With an unexpected turn of event, we ended up not going to Beimazhuang (a village near Baoding) after all.

Thanks to none other than our beloved COVID outbreak!

Just days before our visit to the village, we received a warning notice about a recent COVID outbreak in most of Hebei province.  Which meant if we had gone to those villages, we would most likely be put into 2-3 weeks quarantine coming back to Beijing, which we unfortunately cannot afford to put up with. But we still needed to do what we planned to do, so we attempted to ship all those goods directly to one of the schools we are trying to help. Then we learned due to the COVID outbreak there are restrictions set disallowing the express service companies to make deliveries to those villages, which once again hindered us from getting the goods to them!

After a long discussion with the village head and school principal, we were given an alternate address in the center of Baoding (unrestricted area) for us to ship the goods to , and they would send somebody on a half an hour drive to pick it all up with a truck.

So after days of stress and headaches, we finally got it done.

Little did we know, the school had assembled all their kids (around 200 kids) onto the school playground for a so called charity event. They put up an electronic sign that said “Charity event “ in the background, set up a long table and placed all the goods we had sent them on it. Then they apparently had a list of names of students who needed it the most, and lined them up to receive their donations. A couple of teachers were then responsible for handing out the goods to those students.

We donated a few hundred notebooks, couple hundred pencils, cartoon eraser, pencil cases, pens, and rulers.

We weren’t sure how it was distributed, but I hope a lot of the kids were at least satisfied with what they had received.

We then had the kids who received a donation to fill out a questionnaire (about a 100) for us to learn a little bit more about them, and help us prepare for future donations. Below are a few sample questionnaires filled out by the kids.