An Ohio University professor and student organization are working to set up children who lost their parents during the Wenchuan earthquake last May with a big brother or big sister.
Wei Huang, a professor of business who is spending this year at Tsinghua University in China, along with the Ohio University Chinese Business International is setting up a project to lend support to orphans through phone calls, letters and ' for participants living in the region ' visits.
After the Wenchuan earthquake, the Chinese government gathered children who lost their parents and placed them in an orphanage in Chengdu, capital of the Sichuan province, Huang said. After visiting the orphanage in August and seeing the destruction first-hand, he decided to set up the project.
Huang, OUCBI's advisor of three years, is the intermediary between the director of the orphanage and the volunteers. He is trying to get both U.S. and Chinese universities to promote the project and enlist student volunteers.
I'm delighted to know that many of China's top universities have participated in this project so far and many local counties have interest in sponsoring this project in China
he said.
Huang said he has enlisted five Ph.D. students from Xi'an Jiaotong University to join the program and is actively recruiting volunteers from Tsinghua University.
The project does not require participating students to actually adopt orphans, but OUCBI is asking participants to maintain regular contact for at least two to three years, said Lifeng Wu, a doctoral student and the project's advisor.
Through past members who have since gone on to graduate school, OUCBI is expanding the network to include other U.S. and Chinese universities, such as Shanghai Jiaotong, Xi'an Jiaotong, the University of Hong Kong, Taiwan National Chung Cheng University, the University of Utah, the University of Kentucky, and Ohio State University.
Although the project calls on the participation of any college student in the U.S. or China, fluency in Chinese is a must because most of the orphans speak poor English, Huang said.
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