The BDS Youth League Committee, in collaboration with the Youth League Branches of the Department of Translation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and World Affairs Publishing House, organized a young volunteers’ team to visit the Sanjiadian Primary School at Mentougou District to host a theme forum and a book donation event.

Being a countryside school located in the urban-rural fringe region, more than 80% of the 300-odd pupils are from migrant workers’ families, of which the parents mostly engage in small businesses and are too busy to take good care of the children. Some of the parents are so poorly educated that they could hardly provide any help to the youngsters with the latter's homework, and some even incapable of putting their names on their children's finished homework for endorsement, let alone offering any after-class recreation or tutoring to the kids. The simple and unadorned children aspire to learn more about the world, which seems so remote and inaccessible to them. Under the auspices of the BDS Party Committee, the BDS entered into a partnership of “Spiritual Civilization Construction” with the Sanjiandian Primary School in late 2012 and the BDS Youth League Committee has since then kept in close touch with the school. In addition to making economic contributions, numerous trips have been made to the school to organize theme forums and other joint activities in respect of foreign cultures, English tutoring, art performance in the past year.

On the latest theme forum, the BDS volunteers and senior staffers from the Department of Translation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs delivered interactive presentations on the importance of reading and learning as well as issues of “Why we need to read books?”, “What to read?”, “How to read books?” and “How to read English books in the original language?” when the enthusiastic and energetic children posed numerous questions and made their own comments. Towards the end, the volunteers joined the children in reading English texts aloud, singing songs and putting personal mottos down in the notebooks for exchange with each other. The forum closed with lots of laughter and a great sense of satisfaction.

Following the forum, the volunteers presented 50 volumes of the Children’s Verses in English, donated by the World Affairs Publishing House, to the school. The BDS Youth League Committee representatives consulted the school authorities on the Partnership Building Plan 2014 to finalize the schedule of joint events.

Being part of the Youth League Committee’s Book Reading Festival, the trip to the Sanjiadian Primary School was very well received, bringing cultural elements to the children to help them establish the interest in and habit of book reading. It is hoped the event will be conducive to the establishment of the children’s passion for reading so that they can learn and experience more about life through reading books. It is also hoped that the children will learn that reading not only brings along academic and economic benefits but is also conducive to turning them into warmhearted, aspiring and thinking human beings. The event, on the other hand, offered the volunteers the benefit of being compassionate as well as a deeper understanding of the importance of reading.