Cruelty
- Chechen -

I only have a few pictures that the Medicins du Monde smuggled out of Chechen.

In one picture drawn before the tanks came, Chechen was full of green mountains and beautiful rivers. It was a heaven where you could dance and ride horses. Unfortunately, the war has ruined the peaceful lives of the people. Beautiful flowers don't bloom anymore and the soil doesn't smell sweet. What is left to these children are injured flesh, broken bodies, bombs and ruined buildings.

The children of Chechen have no storybooks, toys, candy or MacDonald's. For them, the deeply ingrained memories of childhood will be ones of the cruelty of war and the enmity of people.

Hunger
- Ethiopia -

Under the sun, Ethiopian children have radiant skins and mouths full of extremely white teeth. However, there was one year when more than one million Ethiopians died from starvation, including many children.

From the time the children are born, they are destined to have hungry stomachs. Some have to drink from the same water as animals. The children drink so much water that their bellies swell, and there are no doctors who can help them. Hunger, dirty water, infectious diseases, and even AIDS are problems that these children have to face.

Death
- Rwanda -

Since 1994, children of Rwanda have been living their lives in refugee camps. Fear of death, hunger, corpses, cholera... These constantly encroach on their tender minds.

Some children are shot and killed in churches. Some die as they leave their homes. Some die of cholera. Some are killed by mines. Some starve to death in their mothers' arms. Some...

These innocent children do not understand why they are involved in the government and racial genocide. Nor do they understand why there are such senseless catastrophes in their simple lives.

Loneliness
- Azerbaijan -

Narrated by Dr. Chang Shi-chung of Tzu Chi Hospital
Compiled by Ho Hui-ching

Maybe it is in the genes, or maybe it is because of the extremely high rate of literacy. When they meet strangers, the children in the refugee camps and disabled children's homes are not slow or shy. Instead, they are quite vivacious and curious.

In this refugee camp, there are only two hours of electricity and three hours of water each day. There are 29 water taps for 15,000 people. There are no classrooms, no schools, no textbooks, no sport equipment. A family of five or six is squeezed in a not-so-large, torn tent. They eat, sleep and live together.

It is the same scene in the disabled children's homes. The children in the homes have to line up to receive their meals, but they do not necessarily get enough food. When they are cold, they do not have enough clothes to wear. When they are sick, no one can take them to a doctor. No one knows where their parents are or even whether they are still alive. In their innocent hearts, the children are unable to ponder these questions or even be concerned.

In comparison, children in the refugee camps are healthier. At least they can run around. When their parents leave to find food, older children can take the younger ones to play with their playmates.

Fear
- Cambodia -

Walking along a dirty, smelly road, I saw many poorly clad children searching through a garbage dump for kindling and old, reusable items. The setting sun shone on their tiny backs while they rummaged through the garbage. Tears came to my eyes...

-Liu Ming-ta

At a relief distribution site, a naked boy was picking up fallen rice on the ground. He was so tired that he finally fell asleep on a chair, but in his hand he still clutched that bag of rice... That really upset me. Wars are so cruel, but children are so innocent!

-Sister Ching Chi

While going through the data about Cambodia, one of the most shocking stories is the horrible case of a whole family of fourteen people who committed suicide by taking poison, because they did not want to be hungry anymore.

Is the choice of death the only way to achieve freedom from suffering? For Cambodian children who didn't choose to be born, how many other choices do they have?

Besides the hunger brought by floods and droughts, the children must face the danger of being injured by mines while they are out herding sheep. They also feel the threat that their homes will be burned and their food robbed by the Khmer Rouge. And so they live in fear...

Illiteracy
- Nepal -

Nepal is one of the ten poorest countries in the world.

The children there are thin and dark-skinned. Their faces have deeply cut features and sweet smiles, but there are many parasites in their swollen bellies.

More than seventy percent of the population is illiterate, and many children are poor and uneducated. We can often see poorly clad children trudging along the dirt roads, carrying large bamboo baskets filled with tree branches. Some children have to herd cattle or sheep to assist their families.

