News and Events

A Concert Tribute for the Disadvantaged

Date 2010-12-30 7099 Clicks

According to a study by the Ministry of Education, Taiwanese children born to foreign brides typically spend less than an hour a day completing or revising their homework. The reasons parents are unable to help such children with their homework include a “lack of time due to the need to make a living” and “poor language ability”, cited the study.

This is a problem faced by disadvantaged children across Taiwan. In an attempt to mitigate and even reverse this trend, several organizations and initiatives have been set up throughout Taiwan in the hope of helping young students from disadvantaged families “keep up” academically. One such initiative, the Little Sunshine Project, has been serving local families in Tamsui.

For the past semester, as part of TKU’s Community Learning program, Tamkang freshmen have been helping care for children from the Little Sunshine Project in Tamsui. Each week, they help young children to read and write, and to finish their homework. Yet as the current semester rapidly draws to an end, their Community Learning duties will soon be over. So of late, they have been thinking feverishly of how to make a lasting difference in the children’s lives.

Their answer: a musical tribute; a symphony concert, dedicated to the children, that would give the children a chance to appreciate fine music – and art in general – and provide them with a snapshot of university life, around which they may build and create a successful future.

The concert was held on Wednesday, December 29. As the concert was about to begin, the children handed gifts and hand-written cards to the TKU students who had been looking after them. One of the participating TKU students, Zhao Li-ya, commented that “The Community Learning program will soon be over. While interacting with the kids at the concert this evening, I could sense that they were excited…Although we’ve only played a very minor role in their overall process of growing up, I hope that they’ll remember us; remember that they once had a group of older ‘brothers and sisters’ who helped them with their homework”.

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