Students in Fuchang primary school play with Keir Steinke, Unilever's vice-president of Asian development, who volunteered to teach English there for a week. Provided to China Daily
BEIJING - Online video chat might seem nothing new nowadays for city folk but for 10-year-old Lin Xin it is very special.
The youngster has been able to see and hear his mother online since the Spring Festival although she is working 2,000 km away - thanks to a microphone, a pair of headphones and an Internet connection.
He was overwhelmed by his first 10-minute cyber chat. The third-grade student couldn't finish a whole sentence and just repeated the world "mom" while staring at his mother's image on the computer screen.
The talk came to an end without a goodbye because the network was unstable but Lin regarded himself as the luckiest lad in Fuchang Center Primary School because he was the first to use the connection.
A total of 212 out of the 417 pupils are separated from a parent in the underdeveloped Hongya county because either mom or dad has moved away to become a migrant worker.
The county located in the southwest part of Sichuan province has 69.7 percent of its land covered by forest. However, the beautiful natural environment is not enough to stop ambitious young people desiring a better life. Since the 1990s, young people have started to work in big cities, leaving their children and farm work to the older generation.
The majority of the primary school students live with their grandparents without the guidance of one or even both of their parents. "Their parents usually leave to work in big cities right after finishing breastfeeding and they come back once a year or once in several years," said He Shigui, the headmaster of Fuchang Center Primary school.
Thanks to the Rainbow Homeland project launched by the All China Women's Federation (ACWF) and Unilever China, the students will be able to feel more connected with their parents through the online video chatting system.
The project equipped two schools in Jiangxi and Anhui provinces with the equipment last year and sent out around 300,000 copies of books to migrant worker parents, offering them tips on how to show more care to their children from a long distance.
"This school is our first stop this year. We plan to equip 10 schools with the video chatting system and send out another 600,000 copies of the books by the end of this year," said Su Chunjiang, the deputy director of the project with ACWF.
"Around 30 parents have already signed up to join our OICQ group and we will open the system to students during lunch break on every Monday, Wednesday and Friday," said Wan Li, a teacher who is in charge of the system in Fuchang Center Primary School.
She added that the system will be very popular among "left-behind" children and one computer may not be enough to meet the demands of all the pupils.
In a nationwide survey conducted by ACWF last year, as many as 58 million children in rural homes live under the care of their grandparents or other relatives. Among them, those under 14 account for around 40 million.
Zeng Xiwen, vice-president of Unilever's Greater China region, said the company was focusing on the education and care of the left-behind children since 2006 after they noticed a growing number of migrant workers in Unilever China.
"The survey shows that one-third of the 58 million children have psychological issues to some extent. An unhappy childhood will do harm to the development of a person and has a bad influence on the whole of society," Zeng said, adding that responsible companies should contribute more to society in the long term.
Zeng said he hopes to build the Rainbow Homeland into a new form of charity. "For about 10,000 yuan, you can provide a computer and one year of the Internet fee so that more children can meet their parents online," he said.
Unilever China has invested 3 million yuan in the Rainbow Homeland project alone. The company has also organized around 100 employees to teach in rural schools as volunteers since 2006.
Keir Steinke, Unilever's vice-president of Asian development, who visited Fuchang to teach English during the opening of Rainbow Homeland at the school, said: "It was lucky that my parents were there for me when I was a child. Those people are brave to work far from their hometowns and leave their children behind. It is a tough life."
He said he will do more to help children in China because "investing in children is investing in the future of China".
