September 25, 2008
UW students win award for earthquake relief work
When UW students Steve Margitan and Geoff Morgan pitched in with post-earthquake help in China this past spring, they had no idea they’d wind up with $65,000 in donations and 5,700 cards and letters for children in the disaster zone. They also didn’t know the work might lead to a new learning center for Chinese teachers or that they’d win an award for their work.
The Foundation for International Understanding Through Students, founded in the 1940s and based at the UW, has awarded China Earthquake Aid, the group Morgan and Margitan founded, its Shigemura Award for International Understanding.
The foundation, which helped the students manage a post-earthquake fund drive, is helping them decide how to use the rest of the money, including a $50,000 gift from an anonymous donor who already had ties to the UW. The gift might be combined with an $80,000 grant that Teachers Without Borders is finalizing with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The groups might then set up a teacher resource center in the area devastated by the earthquake, said Fred Mednick, founder of Teachers Without Borders, which is based in Seattle.
The $50,000 gift arrived shortly after the students distributed $8,500 worth of goods at three Chinese schools in the earthquake region.
Margitan and Morgan were studying at Sichuan University when the earthquake hit. They and five other students from that university and the UW distributed several hundred pounds of school supplies, some 900 English/Chinese dictionaries and 10 pounds of candy to students in Dujiangyan, the city closest to the epicenter of the 7.9 magnitude earthquake which struck May 12.
The students also gave the children cards and letters they had collected from children in their countries and others. A nurse and a teacher in the quake zone suggested the notes, so Morgan and Margitan tapped friends, family and former teachers, asking them to spread the word.
They wound up with a stack of notes three feet tall. “We got cards and letters from people and places we had never heard of,” Margitan said. About 3,500 came from children in China, including large numbers from Hong Kong; 20 came from children in Germany; and the rest came from the United States. Two second graders at the John Stanford International School in Seattle also operated a lemonade stand that raised $32.57 for child victims of the earthquake.
“It was just what we were supposed to do,” Margitan said of the relief efforts. “There was no other choice, given what we saw.”
The Chinese Students Association and the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at the UW held a donation drive and a candlelight vigil May 20 in Red Square. They gave Morgan and Margitan’s group $5,000 which helped buy the dictionaries, the candy and a passel of school supplies — crayons, colored pencils and some 2,000 writing pencils.
But the logistics of the project were sometimes daunting. Chinese officials initially hesitated about the donations or turned them down, apparently out of pride, but then relented. Within the UW and Sichuan University group, conflicts about what to do and how to do it had to be ironed out. Supplies had to be purchased, then a bus rented and packed as tightly as a Chinese subway train.
Eventually, though, the bus and the project organizers arrived at the schools. “It was exciting to see the children lined up and waiting. It turned out to be both inspirational and a lot of fun,” said Morgan, 22. Majoring in international studies as well as civil and environmental engineering, Morgan also had a Rieser fellowship this year to re-engineer and rebuild a water system for a village near Chengdu.
Steve Harrell, a UW anthropologist who has worked in China for years and has advised the students, said the country is very good at huge relief efforts over short periods of time but that sustained effort has been difficult.
“There’s not much follow-through,” Harrell said. China Earthquake Aid “opened the gate to a sustainable pipeline for improving education,” and long-term partnerships could be good for both China and the UW.
