January 31, 2003

Dear friends,

Please forgive me for sending you a group letter. I just can't resist using this 'modern day marvel.' This is also a cheap way to stay in touch and to tell you all: I miss you, the children you have helped miss you.

FORCE/Friends of Rural China Education was founded in 1994, as a non-profit organization. Its goal is to help build schools in poor villages in rural China and provide scholarships for needy students. We are not affiliated with any religious or political groups. We were receiving donations through the good offices of the Saint Augustine Church in Gainesville, Fla., until we gained Federal 501 (c) (3) status in 1998, All workers are volunteers. We pay for our travel expenses to China and office expenses like xeroxing, postal mailing, phone calls, ...etc. We have no overhead nor operating cost. Every dollar goes to the projects. The following is a brief review and update on our projects. Please check out our website for more information: www.oocities.org/force1993

FORCE's non-profit status: This is the end of our five year "advance ruling period". Lin-yi is in the process of sifting through past records, filling out forms, consulting our lawyer in order to get a permanent 501(c) (3) status. Jim Roberts in Oakland has been helping us pro bono all these years. He said we did an outstanding job and there should be no problem for us to retain our status as a publicly supported foundation, but we need to widen our public support base.

Resuming membership drive: Resuming membership drive may become necessary as we have been receiving most of our contributions from three donors, Dr. Wang, Mrs. Hu and Lin-yi Wu (through teaching taiji), besides a few constant supporters. If we continue like this, we may not legally qualify as a public foundation. A public foundation may not receive a large portion of its revenues from two or three individuals. Therefore, we are hoping to recruit 50 or 100 members each contributing $50, $100 or more annually. Lin-yi's taiji students are now being counted as FORCE members. Members' privileges include free taiji or Chinese lessons and annual newsletters and maybe assistance in organizing trips to visit Friendship Schools in the Shangrila region in Yunnan Province.

Opening an Eastern Front: A friend in Florida has shown interest in helping us set up an "Eastern Front" on the East Coast. He has committed to putting out a brochure so he could distribute it among his friends and members of his church . Another friend in the DC area also volunteered to raise funds among her Buddhist friends and her colleagues. I just provided them with the necessary documents and information.

Update our website, set up electronic net work: We plan to update our website www.oocities.org/force1993 to include pictures of schools visited in 1998 and 2002, by Lin-yi Wu and her family. (Last year's visit was done in conjunction with a trip for the adoption of a boy by Tung-lin Wu, our vice president in Yunnan Province, near our Friendship Schools.) If we do our fund raising electronically, we will be able to reach a lot more existing and potential donors, in a fraction of the time needed before. We will be able to get pledges and input from them instantly. It is time for us to make good use of this modern day marvel. FORCE projects: From 1994 to 1999, FORCE has completed five Friendship Schools in the cave dwelling Yenan Region, Shaanxi Province, where Mao started his revolution seventy-five years ago from a cave. Since then we have been focusing on Yunnan Province, in the Shangrila region, (3 schools), and on the borders of Burma and Vietnam, (2 schools each). We have completed 12 schools altogether, the 13th will be finished in March.

Our next projects:

1. get water to a village in Guizhou Province where we will build our next school. They already found the water source. We are sending them $6,000 to build ditches and install pipes.

2. help rebuild a small school in Guizhou run by a wheel chair bound teacher much admired by the local villagers.

3. help build our first secondary school, in collaboration with Qingshu/Evergreen, another foundation here in the Bay Area, in Zhongdian, a beautiful county inhabited mostly by Tibetan minority, in the Shangrila Region, where we have already built two elementary schools.

We are also hoping to help establish school libraries. The governmental guideline is 7 books for each student and 10 books for each teacher. Qingshu/Evergreen Foundation has been helping to set up an electronic program for some middle and high school libraries. We are entering into collaboration with them when we build our first middle school.

World News Daily, a Chinese newspaper published in the US, reported that in the minority region, high school children buy old English newspaper for one yuan a jing (about a kilo), and voraciously read them to learn English. They are eager to learn about the world. Some of them want to become lawyers, a profession much revered in China---they want to be arbitrators to settle arguments among the villagers. All have a fervent desire to read, but there are no books in their huts, and school or local libraries are severely undefended. Providing funds for books may become essential among our future projects in Yunnan. In the Yenan region, we contributed US$4,000 for libraries of the Friendship schools during our visit there in 1998.

