The understanding, the awareness, that the writer arrived at, on his trip around Taiwan, to visit the distant region areas, where there are, too many families, waiting for, assistance, the call, for everybody to lend that, helping hand! Off of the Front Page Sections, translated…
I’d recently finished the fundraiser, 1919 Cycling Around Taiwan, the fifteen day cycling trip of “I ride, You donate”, for the families in dire need. With a team of sixty-two cyclist, riding 1,300 kilometers around Taiwan, and we’d visited twenty-nine help center, to understand the trials of life of the families hit by emergency situations, hearing their voices, helped them walk that extra mile. The fifteen days’ of in-depth entering into the poverty-stricken, distant regions, made me see what poverty looked like, and it’d made me realized, that “the origins of poverty WAS from the broken family relations!”
the plea…
photo from online
In actuality, poverty is a widely defined concept, there’s no set definition of it. From the language, the two characters mean “extremely deprived”, so, poverty is used to describe people living in the hardships of economics, with a shortage of all the resources they’re in need of. But, being poor, it’s a subjective interpretation, and a comparative; and, there are more levels of poverty than just the economical, materialistic, it may also include societal, economical, as well as political. In my fifteen days cycling to raise fund for the poverty stricken regions, with personal contact, interactions with the dozens of families, it’d made me feel, that poverty is actually the results of “broken relationships”, especially of the family relationships that were, broken down.
Aunty Chang in Pingdong, is an exemplary case of this. Aunty Chang is seventy-one, with the condition of mildly mental retardation, live with her younger brother who had a stroke, her own emotionally troubled son, and the nephew with epilepsy. This family of four lived off of the assistance of handicapped individuals, and the assistance for the elderly. What added to their difficulties was, that last year, there was a fire on the second floor of their home, the furniture all burned up, there’s now, just the living room on the first floor that can be, used, the originally home with almost nothing now, looked like ruins, and, as it rained, the house would, start, leaking, the place was totally, unoccupiable. Our teams helped fixed up Aunty Chang’s home, and as she’d cried and told of her trials of life, I can only cry with her, and hugged her, to give her the emotional supports, and told the assistance foundation, to help them look for more resources to help the family, to help them fix up this broken home, so at least this family would have a steady roof over their, heads.
And, there was, an Atayal fellow cyclist this year on our team, who’d, gone on the entire fifteen days’ trip with us. He’d witnessed the needs of these families, and shared with me, that what he saw, was no different than what he was growing up in, forty years ago. When this man was only five, his father died from long-term alcohol abuse, leaving his mother, to raise him and his siblings up. Thankfully, that his mother insisted on getting the children into the church, to help them keep their, faith; because of the church’s unconditional love, and help, it’d helped covered for the lacking of functionality of his family, and it’d helped the family members patched their relationship with one another, up, keeping this Atayal teammate of ours, not gone astray, and he was able to break away from the cycle of poverty, to not pass it down to the next, generation.
And now, the 1919 Cycling Around Taiwan’s fifteen-day long journey is over, but, the needs of these families in the distant regions are still, pressing, and all we can do, is to keep watch over them, continue to accompany these families in need, help raise the funds for the families that are faced with the emergencies, to help those who have the needs, for one more, extra, mile. I invite you, the readers, to offer a helping hand to those families that are broken down, lacking the normal functions, so the members of these families can, have the hopes for a better, tomorrow.
what we can do to help!
poster from online
Because of you, love cycles! Help us help those in poverty, to return the relations we share with the outside world back to, love again.
And so, this, is from going deep into the local regions, to SEE and FEEL the needs of these families, and, if we don’t get immersed in the trials of others, and learn to empathize with their situations in life, we will never be driven to help.
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