Education Development > Student Bursary

When we visited Baiyan Village in Hunan, we met peasant Shi Yuan-Kai, and learned how much he had struggled to support his three children for their schooling. Yuan-Kai's eldest son, Yuan-Cheng, had always been the top student from primary school to lower secondary school. He had been awarded "The Five-good Student" honor a number of times at school. However, when he graduated from lower secondary school, he was forced to drop out because his family could not afford to pay for his tuition. Yuan-Cheng's sister, Qin-Lian, also excelled at school, but she faced the same destiny when she finished junior secondary school. When she discovered that she could never go to school again, she was so upset that she was speechless for days. Yuan-Cheng decided to go to Zhejiang province to become a worker so he could help support his sister's schooling; yet all he earned could not meet the thousand dollars his sister needed for attending senior secondary school. Yuan-Kai, the father, then sold the only farm cow of the family to gather enough money for her first term tuition.

Without a farm cow, Yuan-Kai must bear the shame of asking his neighbors to lend him their cows for farming during agricultural seasons. He has to ask a different family each day and, sometimes, it takes hours to walk to another village to borrow a cow. Yuan-Kai sighed, "I don't have any other way. Many kids here cannot go to school because of poverty. Some were so upset that they went crazy. I don't want my daughter to be like that!" We asked him how he was going to deal with the future tuition of his daughter and his youngest son, who just graduated from primary school. Yuan-Kai sighed again, "I really have no idea now. I can only see one step and take one step, I can't think further into the future. I'll do everything to let them study at school. If I have a thousand dollars, they'll study for a thousand dollars; if I have only a hundred, they'll study for a hundred. I can't think that much...there is no way out! Poor people can only use poor people's methods."

Yuan-Kai's wishes are trapped in such a contradiction.

We are currently subsidizing the education of the three brothers and sister in this family. IRD runs long-term student bursary programs for impoverished villages of Hunan, China. We hope to provide a safe and happy environment for children to study at school and our immediate-future plan is to extend our bursary program to more villages so that more school children, and their families, will be benefited.