Tom Spender

Sun Village is a non-governmental charitable organization that has provides foster care and education for children of convicts who have been jailed for more than 10 years.

[Photos at Demotix here]

Charitable services include special education, psychological counseling, rights protection and vocational training. Over the past ten years, Sun Village has helped more than 2000 children in Beijing, Xi’an, Jiangxi, Qinghai, Xinxiang of Henan and Long County in Shanxi.

Most of the children are from the western provinces in China, which are among the poorest. There are estimated to be about 600,000 Chinese children with parents in prison.

Many of these children’s parent are in prison for domestic violence. In some cases, the father may have killed the mother. Many of them come from poor and difficult backgrounds and might otherwise be living on the street.

However, because these kids are not either disabled or the children of recognised “heroes” (who have presumably performed some service for which the authorities are grateful), they are not eligible for any real government funding, despite facing apparent destitution.

Many of the kids have serious psychological issues. They exhibit aggressive behaviour. There is a professional psychologist who sees them 1x a month. Most of those aged under 10 years are not aware that their parents have been jailed for serious crimes.

We went there to donate about RMB4,000 (US$590) left over from the fees from a salsa course run by a friend and were taken around by Gao Feng, an energetic guy who worked for 20 years in the People’s Liberation Army, who finished up as a tank regiment commander and now considers himself to be a “global volunteer”.

A boisterous guy who understates the length of time he has been working on his (pretty good) English language skills in order to impress foreigners, he’s a good ambassador for the place, which seems to be exceptionally well-run.

Typically, the “NGO” field is quite tricky to operate in in China because the government is wary of any organisation outside the Party. The words “Non Governmental Organisation” are not music to Communist Party ears. But Sun Village clearly provides a great service to the state by basically doing part of its job for it.

And it seems to be flourishing, using a smart hybrid commercial/sponsorship approach. It gets a paltry RMB50,000 (US$7,400) each year from the Chinese government. It is registered as a business with the Ministry for Industry and Commerce (if I remember right), rather than with the Ministry for Social Affairs.

The organisation rents land that it farms commercially to raise money and seems to be pretty good at attracting sponsorship internationally. It has a profile both nationally and internationally. We went on a weekend and the place was stuffed with visitors.

There’s a form you can fill in on its website to sponsor a child and many of the dormitories have plaques on them indicating that they were paid for by one or other international organisation. A lot of freshly-planted trees had been sponsored by the Crowne Plaza hotel.

Our group aimed to play some games with the kids. Viewing the number of visitors they had to deal with, I was a bit sceptical that the kids would be terribly enthusiastic but they did their best. They got through translated guessing games (“what am I? I have 3 legs…”) and an aborted effort to run races holding a spoon in their mouths with a nut balanced on the end and finally we all had fun with a cowboy game where we had to mime shooting one another. Nice trip.