Catholic nuns from Canada and Haiti visited Taiwan yesterday to pay tribute to a Buddhist foundation that has helped with the rebuilding of areas in Haiti destroyed by a massive earthquake in 2010.
“It’s just so refreshing to work with a group that truly cares about other people,” said Rita Larivee of Canada’s Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Anne.
“It was so easy for people to come once, but they did not come back,” Larivee said, adding that, unlike the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, a lot of volunteers did not keep their promises to return to Haiti to help out.
Larivee’s organization, which has been operating in Haiti for about 60 years, began cooperating with Tzu Chi to reconstruct three local schools this year, two years after the devastating earthquake that cost as many as 300,000 lives and destroyed thousands of homes.
On Jan. 21, the two religious organizations held a groundbreaking ceremony at College Marie-Anne in Port-au-Prince.
Despite coming from different religious backgrounds, the sister said that she had encountered no barriers since they both shared a common mission — to ensure that Haitian children receive an education.
“We share the same values and we are committed to the same people that need help,” said Lucille Goulet, another sister from the congregation.
“It is not an easy job,” Haitian Ambassador to Taiwan Mario Chouloute said in a speech about the situation his country is facing.
He thanked the two groups for their continuous efforts to provide a better life for Haitians.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching