A program that gets the people from all around more involved with what’s going on in their immediate environment, from the Newspapers, translated…
It doesn’t cost too much, if you want to spend a night in the local tribes, so long as you have the compassions, you will have the opportunities to exchange your compassions for a night’s stay. The Taiwan Fund for Children & Families set up a “Love Exchange Station” in Namashah District in Kaohsiung, if someone offers physical help, then, s/he will be able to have a free night’s stay there; there were groups of volunteers who’d headed up the mountains to help the locals harvest their produces, and, there were students who’d come into the community to tell the stories to the children, and this small tribe’s heart shone through.
Normally, the “Work-for-Stay” programs are built on the private personal relationships, and the tourists needed to put in the labor, to get the free stays. The Northern Kaohsiung’s Fund for Children & Families set up a Love-Exchange Volunteer Free Stay Program, when someone proposed an idea of service to the managers, and after the ideas were checked and okayed, then, the individuals get to stay in the hostels for free.
The social worker, Lin said, that it’s hard for the people in the tribes to find work, but, they’d owned beautiful residences, that the not-for-profit hotels were made of two privately owned homes, it’s more like a hostel for backpackers, and, there are, the open floors for the tourists bringing their own sleeping bags to sleep in, the hotels provided care and concerns to families of lower economics, offered the services to the schools, and the local communities too, and helped the farm workers harvest the produces, shipping them out in packages, there’s no limit to the services provided.
Awhile ago, thirty-four members of the team of volunteers from the Taiwan Fund for Children & Families came, not only did they help the farmers dig up the taros, they’d also spent over $2,000N.T.s from their own pockets, to buy what they harvested; the farmers didn’t have to pay for the manpower they’d needed, to help them harvest, and it’d given them, a small sum of earning at the same time.
what one of the not-for-profit hotels look like here, photo from online…
Lin, a volunteer told, that he’d bought his produces in the traditional marketplaces or supermarkets, the very first time he’d dug up the taros and bought them home to consume, it impressed him deeply, he will cherish the produces planted by the farmers even more now.
And so, this, is a great program, isn’t it? To allow those in the cities, to experience a day of work in the farms, at the same time, it’d, benefitted the planters, because this way, they wouldn’t need to wreck their brains about how they can’t sell off ALL of their harvested produces.