Keep poor kids educated in school in China

Since this is the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016,I think it is proper to give a brief summary of the Hometown Education Foundation has done during 2015, see the attahed file or our webite  for detail 

http://hometowneducation.org

 Here is one student we added recently (one of   1026 students we support during 2015-16).  Menglan  is a 8th grade girl born 2002. She used to have a happy and financially secrure family with her parents, her younger sister, and her grandparents (on her mother side). Unfortunately,  her father died suddently and her mother could not accept the fact and became mentally ill.  To make it worse, her grandpa was fired by his company due to  old age. Now only her grandma works as a street cleaner to support the family of 5. Our little supportof 1000 Yuan RMB (a little more than our usual 800 Yuan RMB a year) is essential to keep her in school to continue her very basic middle school education. 

 Here is another student Baofeng  whom we have supported since  our start at 2004.  Her mother was handicapped and her father was often sick with stomach pain and was found to have stomach cancer. During the summer of her elementary school graduation (6th grader), her father fainted while working with her at field. She had to carry  her father to a local hospital (extremely hard, see the attached photo when she was between 4th and 5th grade---summer of 2009). It was immediately tranferred to the county/city hospital where he was found to have stomach cancer. She stayed at the hospital to take care of her father day and night for 17 days, while her disabled mother had to eat the same vegetable available for 17 days due to lack of money and other difficulty. Despite all the these difficulty and her poor academic background, she worked extremely hard with our support and was able to be accepted by a  second level university last summer. It was really hard earned but she was considering not going to college. Instead she wanted to work to help her family (she started immediately to work after high school graduation). I was very happy to be able to convince her  with another volunteer's help (also a poor student we supported but now coming back to support us with donation and volunteering), she decided to go to college to give herself a higher platform and better opportunity to support herself and her family four years later.

A little support makes big difference to the poor kids who have so little.  It also inspires them to feel more confident, less isolated, to do better and work harder, and to become more caring themselves. Please check our webpage 

http://hometowneducation.org/letters.html

for their letters, and 

http://hometowneducation.org/photos15-1.html

and links there for Professor Tonghai Yang's annual visit to some of the students. Please be assured that 100 percent of your donation (except the  extra  fee GlobalGiving charges you) goes to the needy students.

Links:

• Google search Hometown Education Foundation

• Baofeng's letter in August 2015---English trans. (DOCX)
• 2015 Hometown Education Foundation Summary (DOCX)