(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-06-01 14:19 Comments-- When Jia Xin held the violin donated by a benevolent stranger, she was so excited she couldn't get her fingers to play properly.
The eight-year-old girl, who comes from northeastern China's Jilin Province, is now receiving leukaemia treatment in the Beijing Children's Hospital.
The violin was donated by 48-year-old Wang Yi, a fund manager who was attracted by a charity campaign launched by the Chinese Marrow Donor Program (CMDP) and The Beijing News on May 25 for the annual International Children's Day, which falls on June 1.
Organizers of the campaign managed to collect around 160 wishes from leukaemia children who are being treated in 11 hospitals in Beijing, including the Beijing Children's Hospital and the Naval General Hospital of the People's Liberation Army.
The wishes were almost all very simple, such as a book, a toy car, a game player, a skateboard, or going to the zoo or a park. Only a few of the children took it to a more costly level, such as a violin.
Wang told Xinhua that he went to buy the violin after he saw the campaign advertisement, which cost him about 1,000 yuan.
"For me, this is only a modest amount of money," he said, "but for the girl, the gift means a lot."
Wang said that he wanted to see the girl cheered by playing the violin, and he hoped this would make her treatment easier to accept.
The little girl, who fell in love with the violin in her hometown, said "Thank you" to Wang again and again.
After buying the violin, Wang said he would take care of the living costs of Jia Xin's parents in Beijing.
The organizers said Sunday that they had received 193 donated gifts by the end of Saturday, six days after the campaign was launched. The gifts had all been given to the children by Monday.
Besides gifts, CMDP's bank account received 134 donations in cash, totaling 58,825 yuan (about 8,610 US dollars), which would be used to buy more gifts.
The donors include company managers, migrant workers - who are not rich themselves, people who have recovered from leukaemia, and organizations such as the Red Cross Society of China and the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
CMDP director Hong Junling told Xinhua that the aim of this campaign was to give more care to the children, as they are a vulnerable group, and Children's Day provides an excellent opportunity to do so.
"We hope to cheer them up as much as possible," Hong said, "and gain more attention and care from the public."
According to CMDP statistics, there are now several million leukaemia patients in China and around one million of them are waiting for marrow transplants.
"Each year, there are about 40,000 to 60,000 new patients reported and 50 percent of them are children," Hong said.
Hong said that only a very small portion of the patients in China could finally get a marrow transplant, the most effective way found so far to treat the disease, because of the difficulty in finding the right type of marrow and high operation costs.
"Only 20 to 30 percent of those who applied for marrow transplants could find the right types of marrow," he said, adding that even brothers and sisters only have a success rate of about 25 percent.
Due to the one-child policy in China, some parents of leukaemia children try to give birth to another baby to save their children's lives, but they are only lucky if the new-born baby's marrow type is compatible with the leukaemia brother or sister, Hong said.
Besides, even though some families managed to find the right type of marrow, the high operation costs would be beyond their reach.
In a country whose per capita GDP is just above 3,000 US dollars, a leukaemia treatment with marrow transplant and follow-up medicines in China costs at least 300,000 yuan to 400,000 yuan for each patient.
Currently, most leukaemia children's families bear the treatment costs by themselves, said Hong.
Those children who are covered by insurance can partly depend on claims and some, who are from very poor families, can apply for charity funds from organizations such as the Chinese Red Cross Foundation (CRCF).
However, CRCF secretary-general Wang Rupeng said in early May that the success rate to apply for CRCF leukaemia funding is only around 10 percent due to the limited amount of money the foundation has raised and the high number of applicants.
"We hope the patients can receive more public donations in the future," Hong said.
|
