Chinese students' outreach to BD children

William Zhou, Steven Xu, George Bao and Cindy Shao, four high school students from Jiangsu Tianyi High School and Wuxi No. 1 High School, China recently paid their second visit to Dhaka and were impressed to see the great improvement that has taken place in both the areas of city construction and voluntary organisation.

After their last visit during the Chinese lunar new year which attracted attention of the local government and the press, William, Steven and others of the team devoted themselves and succeeded in propagating through delivering, raising money through donations and even rebuilding and expanding the team in their local high schools. With greater support both financially and spiritually from China, the new team started their five-day visit from August 4 last.

George is one of the team members who had never been to Bangladesh. He said: "Mother Teresa once said that few of us can do great things, but all of us can do small things with great love. Indeed, for the first time coming to Bangladesh, I could finally realise the truth poverty is not just the deficiency of finance but poverty is the lacking in proper education.

Unfortunately, the truth is often hard to accept, but gladly all of us have the faith to make a difference, to change those homeless kids' life. Like what I told the press, now the education is their priority. We have already made the first two steps and we will not stop right here. I have a dream that in the bright future, each and every homeless kid in Bangladesh will receive quality education to change their life with their own mind."

One of the main sponsors of this programme, William, said:"This is my second visit to Bangladesh. After Mr Arian Arif, founder of Odommo Bangladesh Organisation, showed me their plan about the school they want to build for homeless and extremely poor children in the future, I thought it was very meaningful and want to do something to support him for this programme. So I found a website for money raising after I went back to China and raised RMB10,000 (about Tk 110,000) for this programme before this visit to Bangladesh. I really hope the children can have a happy life and a better future."

Both Steven and Cindy believe that their voluntary project won't end here, more work should be done to let more people in China and other parts of the world know the situation here in Bangladesh. He also expresses his hope more students in China would join them to help the homeless and extremely poor children in Bangladesh, since they can build a home for them out of love.