Citing Brazilian-Taiwanese Iruan Ergui Wu’s (吳憶樺) visit to Taiwan, Taiwan Catholic Mission Foundation executive director Austin Ou (歐晉仁) expressed hope Iruan’s story could help bring attention to the predicaments of other children facing the same fate.
Iruan, at the center of a high-profile custody battle between the two countries nearly a decade ago, arrived in Taiwan on Friday last week for a two-week visit.
It is the first time the 18-year-old has visited Taiwan since the Taiwan High Court granted custody to his Brazilian grandmother in 2004.
Iruan is the son of a Taiwanese fishing boat captain and a Brazilian woman, Marisa Ergui Tavares, who died shortly after his birth.
Iruan’s father, Wu Teng-shu (吳登樹), died of a heart attack in 2001 shortly after he brought the young boy to Taiwan to visit his family.
“The ‘Iruan Ergui Wu case’ is just the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of Taiwanese-Brazilian children like Iruan in Porto Alegre, but they do not get as much attention and love from the public and the families of both his parents as the 18-year-old does,” Ou said.
Ou said the waters surrounding Porto Alegre — Iruan’s birthplace — are a traditional fishing site for hundreds of Taiwanese fishermen, many of whom have fallen in love with Brazilian women.
As most of these fishermen are already married in Taiwan, their illegitimate children often grow up without a father figure, Ou said.
Ou said a Brazilian woman has asked him to locate the father of her three children, but the only thing she knows about the man is his family name.
“Each time I visit Porto Alegre, her children ask me whether I have found their father. Even though their mother has lost hope of finding the man, the kids still cling to the belief that their father loves them and will come back eventually,” Ou said.
To avoid upsetting the fishermen’s families in Taiwan, Ou said he is reluctant to help these women search for their long-lost lovers and that he tries to find other ways to look after their children, for example by providing them with computers and education funds, or giving them “red envelopes” during the Lunar New Year.
Ou said that because of the wide media coverage of Iruan’s story, a number of Brazil-based Taiwanese businesspeople have offered Iruan jobs or asked him to be their company spokesperson.
“Some corporations have also offered to provide long-term funding to Taiwanese-Brazilian children to cover their tuition fees and living expenses,” Ou said.
As a gesture of goodwill, Ou said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered about NT$200,000 to the foundation to help set up a computer classroom at the Brazilian school where Iruan studied.
“All classroom equipment will be printed with the sentence ‘Donated by the Republic of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs,’ in an attempt to show Brazilians that Taiwan is a loving country,” Ou said.
However, the foundation’s efforts to help Brazilian children have sometimes met with criticism.
Ou said the foundation has been receiving calls from people asking: “Why bother to save children abroad when there are still Taiwanese kids suffering?”
“Some people also ridiculed us by saying: ‘Why not save me? I am unemployed and am about to starve to death,’” Ou said.
“However, I tell them that other nations donated milk powder and clothes to Taiwanese children when the country suffered about five decades ago, and that it is our chance to lend a helping hand now that we have become capable of doing so,” Ou said.
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
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
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