The Amity Foundation

Computers and basketball hoops for Hanwang School

The Amity Foundation has supported several schools in Hanwang and elsewhere in the Mianzhu region of Sichuan Province since the devastating earthquake of 12 May 2008. It supplied toys to Jiulong Kindergarten and equipped a laboratory at Guangji School, among other things.

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SEP 2009 testimonials

There are five of us foreign teachers here in Chifeng (“Red Peaks”), a small Han outpost with 4.5 million people, and 200 miles north of Beijing in Inner Mongolia. We have around 20 students per class. The students are all junior high school English teachers and come from the Chifeng area.  The program is an oral English program in which we try to get the students to speak English as much as they can.

Ian Skoggard was one of the SEP volunteers who taught in Inner Mongolia this summer. His reflections are found on the Global Ministries website.

Gil Emmert, who taught in Yingtan, Jiangxi Province, writes on the Madison First Baptist Church website:

The English language plays an important role in the Chinese educational system. Children start learning English in third grade and continue with it through middle school and high school. Students must pass an exam, which has an English language section, to be admitted to high school. Admission to a university requires passing another, more competitive, exam; this exam also has an English component. [...] In this system students in rural school are at a disadvantage because of the lack of good English teachers.

New office building opened

Amity’s new office building has been officially opened and staffers have moved over from the old building, which will be completely restored over the next few months.

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2009 Summer English Programme concluded

The debriefing conference of the 2009 Summer English Program (SEP) was held in Shanghai on August 2 and the 2009 SEP was successfully completed. Amity had invited 57 volunteers from Canada, Norway, Great Britain and the United States to provide oral and listening training to teachers of English in rural China.

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Student volunteers back from Woyun, Sichuan

Amity’s student volunteers have returned home to Nanjing after a week of service in Woyun Village, in the earthquake region of Sichuan. The 11 students are freshmen at Nanjing Audit University. They used part of their summer vacation to support Amity’s reconstruction and rehabilitation work in the region of Mianzhu City, which was hit hard by the 12 May 2008 earthquake. The volunteers formed four different groups, working in the areas of summer activities of children, environmental management, reconstruction of homes and public information, respectively.

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