How Did We Get Started?

Every morning, Bai would enter the dark cave, draw a line in the middle of the black board, taught one class for 25 minutes, then turned to the other side and taught the other class for 25 minutes. Hung-sen Wu and his wife Lin-yi, who immigrated to America after they left their faculty positions in Beijing University in the early sixties, decided to help. Together with friends and colleagues from Gainesville, Florida, where Hung-sen was an instructor at a local community college, they formed a group named Friends of Rural China Education (FORCE), headed by Dr. Ron Wolff, a zoology professor at the University of Florida.

Through garage sales, benefit dinners and membership donation, we raised over US$10,000. Donation and proceeds were sent to the local St Augustine Church who, through their affiliated organization in Hong Kong, dispatched the money to the hands of Teacher Bai, whose husband happened to be a construction worker. The first red-brick school house was constructed in 1994, for US$7,000.

Since then, FORCE has helped build 4 other schools, for a total investment of US$44,000, of which US$4000 was earmarked for books. The local government and industries also contributed, sometimes investing as much as 65% of the total cost.

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