A group of 25 student volunteers yesterday left for Swaziland, one of Taiwan’s four diplomatic allies in Africa, where they are set to help out at orphanages for two weeks.
The students are scheduled to help erect buildings, plant vegetables and clear uncultivated land at the orphanages, said Lu Hsing-chung (呂興忠), the chief librarian at Chunghua Senior High School.
Most of the student volunteers are from low-income or single-parent families and have never traveled abroad, Lu said.
In order to qualify for the program, they had to pass an English proficiency test, he added.
The overseas volunteer program, now in its fifth year, offers the students an opportunity to learn valuable life lessons and cannot be used to obtain credits for college applications, Lu said.
One of the students, surnamed Yang (楊), said she hopes to gain a deeper understanding of the poverty situation in the African country.
The group took with them an aid package consisting of 5,000 packets of Master Kong instant noodles, which were donated by Tingyi (Cayman Islands) Holding Corp — a food company based in China run by Taiwanese entrepreneurs — 500 flashlights from Chunghua-based Benz Electronic Co and 1,200kg of clothing.
Over the past five years, more than 125 students have participated in the summer charity program, which is sponsored by Acer Inc founder Stan Shih (施振榮), FSP Group chairman Cheng Ya-jen (鄭雅仁) and Sun Chin-chuan, chairman of trading company Ballerina Co, Lu said.
The student volunteers are scheduled to return home on July 18.
Taipei on Thursday held urban resilience air raid drills, with residents in one of the exercises’ three “key verification zones” reporting little to no difference compared with previous years, despite government pledges of stricter enforcement. Formerly known as the Wanan exercise, the air raid drills, which concluded yesterday, are now part of the “Urban Resilience Exercise,” which also incorporates the Minan disaster prevention and rescue exercise. In Taipei, the designated key verification zones — where the government said more stringent measures would be enforced — were Songshan (松山), Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Air raid sirens sounded at 1:30pm, signaling the
The number of people who reported a same-sex spouse on their income tax increased 1.5-fold from 2020 to 2023, while the overall proportion of taxpayers reporting a spouse decreased by 4.4 percent from 2014 to 2023, Ministry of Finance data showed yesterday. The number of people reporting a spouse on their income tax trended upward from 2014 to 2019, the Department of Statistics said. However, the number decreased in 2020 and 2021, likely due to a drop in marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic and the income of some households falling below the taxable threshold, it said. The number of spousal tax filings rebounded
A saleswoman, surnamed Chen (陳), earlier this month was handed an 18-month prison term for embezzling more than 2,000 pairs of shoes while working at a department store in Tainan. The Tainan District Court convicted Chen of embezzlement in a ruling on July 7, sentencing her to prison for illegally profiting NT$7.32 million (US$248,929) at the expense of her employer. Chen was also given the opportunity to reach a financial settlement, but she declined. Chen was responsible for the sales counter of Nike shoes at Tainan’s Shinkong Mitsukoshi Zhongshan branch, where she had been employed since October 2019. She had previously worked
Labor rights groups yesterday called on the Ministry of Labor to protect migrant workers in Taiwan’s fishing industry, days after CNN reported alleged far-ranging abuses in the sector, including deaths and forced work. The ministry must enforce domestic labor protection laws on Taiwan-owned deep-sea fishing vessels, the Coalition for Human Rights for Migrant Fishers told a news conference outside the ministry in Taipei after presenting a petition to officials. CNN on Sunday reported that Taiwanese seafood giant FCF Co, the owners of the US-based Bumble Bee Foods, committed human rights abuses against migrant fishers, citing Indonesian migrant fishers. The alleged abuses included denying
RSS