CITY GUIDE >Culture and Events
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CITY GUIDE >Culture and Events
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Offering migrants a hand up, not a hand out
By Mike Fuksman (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-29 09:21 The Subway sandwich shop is filling with impatient customers, but teenage worker Li Zaiyang is not too fussed. The young migrant worker knows the drill, can work well in a team and is quick to serve. The queue quickly shortens, and Li now has time to pause and think. The 18-year-old knows he won't be working for Subway forever, and ponders his future with the same optimism as any other teenager in the world.
Li has been employed at the Subway restaurant chain for two months as a result of his training provided by Compassion for Migrant Children (CMC), a group dedicated to improving the lives of migrant children and their families. Li moved to Beijing with his family from their countryside home in Henan province, and has directly benefited from the vocational skills he learned at CMC's Dongba community center. "I trained at the center for two and a half months; we celebrated my graduation from the program in January," he says. For Li, it is not just the tangible workplace skills that he has valued the most it is all about a renewed attitude of hope. "The vocational skills have been useful, but for me, the most important thing I have learned is about my mind, to change my attitudes and values. These things have changed me and will be useful for my whole life," Li says. "I want to keep working at my job, but I am also thinking about doing something that I really like in the future." Jonathan Hursh, founder and executive director of CMC, started the group in early 2006, and has been steadily building the program with the help of volunteers. "We're embedded in the migrant community; kids get engaged seven days a week, and they engage us right back," he says. There are many NGOs dedicated to aiding the plight of migrant workers; the influx of migrant families to the urban centers of China is "the greatest peacetime migration that's ever been seen, in any country," says CMC's director of operations Charlie Humphreys. However, CMC differs from other NGOs in that it provides more than just tangible aid such as housing or food. "When the migrants move from the countryside to the city, the social fabric that was in place in their migrant villages is ripped apart. We try to rebuild that social fabric," says Hursh. |
