The Children
"My teacher, can we touch the cloud?"
"My teacher, you know, I live at the foot of the mountain, Sometimes, I can feel the cloud is very near to us and then I will try to touch it, yet it runs to the top of the mountain. But once I reach the top, it runs away again."
"My teacher, we can see the cloud is very small just like a quiet thing, Yet it runs away after a little while."
We will have a total of 80 children enrolled once there is enough money to build dormitories.
Brief introduction of the 48 children studying at school at present is as followed:
Age: from 5 to 13;
25 children are orphans or children without care from parents;
10 children from one-parent family;
13 children whose parents suffer from sicknesses such as deaf-mutes, blindness, paralysis, cancer, accidental, disabilities, psychosis or are stricken by poverty or unable to go to school;
One handicapped child.
By the end of 2006 we plan to have some 32 children enrolled at the Sen Ji Mei Duo Charity School in Qi Zong, Yunnan. Another 48 children will be able to go to school after the second dormitory is built with the help of your donation.
In the meantime, we have 32 students now living at the school. These students hail from ethnic Tibetan regions of Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.
Like the first group of students, future children will first undergo a health check at the Zhongdian State Hospital in nearby Zhongdian (or Shangri-la as it is now known). The teachers and other professional staff who work for the charity school must also undergo health checks. The school will register for certificates of innoculation and disease prevention certificates after the students receive the required immunizations.
The children are now getting used to living their new lives in a new environment. The teachers have spent a lot of time with the children to teach them many new, positive habits like personal hygiene and thrift. They now know how to wash their hands, how to throw rubbish into the dustbin, how to turn the water faucet on and off, how to blow their little noses, how to fold up their quilts.
In the first two weeks of their new lives, the teachers help them to clean their dormitory spaces and sleep in the dorms to help them get acclimated to the new environment.
Today, the students and the teachers are now used to each other. Now, even the teachers are learning from the students how to speak their local dialects. They dance and sing, joke and play together when not in class.
The students, of various ages, are attending classes in mathematics, Chinese language, Tibetan language and English. Physical Education, Art and Music classes are arranged on a daily basis.
Classes will be arranged accordingly following enrollment of a total of 32 students. For example, roughly half of the students can spell and pronounce words in Tibetan, but they cannot write in their own language and must start from the beginning.
Most of the students learn the Chinese language phonetically. About four of the children can read or write Standard Mandarin.
Most of the students will learn basic math from the very beginning, and the same goes for English.
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