Special Donations to Quake Refugees

A special donation event unveiled its curtains in a Mexican Café at the back gate of Yuquan Campus, Zhejiang University on May 22nd.

The café manager Alex is from Mexico. He tried all means and visited the General Association of Charity (GAC) twice in order to arrange the donation in his restaurant.

The problem occurred was the donation box at the very beginning. They originally planned to wrap a plastic box with some red paper. Fortunately, they learnt from last Thursday's English News on City Express that all the donation boxes should be applied from GAC with certain certifications. As the restaurant is not a commonweal organization or committee, they are not allowed to organize an donation event. Alex visited GAC twice and finally got the accredited donation box.

On 22nd May, the first day of donation, all the BBQ meat was prepared by Alex in person in order to formalize the donation. The restaurant was packed with foreigners living in Hangzhou.

At 8:00pm sharp, Tanya from Ukraine made a speech with the donation box in her hands, "Sichuan has suffered severely from the devastating earthquake. Let's make our contributions to all the survivors." With this, Tanya went from one table to another and all the guests donated generously.

It's not a big restaurant with only a score of tables. It took only a short while when everybody made the donation. Later on, a few more international students came over, some of whom made their donation and left, as there was no vacant seats.

"I came across a bad earthquake, too." When talking about the disaster, Alex looked really serious. On Sep. 19th and 20th, 1985, two earthquakes with a magnitude of 8.2M and 7.6M continuously hit the City of Mexico, causing a death toll of around 10,000 people. Alex's hometown is about 500km away from the City of

Mexico and he experienced the horrible tremor as a result.

He recalled, "It was about 3 or 4 in the morning when I was sleeping soundly. All of a sudden the room was shaking. At first I thought it was some one stomping on the floor, but my father just grabbed me and rushed out of the room. He didn't tell me it was earthquake until we arrived at a safe spot."

According to the official statistics, 6,000 people died and 10,000 people were injured in those earthquakes. But unofficial reports believed that at least 10,000 people died and 30,000 people were injured.

With this understanding and common feelings, Alex wished that he could raise some money for the refugees, for he is not able to send food, water, clothes or tents there.

Gya, a 19-year-old American girl is an organizer of this donation event. She is currently studying Chinese in Zhejiang University.

She said, "I learnt about this great earthquake on the next day from my Chinese classmates. I think we international students should do something for the survivors in the disaster area."

Both Alex and Gya were quite thrilled to see the restaurant packed with people prepared to donate, since they didn't post the event at the school. She admitted that she didn't expect so many people, as she only told a few friends.

Source: City Express