On May 31,  a 18-member delegation consisting of 06-MBAs and 07-MBAs from Tsinghua SEM and their families visited Qi-zhi-te School for Children with Metal Handicap, wishing children there a happy holiday ahead of the Children's day.

Located in the suburb of Beijing, Qi-zhi-te School for Children with Mental Handicap is a non-profit organization, which provides mentally handicapped children with boarding care, special education, rehabilitation training and professional skills training. According to the statistics, among the domestic children aged 0-6, the population of the disabled is about 1.395 million, accounting for 0.93%. The children with mental handicap account for 54.21% of the disabled children in China. Among minors under age 18, there are more than 5 million with mental handicap in China.

The following is cited from a visitor’s article.

All the visitors arrived at the campus after two-hour journey.

Tranquil and clean, the small campus is really a pureland in the noisy city. We went to the school building; the children’s lovely photos on the wall came into our sight. Led by their teacher, the children came to the activity room to meet us. It was the first time for most of us to approach those unusual children.

The lollypop was an effective mean for communication here. Starting from helping them remove the candy paper, we were trying to establish their trust toward us. Some vigorous children introduced themselves to us and we introduced ourselves, too. We appreciated semichorus performed by some children and we danced for the children later.

If the in-door activity gave us an opportunity to get known of each other, the out-door meeting was a chance for deeper understanding. We and the children came to a lawn. What shocked us most were getting up close to the children and talking with them. A boy talked about the topic on marriage seriously, though he didn’t know what marriage means; a girl took up a camera; without anyone’s teaching, she learned by herself how to start the camera, how to take photos and videos, though her pictures were not clear enough; a 13-year old boy, wearing a glass, was studying the course for grade-5 of primary school with all attention, though he had infantile autism; and there was a boy who was asking around if there was someone whose home was in Sichuan, because he knew an earthquake happened there; maybe he was intent to sent his wishes to the countrymen there.

Every child here is unique. They need love; they need communications with others. They may have some “flaws”, but these cannot be the reason for preventing them from enjoying joy and warmness. Maybe we don’t know clearly what on earth they think at the bottom of their hearts, but they have their own dreams to realize; the children may know little about the outside society, but we hope they could be treated as members of the social community instead of being forgotten. We may don’t know what the children need most at present, but we know what they have obtained are far from being enough, and we really can do more!