NGO Volunteers Help Tibetan Children

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The 39-year-old Hong Bo is from Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, an inland province in eastern China. She is a senior engineer at the first hospital affiliated to Anhui Medical University. A woman with a passion for natural beauty, she first saw Tibet in 2002 when she worked as a volunteer for more than a month in Kekexili, a desolate part of Tibet. An unusual encounter with a Tibetan family in Qinghai Province changed her view of the world. Traveling across the Gobi, the thirsty woman went to a Tibetan family to have a drink of water. To her great astonishment, she found the hostess of the family was a teenage mother with a baby. She learned that the girl from a poverty-stricken family dropped out of school at 9 and got married early and that the girl’s husband was only 16 that year. The young couple worked hard to support not only themselves but also a paralyzed father and a grandmother.

In the spring of 2004 she ran into two sisters at a Buddhist monastery while traveling in Gannan Prefecture in Qinghai Province. The two teenagers tried to sell some herbs to Hong Bo. After a chat with the two youngsters, Hong learned that their father had passed away and their mother did small jobs to keep the family together. So the sisters decided to help in their after-school time. Hong Bo decided there and then that she would donate a few hundreds of yuan a year to help the two sisters through high school. The two youngsters jumped with joy.

This experience opened her eyes to more Tibetan children like the two sisters. With the help of her husband, she traveled more from the summer of 2004 around the areas where Tibetan people live. She visited a lot of schools across Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu. She was shocked by the rural schools she saw. During her field study in 2004, she met with Liu Wei from Shanghai. The two hit off immediately when they talked about helping children out in the west. They agreed that the government couldn’t cover all the children from poverty-stricken families and that ngo volunteers had an important role to play in bringing timely and adequate help to these children.

In the winter of 2004, Hong Bo saw a posting about in a forum about an orphanage in Lhasa. The orphanage urgently needed cloths for the winter. Hong Bo and Liu Wei organized a donation and raised more than 10,000 yuan and padded cloths for the 60 children at the orphanage. The two laughed happily when they talked over phone about the orphans who finally received the cash and clothing.

Hong Bo then had an idea. She wanted to pair 100 children in the west with 100 donors to make sure that these children get through primary and secondary education. The duo designed a strategy. Hong was to put together a list of 100 children and Liu tried to find 100 donors. From the end of 2004 to February, 2005, the two women successfully put together 70 pairs. Then they ran into a financial problem themselves. Telephone bills were too costly. So they hit upon the idea of setting up a website for the charity work.

Yu Feng, a man from Dalian, a port city of Liaoning Province, answered the call. He had worked as a volunteer in Tibet. He bought a domain name at the expense of 4,000 yuan out of his own pocket and built a website. It was named

Azaleas Network for Children in West. Warm feedback flooded in as soon as the website went online. Another 30 children soon got linked up with donors.

Hong Bo received an urgent call in the evening of November 4th, 2005, about nine months after the Azaleas Network was initiated. A school principal in a remote area in Qinghai Province called to say that the region was being hit by a snow storm that had begun on October 15 and was still raging when she was making the call. The school was shut down. Moreover, fuel was about to run out and the children could die in the freezing weather. Twenty minutes later, a few photos of these children, taken by a teacher of the school at the risk of his life, were uploaded onto the forum. Hong Bo posted an appeal at the forum for help and donated 1,000 yuan first for the urgent relief operation.

Within a week, more than 30,000 yuan was raised and a lot of winter cloths were donated. With the money, 50 tons of coal and 5 tons of flour were purchased and four trucks were hired and loaded. Zhang Yali, a volunteer in Xining, the capital city of Qinghai Province, went with the trucks to the stricken area. The trucks rode two days and two nights under the freezing temperature of 30 degrees below zero before they reached the county. When the state weather bureau and the ministry of civil affairs jointly issued news release about the disaster-class snow storm, Hong Bo and the organization had already delivered the first batch of relief material to the children in the county.

This Azalea relief operation lasted a month and more than 20,000 people at the website chipped in. A total of 60,000 yuan in cash and 20 tons of winter cloths were donated and shipped. The operation was reported by Xinhua News Agency. The reporter was surprised to find that the timely relief work was done by a NGO web-based organization.

Azalea has a system to ensure transparent operations. After information about children in need is published at the website, donator can send cash directly to accounts of schools. Supervisors, recruited online, will be present when volunteers and schools distribute cash. At present, the NGO organization has work stations in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Ningbo. Volunteers in these cities promote their work at regular intervals. The organization aims to set up workstations in all major cities across the country in the next few years.

The “help children through school” target children from poverty-stricken families in the west. The care and love is given to children from these families no matter whether they are academically brilliant. Volunteers give top priority to the importance of all-around personality development of these children. They want these youngsters to face life with dignity, the most important quality for youngsters. Hong remarks, “We are not sure all the seeds will germinate, but we will never stop sowing.”

So far, the website has a network of more than 40,000 regular participants. The NGO organization has raised more than 10 million yuan to improve education in areas where tibetans live. More than 20,000 children have received aids and more than 200 teachers from these areas have received special training. Over the past few years, the website has raised and distributed materials and fuels worth 4 million yuan to remote western regions where winters are long and freezing.

In November 2007, Hong Bo was recommended as a candidate to CCTV for its annual program “People Who Moved China”. Though Hong and her organization were not chosen, the cause has been made known nationwide. Hong Bo took part in the Olympic torch relay in Lhasa on the morning of June 21st, 2008, a great honor to those who contributed to the nation.