Wednesday, June 9, 2010

building a library

Something I took for granted before I moved to China was my freedom to move. Here, when parents decide to move from their town of birth into the city, they have to leave their one child behind with relatives, or the child will lose his or her benefit to attend school. If the parents have two or more children they don't have any government benefits anyway. These kids moved with their parents. They attend what is called a migrant school. It's run by charity organizations.



Saturday afternoon, the boys, Bethany and Rob went to this migrant school to help Nick from our branch complete his Eagle project. He collected books and furniture to make a library for the school.












There's Nick. This is his project.

And Nick's mom. She's been quite busy too.





There's the Telly tubby I gave Ben for his first birthday. I'm a little wistful about that.



There's the stuffed lion my Laurel advisor gave me when I turned eighteen.
When I took it to college with me my roommate's boyfriend told me I should give it to charity. There you go.






Thank you to Nick. We have been hoping the kids would have an experience like this before they left China. And thank you to Rob for taking these great pictures and the beautiful pictures at the camp out. It will be a while before I'll be able to enjoy his photography on my blog again.

2 comments:

Z. Marie said...

Oh, what a great project! I love that you can see it was an empty room before they moved everything in.

Stefany said...

I'm looking for information on what it is like for a big family to go into the foreign service. I think, from skimming your blog, that you might have some insights. It also looks like you might be LDS, which would be even better! My husband 35, we have seven children, and he is waiting for his invitation to the FSOA, which should come this week. If you would be willing to tell me a bit about how well a big family, being a member of the church, and the Foreign Service all fit together, please email me at stefpratt at gmail dot com (I wrote it that way so I don't get spam from crawlers). Thank you!