News: Drinking Water, Bilingual Education
“Wells of Happiness”
Amity’s local office in Woyun Village near Mianzhu, Sichuan Province, recently finished a drinking water project. 12 wells have been restored to good working order, corroded pipes have been replaced in 7 places, 3 new pumps have been installed.
The earthquake of May 2008 not only led to the collapse of well shafts and damaged pipes, it also changed groundwater levels all over the region. In Woyun, 14 out of a total of 16 wells didn’t yield any water anymore. Some 3000 people were severely affected, both because they had no easy access to safe drinking water and because they lacked water for the irrigation of crops.
Some families had to fetch water from a township distribution point more than 2 kilometers away. This was especially difficult for elderly people whose working-age children had left to work in the cities. Many of these had also put up their little children with their grandparents in the village. Some of the elderly and children of Woyun had no choice but to fetch their water from a nearby ditch instead. Drinking this unclean water posed a great risk to people’s health.
In close cooperation with the villagers and with the Woyun Reconstruction Committee, Amity’s local staffers initiated the necessary research and soon started work on the rapid restoration of the drinking water system. After the completion of work, villagers are now joking that “Amity has given us wells of happiness.”
Conference on Bilingual Deaf Education
In May this year, some 180 specialists, leaders and teachers from European and Asian countries met in Suzhou for a three-day conference on bilingual deaf education – one of the most advanced concepts in special education world-wide. The Amity Foundation, in cooperation with the Norwegian Signo Foundation, has pioneered its adoption in China, first under a pilot project starting in 1996 and later on a broader basis. Today, bilingual deaf education is used at four special education facilities in Jiangsu Province: the Suzhou School for the Blind and Deaf, the Changzhou School for the Deaf, the Yangzhou Special Education School and the Zhenjiang Special Education Centre. Since 2006 this concept has spread further west, to the provinces of Guizhou and Sichuan. In these last five years, the project has accumulated an impressive body of experience and reached the hoped-for results.
