Sharing: President's Word

In order to facilitate my teenage daughter and son who are typical of the ‘strawberries clan’ to experience the nature, I took them to the mountainous areas of Xiangxi where the ethnic minorities live in an Autonomous Region, within Hunan, Mainland China. We discovered that the ‘children of big mountains’ among the Miao and Tujia clans live in a land that are surrounded by infertile but green stoney mountains where the paths are usually narrow and winding.
Although the mountainous clans eat only chilli, wild vegetable and boiled rice, and they wear clothes of ‘many holes’, their children have unyielding determination and perseverance to study and pursue knowledge. This made me feel enlightened and encouraged. As a norm, there are not many Miao clan in the mountainous areas who would pursue further education, the number is much less with girls. Anybody who can persist up to higher middle school level or university level would belong to the ‘extra-ordinary group’. Hence, only this ‘extra-ordinary group’ could become tomorrow’s ‘sun of the big mountains’, only they could bring hope and change to the lives of the people in the Autonomous Region and only they could break the vicious chain of poverty to realize the vision of ‘adequately care for the elders and properly raise the youths’.
In the ensuing few years, I continued to participate in activities to riase donations and personally distributed donated money to the deserving youths in the mountainous areas. I came to realize that I could not simply abandon this ‘extra-ordinary group’. In the end of 2008, I founded the World of Compassion Education Fund Association (WCEFA) in Hong Kong with several dear friends who have compassion and share the same passion with me.
Our charitable organization, although small in scale and structure, charge only near zero administrative cost and is aimed to offer financial assistance only to the potential ‘sun of the big mountains’ with stringent vetting criteria and strong sense of fairness. We have just started our fund raising long journey, as and when our donations and experience grow, our charitable organization could also grow from strength to strength, and it would exert some positive influence on the lives of those youths.

Ms. WONG Mui-kit, Elsie
Founding President of WCEFA