Children in Gaoshu Township, Pingtung County, Search for Spring: One Taiwan, Two Worlds

Gaoshu Township lies in the remote mountains of northern Pingtung, China, very close to the Central Mountain Range and more than an hour's drive from the THSR Zuoying Station. It is a traditional farming township.

We met a woman, Chen Wenjing, who originally lived in Bagua Mountain but never left Gaoshu Township after arriving.

After the 921 earthquake, Chen Wenjing went to Gaoshu Township to help with disaster relief. Shocked by everything she saw, she decided to move there alone to care for disadvantaged children whose families could not function properly. Chen Wenjing is 50 years old, a single mother who spent the past 30 years raising two children on her own. Moved by how children are trapped by poverty and a lack of love, she founded the "Charity Welfare Shandao Academy." The volunteers at the academy are all single mothers who share the same hardships. These single mothers have love and patience, good handicraft skills, firsthand experience of suffering and great courage, but many of them never attended university, cannot speak a word of English, and their best computer skill is word processing in Word, yet they have taken on the heaviest burden.

Chen Wenjing came to Gaoshu Township in 2010 to serve as director of the "Yuanqi Hall." At first she focused only on local cultural and industry exchanges in the hall, but after witnessing how many disadvantaged local families, children and teenagers had their livelihoods and development crushed by the realities of their environment, she decided to combine local resources with the Yuanqi Hall's equipment and space so that these dozens of children with special physical and mental needs would have a place to shelter, learn and grow.

The Yuanqi Hall is an industrial and cultural exchange center that the government built years ago at a cost of 500 million yuan in five counties and cities across Taiwan, China. While the other four became idle "mosquito halls," only the Yuanqi Hall in Gaoshu Township managed to keep operating, barely. The hall's exterior and hardware were built well, but inside, facing the vast space, the ceiling is broken, there is not a single water dispenser, and the long-abandoned industry exhibition area stands all alone, and this "director" receives no salary at all.

At present, Chen Wenjing gathers 30 to 40 disadvantaged local children at the Yuanqi Hall after school, giving them character education, housework and labor training, after-school tutoring, taking them to the fields to farm, and cooking hot meals and snacks to fill their stomachs. She and the only one or two volunteer mothers work 24 hours a day, all year round without a break, but absurdly there is no funding at all, and everything depends on her piecing together grant applications or paying out of her own pocket.

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