Local contact--- Funds sent to Yunnan are routinely entrusted to Mr. Hui, our liaison there. A scientist employed at the Agricultural Station in Kunming for decades. He is reliable, trustworthy, efficient and above all, having traveled to most areas of the region, knows the problems of the farmers better than anyone else.

We recently discovered a group of retired government cadres, mostly Communist Party pensioners who call themselves "Concerned Citizens for the Next Generation". They volunteer to help us identify needy schools and children. This is great news. Reliable local connection is essential as we cannot be there all the time to supervise the implementation of our projects.

We recently started collaboration with two other larger foundations here in the US, as they both have reliable local contacts in our region. These two foundations are: Zhigen (Nurture the Roots), and the above mentioned Qingshu/Evergreen. Incidentally, Qingshu's founder, Dr. Zhao, a mathematics professor at Golden Gate University, is a direct descendent of Emperor Zhao of the Sung Dynasty. We are indeed in good company.

Annual contributions-- We received the second annual contribution by the above mentioned Dr. Wang (a retired physicist who holds a dozen patents). He has made several trips to schools in Yunnan's lepers colony and to Guizhou where he identified the above mentioned school run by a wheel chair bound teacher. Towards these projects, he put $10,000 worth of stocks into our Charles Schwab account the end of last year . After a couple of weeks of nervous waiting for them to go up, we decided to sell them at a $900 profit. Mrs. Hu our financial officer also contributes $10,000 yearly. Linyi made similar donation from teaching taiji through the year. A small number of other annual contributions ranged from $250, $500 to $1000.

"Affirmative Action" for the minorities---Yunnan and Guizhou provinces are home to many minorities including Tibetans, Miaos, Yees and many others. For historical and geographical reasons, their economic situation has always lagged behind the Hans. In some Miao villages, 95% of females and 77% of males remain illiterate. Most of the children have to stay home to tend for pigs, gathering fire wood, or help their mothers out in the field. The fathers work in the quarry or some cottage industry, at 10 cents an hour, bringing home 200 yuan (US$26 )a month. When the families have enough savings to send a kid to school, they always give the privilege to the boy. School kids who live too far have to walk hours every week to go to school, with a sac of grains tied to their waists and a bundle of firewood on their tiny shoulders. They spend the whole week at school, their dorm is a dark room with no furniture but dirty bedding and a stove, the whole blackened by smoke, as there they also cook for themselves---they are only 9 or 10 years old. We asked the teacher if they miss home. He laughed and told us: "They are happy here. The condition in their homes is much worse."

Chinese abroad and in Taiwan are urging the Central Government to launch an Affirmative Action to help the minorities. There are government programs to help wipe out poverty in the minority regions. For our part, we are planning to establish scholarships especially for girls, alongside our school building projects.

Force's policy to help those who help themselves---It has been our policy to hand out only "seed money". For each "Complete Elementary School" which includes grades 1 through 6, our contract specifies a donation between $10,000 and $14,000 and requires the remaining 50% or more to be matched by the local government. For smaller "Natural Schools" serving "Natural Villages" which include only grades 1 to 3, or grades 4 to 6, we give them $400 to $600 to reinforce their mud structure. Our funds are released only after the construction is in progress. This is done to ensure the authenticity of the projects and to avoid corruption or misuse of funds .

Thank you for taking time to read the above and for your support of a small but worthy cause. We welcome questions, comments and suggestions.

Please note that our present address: 1126-B shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA 94707 will be changed to: 1048 Park Street, Hercules, CA, 94547 at the end of March, 2003. Contributions may be mailed to the above address(es) made out to the order of FORCE.

Jan 31, 2003

Prepared by Lin-yi Wu, President

FORCE/Friends of Rural China Education
Federal EIN: 22-1146430
State of California EIN: 94-3322936
website: http://www.oocities.org/force1993
tel/fax: 510-527-1639 , cell: 510-502-1639
email:linyiwu "at" earthlink "dot" net