Local Chapters Coming
Fact Finding Tour
Why We Care
What We Are Doing
Our Volunteers (Chinese)
Local Chapters
are Coming
The SOAR Foundation continues to make dramatic progress. In its first year (1995-96) the program was largely built on the initial endowment of the founder. In its second year, thanks to the efforts of our volunteers, the Foundation more than doubled the number of scholarships awarded, from 260 to 627. By November 1997, our list of supporters has grown to 362.
The time has arrived to reshape the Foundation's organization in keeping with its growth. Many of its members are eager to pitch in and help while the scale of operations begins to tax its existing staff. To meet the goals of the Foundation, its Board of Trustees has decided that chapters are in order. To launch this program, it has established a South Bay Chapter. Other chapters in East Bay and in San Francisco are in a preparatory stage. In the meantime, the Board of Trustees is exploring the possibility of chapters in New York and in Vancouver, Canada.
To accommodate the role of chapters, the Board of Trustees has adopted amendments to its by-laws. The program of the chapters will be coordinated by the main office in San Francisco. The scholarship award activities — solicitation and evaluation of scholarship applications, disbursement of the awarded scholarships, matching of sponsors and students — will continue to be administered centrally. Major policies will continue to be set by the Board of Trustees. However, local chapters will serve a valuable purpose in membership drives, fund raising, and mentor recruitment activities, while maintaining close liaison with the main office. Periodically, they will submit operation reports to the central office and at the annual members' meeting.
T.Y. Shen
On September 14, our Program Committee chairperson, Faith Chao, led a group of seven SOAR volunteers on a twenty-four day fact finding tour to China. They were joined by the local liaison person in China. The following is an abbreviated version of their report about the tour. A video film of the tour is now being edited and will be available to members for viewing.
The principal aim of our tour was to determine whether our scholarship funds were in fact accomplishing our mission of enabling needy and deserving youths in rural China to obtain a fruitful education. A secondary aim was to offer the scholarship recipients personal encouragement and support. The tour took us to Helaar, in the far north Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Wuzong in Moslem Autonomous Region in Ningsha, and Anshen in the Southwest province of Guizhou. After our visit we feel that there is no question that the recipients are first rate students. They are also poverty stricken and are able to attend schools only because of our scholarships.
Due to time and financial constraints — we paid for our own expenses during the visit and covered great distances — we were only able to meet about thirty scholarship recipients, including members of Han, Mongolian and Hui ethnic groups. Some of us were able to find the students whom we mentor. A point was made not to contact the students before the visit, so that we would have an opportunity to observe the living and studying conditions unhampered by staging. When we reached a city, we left the hotel after breakfast and hired a van to go straight to the school where a SOAR scholarship recipient is studying. We called on the school principal to explain our mission. In every case we were warmly received, and the scholarship recipient was summoned to the principal's office. The meeting began with some nervousness, but all of us soon relaxed as we presented a shirt to the student as a momento and started to discuss the life of the student. Usually this led to an emotional response from the student. How the pressure of livelihood and the concern for further education were suddenly lifted as he or she received the letter of scholarship award from SOAR! And how, suddenly, he or she — often orphaned or from a broken family — was blessed by the emergence of a new loving uncle or aunt, nay, angels, from some distant land!
After viewing the school work and the transcript of the student, we were taken to the dormitory with its bare accommodations. In many schools the only furniture were rows of double bunks, with no hot water and no bathing facilities. Generally these seventh and eighth grade students live in the dormitories, going home once a week. Often we were also taken to their homes. The scenario of their families living in ramshackle shacks on bare subsistence food again and again reduced all of us and even the teachers to tears. The photo on page 1, for example, shows the beans and potatos which serve as two week food supply for the student in Inner Mongolia.
The lives of these students and their families are beyond the imagination of all of us with the fortune of residing in the prosperity of the United States. In Inner Mongolia we met a twelve year old girl, whose father works in the oil field in Da-qing. Her mother has been missing for seven years. She has a younger brother. When the remittance from her father is missing, she borrows money from her neighbors to stave off starvation. Yet she is always the best or the second best student in her class. Even in this environment, she dreams of growing up to be a writer, using her pen to express the power of man's indomitable courage. SOAR has been able to enlist the famous Bay Area author, Ms. Yue Li-qin, to serve as her mentor.
The most poverty-stricken place we visited was in Guizhou. Our van traveled on a muddy, bumpy narrow road for two hours before we saw a flag pole in the distance. That, at last, showed us where the school was. Both the roof and the walls of the school building are full of cracks. The room is warmed by coal stoves, which have blackened the walls. One of the students we visited there lived with his father. They are shown in front of their home in the photo below. The only "furniture" they have is a plank of wood balanced on a tree stump. The student sleeps on the few wooden planks on top of a pig's sty. The deepest impression of our trip was the farewell accorded to us by another student at the end of our visit. Pouring rain, and the girl, tears and rain drops on her cheeks, stood alone while waving us goodbye.
