Invited by Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan, 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi visited Taiwan during January 14th to 18th.In the morning of January 15th, accompanied by Ambassador Tien and Mrs. Tien, Mr. Satyarthi visited Eden Social Welfare Foundation to share and exchange experiences in social welfare field. Eden arranged our volunteer representative Pearl, who serviced at Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) in India, to come and share her experiences in BBA. Mr. Satyarthi was pleasantly surprised and gave Pearla big hug. In addition, Eden also arranged Mr. and Mrs. Satyarthi visitedour Wenfang Center. They gave our disabled young artists sincere blessing and considerable encouragement.
Pearl, Eden’s volunteer representative, reminded her great experience of helping children at BBAinIndiaand gave Mr. Satyarthi a hug with a big smile on her face.
“Taiwan is a beautiful place, but the hearts of Taiwanese people are even more beautiful.” Satyarthi said. Because of Taiwanese volunteers’ assistance, kids who are sheltered in BBA had a chance to open their eyes, to know Taiwan and the world. Therefore, Mrs. Satyarthi treasures this opportunity of visiting Taiwan very much. He wants to share his love and joy with Taiwanese youths, whom he considers as his “volunteer kids.” Satyarthi regards every injured child labor, every young volunteer as his own kids, “I want to do my best to help them, let them believe that they can also be the driving force for world peace, can be the light in the dark, and the strength in the future.”
Satyarthi and Eden’s CEO, J.S. Huang, gave their welcome gifts to each other.
Mr. Satyarthi from India is a well-known advocator for children’s rights. Since 1980, he started to devote himself to terminating children servitude, and to bring them back to school for education. He established the non-profit organization, Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA), which means “Saving the Childhood Mission”. The goal of BBA is to create a child-friendly society, to rescue children from servitude, and to provide them free and excellent basic education. Eden Social Welfare Foundation has cooperated with BBA since 2010. Our volunteers held 8-to-10-days recreational camps with educational activities for those children sheltered in BBA. Eden has sent 170 volunteers to BBA to date, and we are going to send more volunteers to engage in these kind of services in the future. We hope that our volunteers can be substantially benefited from these servicing activities, and may learn and grow via these kind of exchange.
When Satyarthi visited Eden’s Wenfang Center, he interacted with and talked to the young disabled persons.
Eden Social Welfare Foundation’s CEO, J.S. Huang, expressed, “We put more emphasis on our youth-volunteer services for underprivileged groups these years, because we expect our young volunteers to develop their empathy, learn how to give and how to care.” Facing the trends in globalization, there are still lots of conflicts among different cultures, countries, or groups. Nobody can stay out of the issues of world peace. Therefore, we hope that we can have more chances to cooperate with BBA, keeping on the advocacy for human rights, and the development of social enterprise, so that the spirit of “ People are brothers and sisters the moment they are born, so why does it have to be ties of kindred?” can be carried out.
