Blessing Hands: Newsletter for December

Blessing Hands - December Newsletter

COOPERATION WITH MSU: Morehead State University encourages their students to get practical experience through their initiatives to help local nonprofits. A senior student, Brandi Adams, did our 990 tax report under the supervision of her teacher, Ms. Deborah Madden. Three campus social clubs helped us advertise our two Pizza Hut nights that gathered enough to support two senior students for a semester. Two MSU Chinese graduate students, Dorothy Juran and Abby Lou, designed the new logo featured here.

Senior students, Jessica Garrish, Bill Crain, Miranda Cox, and I are working on a new web page and database that will allow all our information to be retrieved from the internet in both public and private ways. We have edited all our student’s pictures past and present and coded them by schools. It is such a big job that the project will be extended to next semester. Jessica is also working on a Google Earth overlay that will feature our Blessing Hands students and hopefully attract new donors and sponsors.

SPONSORS NEEDED: Forty-eight of our students have active sponsors. We also really appreciate those that are supporting our seven male college scholarship students. Some pay extra for their student’s room and board or actually visit their students. Nina Ottinger from Founding Family Charitable Foundation just returned from China where she visited her sponsored children in Yangshuo and checked on the Blessing Hands students who received FFCF eyeglasses in Qinzhou. Her traveling companion, Anita Wherry, was delighted to meet her own two students.

What a dream come true to finally meet my special students, May and Lily. They enthusiastically greeted me by name. We exchanged gifts, but their thank you letters written in English are my greatest treasure. I left that day determined to be a better pen pal and financial supporter. –Anita Wherry

About four hundred of our students need sponsors not only to support them financially but to feed their soul with friendships through e-mail or letters. We support them through program funds but how much better it would be if each had caring sponsors. Please consider sponsoring one of our students. Unfortunately the dropping of the dollar against the yuan has forced the board to raise the support for high school students to $80 a semester. The middle school support will remain $25 while primary children still get $10 a semester. Their tuition is paid by the government now, so what we give them goes for room and board or school supplies and books.

VOLUNTEER REPORTS: Our college students are sending in reports about their volunteer service. We have encouraged them to be Blessing Hands by creating a Zhu Fu Zhi Shou online Google Group for them to exchange ideas and report their volunteer service. Feng Min is volunteering in an AIDS service project at her medical school. Guilian, Daolin, Katie, Hong Joy, and Cherry helped older citizens, while Bamboo and Chong volunteered with children. I wish I could include all of Chong’s delightful description of her tutoring experience with a primary migrant boy displaced in the city.

Being with him reminded me of my primary school years, when I was naive. We had a very happy time in the morning. I treated him as my little brother. His academic performance is not very good. Every Saturday I will go to his primary school during this semester and learn together with him and answer academic questions he encounters. This semester I will be his volunteer tutor. - Chong