What We Are Doing
December 1997 was a very busy and exciting month. The mission assigned to us was to recruit enough mentors for a total of 627 scholarship recipients. It sounded exactly like the PBS annual TV pledge, "one month left and still 500 students to go." The difference was that we did not have the beautifully printed T-shirt or Peter, Paul and Mary CD to give away. All we had was word of mouth and the enthusiasm of the volunteers. My fax machine received batches of new names from Hu, Pai, Chao, Tan daily. At the receiving end I felt so excited, it was like getting mentors for myself! By Christmas Eve we had matched mentors for more than 400 students. To avoid delay we sent a form letter to the other students. On one sunny Sunday a platoon of volunteers gathered at Pai's home and set up an assembly line: writing letters, copying labels, stuffing envelopes, sealing envelopes, accompanied by laughter, teasing and story telling. In four hours the work was done. Next day I carried the box of letters to the post office; I felt I was carrying a box of precious jewelry!
By now all the students should have received their first mentor letter. We still need to find mentors for the 200 students who have only received the form letters. If you know some one who would like to serve, please call Shirley Chen (650)494-7075.
Under a new initiative, membership fees and donations are separated. The annual membership fee is now $15. At the same time, we undertook a drive to seek donors who would pledge an annual contribution of eighty five dollars per student for six years. The pledge supports the scholarship recipients until the completion of their middle and high school education, thus insuring the continuity of our program and providing long term security to the scholarship recipients. As a result of media publicity, word of mouth, and exhibitions at cultural events, sufficient funds have been raised or pledged to support almost 500 students through six years of education. Among the donors are Chekiang Realty Development Company, Shanghai Bank Cultural Foundation in Taiwan ($4,000 annually), Dr. Winston Chen's Paramitas Foundation ($10,000), Professor and Mrs. S. S. Chern ($2,000), and Professor and Mrs. T. Y. Lin ($2,000). We would like to thank them, all the other donors and all the volunteers who have made the pledge drive such a success.
In this second year of our program, following the same procedures as in our first year, we have awarded a total of 627 scholarships of $85 each. Of these, 231 are renewals and 396 were selected from 720 new applications. In the latter group, 35 awards were made to students who had also applied last year and were found to merit an award after revaluation.
We are now in the process of preparing an informational newsletter which we plan to send to all the scholarship recipients periodically.
Why do people who are privileged to partake of California's abundant prosperity devote their time, their resources and their energies to provide scholarships to needy, middle school students in faraway rural China? There are ever so many ways in which these privileged few could use their talents, their time and their energies. There are so many other ways in which they could find pleasure, rewards and satisfactions. However, the officers, directors, members and supporters of the SOAR Foundation are called to its work because they care.
What is this care that the members of SOAR share? It proceeds from the recognition that the success with which each of us has been blessed is the product of the contributions of many people and that, as we have been so aided in our quest for fulfillment, it is incumbent upon us to aid those less fortunate than ourselves. Each of us knows that time and place and fortuitous opportunity for which we can take no personal credit have contributed to our success. Thus, it is only fitting that we assist the deserving who are less fortunate than ourselves. We appreciate that there is no greater gift than the gift of education. It is through education that the youth of China can prepare themselves for a meaningful place in the future of the People's Republic of China. It is through education that the children of China can find personal fulfillment, hopefully gaining an attitude of inquiry, a manner of listening, a mode of recognizing what is significant and the ability to proceed to identify networks of meaning. Such opportunity obviously should not be contingent upon the economic success of their parents.
But in giving the gift of education to needy and deserving students in rural China, the SOAR Foundation gives something more. It confirms to each of its scholarship recipients that there are people from far away who care about them and their future and who challenge them to expand their horizons and live up to their potential. It affirms that there are people who look past arbitrary political boundaries in their belief in people and who realize that concern for others transcends all political, social and economic boundaries. Thus, the members of the SOAR Foundation share the knowledge that they are engaged in the most meaningful form of international relations — the nurturing of people-to-people relationships.
There are, of course, other satisfactions. The members of the SOAR Foundation enjoy the pleasures of companionship and shared enthusiasms. They learn not only about children in rural China, but they learn about themselves and other kindred souls. They find satisfaction in participation in a mighty cause. They enjoy working with others who share their vision. These are but some of the reasons that we care and some measure of the care upon which the SOAR Foundation is founded. With an investment of a few dollars and that shared sense of care, great things can be and are being accomplished.
John MacMeeken
SAVE THIS DATE!!
Second Annual
Fund Raising Dinner
Sunday, June 7th, 1998
Empress of China Restaurant
838 Grant Avenue, San Francisco
The article on South Bay Chapter was cut from this issue and never appeared in print.
We have the first of our local chapters!
On November 9, SOAR's Board of Directors and more than thirty South Bay members
met at Julia Tung's house for lunch. A group of us at that meeting strongly
endorsed the idea — long in the wings and endorsed by the Board by Directors
at its December 10 meeting — of establishing a local chapter.
On December 23, 1997, Julia sent out 120 letters to our South Bay members, announcing an inaugural meeting on December 28. At the meeting the chapter came into being and the following officials were elected:
• Chair: George Chao
• Executive Secretary: Jenny Teng
• Secretary: Julia Tung
• Finance and Fund Raising Director: C. M. Hu (with the assistance of Sally Tang and Y. K. Tang)
• Public Relations and Membership Director: Gilbert Chang (with the assistance of Shirley Wu)
• Volunteer Director: Christina Mor (with the assistance of Regina Chu and Maria Chao)
• Mentor Director and Liaison with the Central Office Mentor Committee: Bihling Hu
It was also decided that the South Bay chapter will meet twice a year. Since the full plan for restructuring — the alignment of tasks and the specification of the relationship between local chapters and the central office — is still to be discussed and determined by the Board of Directors, it is agreed that the current shape of the chapter is provisional.