More than one-fifth of disadvantaged children become malnourished during summer and winter vacations, the Child Welfare League Foundation told a news conference in Taipei yesterday, calling for more people to assist it with providing subsidies to disadvantaged families.
Summer vacation should be a happy time for children, but when children are deprived of a proper diet, it is difficult for them to live normal lives and learn properly, Hsinchu County’s Bitan Elementary School principal Tsao Chiang-nan (曹江南) said.
Poor diets, lack of opportunities to learn and having to work are challenges that children from disadvantaged families experience during school vacations, foundation executive director Chen Li-ju (陳麗如) said.
The foundation plans to distribute food boxes to 3,000 disadvantaged children this summer, Chen said, adding that the boxes will contain noodles and canned foods.
“We hope we can alleviate these challenges over the long summer vacation when students do not have access to school meals,” Chen said.
About 11.7 percent of disadvantaged children have to take care of sick adults, while 13.5 percent have to perform work duties such as farming, recycling garbage or other types of manual labor to support their families, the foundation found in a survey.
The survey was conducted from Jan. 16 to Feb. 28 and yielded 1,075 valid questionnaires.
During long holidays, nearly 80 percent of the families do not make any plans for children, and 22.6 percent of the children lack adult supervision, the survey showed.
The lack of adult supervision and “summer learning loss” often lead to learning problems in school, Chen said.
TV host Mickey Huang (黃子佼), who is an ambassador for the foundation, said he understood the children’s plight because he used to go home by himself.
“It is easy for children in the city to kill time by playing on their computers, but children in remote rural areas might not even have computers,” he said.
He called on people to help underprivileged children by donating money to the foundation, which needs to raise NT$18 million (US$597,848) for the plan.
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:
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