Danish Muslim Aid

Field trip to China April 2012

14.5.2012

DM-Aid chairman of the board Nadeem Niwaz and general secretary Abdul Wahid Pedersen visited China from April 1st to 9th to look into our ongoing projects in the country and to explore the possibilities to expand or strengthen the effort.
DM-Aid has 15 children in our sponsor program in China. The children are all in or around Zengzhou in the Henan Province some hundred kilometers south west of Beijing. Some of the children are muslims and others are from non religious families. All are extreme poor.
The sponsor program is coordinated by the sister to our local contact Ibrahim because he lives in Canada himself. His sister lives in Zengzhou and the work is run in corporation with one of the local mosques. We met the children and had the opportunity to listen to some of their stories which we also got on video.
One of the concerns about the children in China is, that they live out in the rural areas, and even though we and our partners stress that the children must go to school, we can’t be certain that they always do. At the same time we can’t always be sure about the quality of the education they receive. Therefore our local partner recommended that we consider renting a building to run a school/residence for the children where they could stay and receive tuition in the same way as a boarding school. They could then visit their families in the weekends.
Our local partners promised to find out how much it would cost to establish and run such a center.
We didn’t immediately see any possibility to expand our activities in the country and the best we could do seems to strengthen our ongoing activities as mentioned above.