Hawai'i students find, share aloha in China
By Peter Boylan
Advertiser Staff Writer
BEIJING — Punahou senior Sze Ho Wong never expected a standing ovation at an orphanage.
But when Wong, 17, and other students from Hawai'i showed up Thursday at the Children's Village ready to bestow the benefits of a year's worth of fund raising, the recipients welcomed them with applause.
"It is a really cool experience, especially when you get to see the children," said Wong from his hotel in central Beijing. "When we got there they were all lined up next to the side of the road clapping for us."
Wong was one of 22 high-school students (most from Punahou) and six college students who traveled to the Children's Village orphanage to deliver a $1,500 check to three kids adopted by the group.
All of the orphans at the Children's Village are the sons and daughters of imprisoned Chinese citizens. The Children's Village organization, with orphanages in several Chinese cities, will raise the children until their 18th birthdays, or until their parents are released.
Most children in the village stay for an average of 10 years. The village provides them with food, activities and housing. Each village has an on-site psychologist and the kids are sent to the nearest city school.
The Children's Village visited by the Hawai'i group is two hours northeast of Beijing in a rural area surrounded by crops and dirt roads.
The trip to China is part of a program put on by Punahou's Wo International Center and involves students from the school's Chinese language program. The visit to the orphanage is part of an almost monthlong tour of China. The group embarked Friday on a 20-hour train trip to the rural Chinese city of Baojing. In Baojing the students will teach English to middle-schoolers for two weeks.
Judy Pietsch, an adult chaperone with the group, said the college students, who have had some training in teaching English as a second language, will serve as teachers, with the high-school students as assistants.
She said the two-week teaching assignment will help some of the village kids prepare for Chinese national university exams.
"Kids have to take exams in China to get into the universities and one-third of the exams are in English," said Pietsch, whose daughter, Noel, is also on the trip. "Parents need wealth to hire tutors. The average income for a villager is about $300 a year."
She said the principal of the middle school in Baojing will visit Punahou in the fall.
At the orphanage, the kids had prepared a feast for their Hawai'i visitors, complete with post-meal entertainment: traditional Chinese dance and a martial-arts demonstration.
Michael Wu, 16, a junior at Punahou, said it was nice to witness the firsthand result of a year's worth of bento sales, car washes and bake sales. The group also sold Chinese paper cuts, an intricate art form that involves designing pieces of paper with exacto knives, a time-consuming process, Wu said.
Wu, who delivered the $1,500 check himself, has been involved with the program since he was a freshman, and said that it was the first time in three years that Punahou kids got to visit the orphanage, which opened in 2000.
"Handing the check over, there was a warm feeling inside," Wu said. "Over the past two years I was very fortunate to be given the opportunity to see them. I want to stick with this; it is a really great program."
Pietsch said part of the group's next village project is to help build the kids a swimming pool. While at the village, the students began to dig a ditch that eventually will become a cement pool.
"If American kids like to think they are digging a hole to China, I wonder where Chinese children think they're digging a hole to," said Kim Davidson, a Punahou student. "We barely made a dent in the earth but I suppose all swimming pools begin with dents."
Reach Peter Boylan at pboylan@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-8110.
