By Li Nai

Special to the Tsinghua News Center

The Tsinghua Zijing Postgraduate Student Volunteer Group, with over 2,560 postgraduates as its volunteers, has been actively providing services to people in need of help since its foundation in December 2002. Their service programs include services for major scientific and sports events, campus tour guides, and long-term social service programs. Two of their main long-term programs are for children in need.

(Zijing Postgraduate Volunteers Accompany Children with Autism)

It has been three years that they have spent every Friday afternoon accompanying children with autism who receive rehabilitation training at the Education Research Center in Beijing’s Tongzhou District. It takes them a two-hour bumpy bus ride to get there. No matter windy or rainy, they always get there on time. Besides accompanying the children to draw and to play and helping them to communicate, these young volunteers have also done a lot for the Center: foreign language students have translated lots of research papers into Chinese so that the teachers can get to know the latest research and therapies for autism; engineering students have established a bilingual website for the Center and art students have designed exquisite brochures. Their continuing efforts have attracted more and more people as volunteers there.

 The volunteers have learned about autism and companion skills before, but it’s still not easy at the beginning to do the job well. With great patience and enthusiasm, they have been gradually accepted by the children who used to stay in their own world. Mr. Su Jinggang, a volunteer student from the Department of Electronic Engineering, said, “One day before I left, a little boy who’s always hiding himself in the corner suddenly uttered his first word, ‘Thank you!’ At that moment I felt there was nothing better in the world than that simple word.”

(Zijing Postgraduate Volunteers Give English Lessons to Pupils at Xiangshang Primary School)

Migrant workers in Beijing, counting up to over three millions, are the main forces in the construction of Beijing’s infrastructure. According to local residential policy, education resources are quite scarce for those workers’ children. In autumn 2006, Zijing postgraduate volunteers started a teaching service program to deliver art, science, history, and physical education lessons each week for a primary school in the Beijing suburbs, in which the pupils are all children of migrant workers. The program aims not only to teach knowledge but also to foster a positive living attitude for the kids.

Up to now, more than 150 volunteers have joined in the program and provided over 600 hours of service. Mr. Liang Chen, a volunteer from the School of Medicine, wrote to his friend, “We’ve been trying to give them more knowledge and skills. But we find that we’ve been gaining more than giving. They passed to us the childlike innocence and simple joy which we had lost for a long time.”