with the charity, and the majority of them are students of Shanghai’s best high schools. Recently, SPARK held a grand first anniversary party in order to raise awareness and to attract more student volunteers, as well as expert volunteers from foreign companies.
“This is not just English teaching. We are also stimulating those children’s interest and curiosity about the rest of the world,” Zheng says.
Just For Kids
As a student charity and donation group, Just For Kids focuses on sending books, letters and songs to students in less developed regions in China. More than 200 students at Liucheng School in Gansu Province’s Longnan City benefit from this group. Set up in March, JFK now has more than 20 members who are dedicated to send their helping hands. They gathered more than 2,000 books from different high schools and local communities in Shanghai and have already sent 1,000 books to Zhongxinwan School in Lijiang City, Yunnan Province. Members with a passion and talent for music have composed a song called “You will know” that is meant to encourage poor students. The group also appeals to students to write letters and share their ideas. “I hope our little help will make a great difference for the students who have bad studying and living conditions,” says Yu Jiayue, founder of the group and a Grade 8 student at Gezhi High School International Division.
Me to We
This summer, a group of volunteers joined the Jiangyong County Culture and Environment Restoration Project in Hunan Province to learn about local people’s heritage. They got insights into Nushu women’s script, which was secretly developed by women at a time when education was only accessible to men, helped fix dilapidated alleyways. Although Managing Director Annie Zhang says that Me to We China should be seen as an “idea” rather than describing it as an NGO or and organization, the nine-day trip to Hunan costs about 16,500 yuan (US$2,550).
Me to We also organizes pricier trips for teenagers who want to visit a developing country. Before they get on the plane, they are taught some basic information about their destination. Students who booked trips to Kenya, for example, were told that water there can be unsafe to drink, and that it can cause fatal disease. Me to We says that the trips help students understand that charity is about more than just donating money, but that it is a process that demands leadership and true commitment to the cause.
During the trip to Kenya for example, students help set up a school building in the hopes that it will then be operated. Although Zhang does not know if the schools are staffed with teachers, the experience has left Chinese students with a feeling of having achieved change.
“Although it was tiring, we loved to do it for the poor children and when I thought of that, I was proud of myself,” says Xu Tianyang, who has already attended three Me to We Trip events.
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