Mon, Mar 01, 2010 page2

• FEATURE : Taiwanese gives up high life for kids

  OVERCOMING OBSTACLES Since establishing the Field of Relief Agency of Taiwan, former flight attendant Yang Wei-lin has helped around 70,000 Cambodian children

  • BY DEBORAH KUO / CNA, with staff writer
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  Yang Wei-lin (楊蔚齡) was working as a flight attendant with flagship carrier China Airlines 20 years ago when she decided to dedicate herself to improving the lives of Cambodia’s refugees despite facing personal danger, cultural obstacles, funding shortages and a long illness.

  Her efforts were recently recognized by Reader’s Digest, which named her as one of six nominees for the Asian of the Year Award this year. Although she did not win the top prize, her Field Relief Agency of Taiwan (FRA) has consistently been a winner for the 70,000 Cambodian children she’s helped over the years.

  Yang found her life’s devotion through her job with China Airlines.

  

  A group of Cambodian children hold up bags of stationery donated by the Taiwanese public and distributed by Field Relief Agency of Taiwan in this undated photo.

  PHOTO: CNA

  She had worked as a volunteer with Taiwan’s 119 rescue hotline before graduating from college. After joining the airline in 1983, one of her regular stops was Bangkok, and she said she could not look on dispassionately when Cambodian refugees from the Thai-Cambodian border gathered in the city in the mid-to-late 1980s — the legacy of a decade-long civil war in the western part of the country following the murderous Khmer Rouge’s rule between 1975 and 1979.

  She quit the airline in 1989 to join a refugee service center at the Thai border run by the UN High Commissioner of Refugees.

  Working for five years at the center, she came face to face with death, injuries, horror and extreme despair on a daily basis. Yang said she became convinced that the temporary centers were not long-term solutions to the Cambodian refugees’ problems.

  Something she saw during her first year on the Thai-Cambodian border crystallized her conviction. A fatherless girl, whose mother had also just died, was begging in a market, carrying her six-day-old baby brother in a swaddling cloth on her chest.

  dying face

  The girl left after receiving some money for food, but Yang said the image of the infant’s wide-open mouth and dying face lingered in her mind for a long time and convinced her that money alone would also not solve the problem.

  Betting on education, Yang eventually established the FRA in 1995 to help Cambodian people in poor and heavily mined areas get a better chance in life.

  Over the next four years, Yang helped establish 15 makeshift schools, sponsored about 700 orphans and recruited 27 volunteer teachers from Taiwan to work in the schools.

  Those four years also taxed her mentally and physically, posing the most formidable challenges she had ever faced in a philanthropic environment — employee infighting, Taiwanese volunteers experiencing health problems and funding shortages.

  Some of the very orphans she was trying to help were skeptical of the group’s intentions, fearing they would be sold to human traffickers.

  mishaps

  Yang was also undone by a series of mishaps — a car accident she was lucky to survive; a serious burn to her hand sustained when she put out a fire in a frying pan when an aide was cooking in the open air; and a near-encounter with bandits, who were tracking her vehicle, hoping to get their hands on her relief supplies.

  The encounter was averted when some acquaintances came to her rescue at the last minute, but the experience, and her mounting problems, left her so exhausted that she fell ill for six months in late 1999.

  During that time, FRA operations in Cambodia came to a virtual halt, but her illness gave her valuable time to reflect on her campaign, and she concluded that more than compassion and enthusiasm was needed to deal with the orphans or refugees’ problems and the conflicts within her organization.

  Realizing that she needed to change her management strategy and raise more money, Yang returned to her base in Poipet — a Cambodian town on the country’s northwestern border with Thailand — and restarted FRA operations.

  She lowered the wage she paid to Cambodian employees from US$200 to US$100 per month — a shock that made them less prone to infighting and more diligent.

  She also screened Taiwanese staff and volunteers more strictly, declining the help of those who could not withstand hardship or challenges.

  Those orphans or refugees who were skeptical of the FRA’s intentions were allowed to leave FRA shelters if they chose to.

  The result is that over the past 15 years, Yang has helped more than 70,000 children in Cambodia, taking in orphans and those afflicted with AIDS while providing financial support to others.

  Vocational training centers have been built to help adults — many of whom are survivors of land-mine explosions — learn skills and make a living for themselves.

  needy

  She has also trained Mandarin and Cambodian-language instructors to teach at the schools she established and travel to rural areas in 10 provinces to help the needy.

  “This is a labor-intensive job, and one’s work is never done,” said Yang, a Kaohsiung City native. “I’ve probably been defeated by difficulties, but I never gave up.”

  Funding and donations remain a concern, but in early 2008, Yang got a break. She told a Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reporter that she needed 3,500 stationery kits to be distributed to children, many of whom had never seen a tube of glue or a pencil sharpener in their lives.

  surprise

  The story was posted online, and to Yang’s surprise, stationery supplies flooded into her Taipei office from all corners of the country.

  The FRA packaged the scissors, staplers, erasers, pencils, sharpeners and white-out received into kits that were then transported to Cambodia in three 12m containers. The kits have been distributed on weekends over the past two years to 66,000 children, many of whom live in villages that are inaccessible by car.

  “All the work is worth it when you see the amazement and happiness on the children’s faces when they open the kits,” she said.

  “We don’t turn our back on problems,” she said. “We look for them.”

  Her goal for this year is to build a hospital if she can raise NT$5 million (US$156,000).

  For further information visit: www.fra.org.tw/index_en.htm
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