In the past, child labour was quite common in Nepal, and children at young ages had to do hard labour. Later, international organizations demanded that the Nepalese government prohibit child labour, but that only forced the poor children onto the streets, where they had to become beggars or pickpockets to survive.

After the Tzu Chi houses in Rauthat were completed, children of poor families started to go to school. Several parents pooled their resources to hire a teacher to teach their children. In one of their houses, 15 or 16 children sit on the cement floor and write with chalk on small slates. Their textbooks are pieced together from scrap paper.

Reality
- Mongolia -

It is said that the Mongolians really dote on their children. The most beautiful buildings in the country are reserved for day care centers, and people are quite willing to take care of orphans when they themselves have enough to eat and wear.

So the children of Mongolia are the most fortunate, aren't they?

However, political reality has brought cruelty to their lives. Mongolia was controlled by the Soviet Union for a long time, and the country was entirely dependent on the Russians for their industry, daily necessities, and even medicine. In the winter of 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia withdrew its military and all its resources from Mongolia.

Almost a thousand day care centers were closed. The infant mortality rate, which had already been high enough to attract the attention of the United Nations, was further threatened by the closures of factories and severe shortages of milk powder. Of all malnourished people in the nation, 45% were children.

When Tzu Chi members went to inspect the situation, they saw many heartbreaking scenes:

A mother and daughter lived in a small, dingy home. The daughter was ill in bed and had no medicine. Her mother was also sick.

A woman had two children who wore clothes distributed by the German Red Cross Society. In the bag where they kept their food, there was only a small piece of black, moldy bread.

An elderly, sick couple ate dead, rotting animals that they found on the road...

In the photos, round-faced Mongolian children look white and chubby. However, their meals only consist of a biscuit and a cup of sugar water.

As for the future, the children of Mongolia still had a long winter to get through and a long way to go.

Strength
- Northern Thailand -

They are all Chinese, but the children of Taiwan, mainland China and northern Thailand have different lives.

In the sixty-four refugee camps in northern Thailand, there are more than 65,000 refugees from mainland China, including close to 22,700 children.

The Thai government requires all schools to teach only the Thai language, so adults in the camps have to find teachers to teach children Mandarin Chinese. Although the children there cannot learn Chinese freely, adults and children insist that they want to be Chinese.

Miss Cho, who has been working in a day care center in a refugee camp for seven years, recalled that there was an 11-year-old boy named Lee A-hua. He wanted to study very much, but because his family was poor, he could not afford the tuition. A school teacher once urged Lee to pay the tuition, and Lee did not go to school again for days.

The teacher felt that very strange, so she went to Lee's home. Lee's mother then told her the truth. "A-hua recently kept nagging me for the tuition money, but I really didn't have any money to give him. So he asked for a piece of land on the hillside and some seeds. He then cleared the land, planted and watered the seeds, and now there are little seedlings..."

A-hua, who had been listening quietly at one side, spoke up shyly. "Teacher, after the vegetables have grown up, I will sell them in the market. Then I can have money to pay the tuition and I can go to school again."

With tears streaming down her face, the teacher embraced A-hua.

These children in northern Thailand need a lot of strength as they grow up. The orphaned, the poor, the single parents... Older children carry younger ones on their backs. They live in grass huts that easily catch fire. When they are sick, they cannot go to a doctor...

Hope
- Taiwan -

By Chen Chiu-shan and Chen Yu-fang

The general impression is that children in Taiwan are lucky: they have plenty of food and clothes and are well-educated. Their environment provides an inexhaustible supply of everything they need. However, under the surface of this affluence, who knows how children who have no place to live survive?

Chun is a child who really breaks the hearts of Tzu Chi social workers. Her mother was nowhere to be found and her father was drunk all the time. One day he accidentally drank some acid that he thought was alcohol. His esophagus was damaged and he could not provide for the family. He became depressed, and he finally jumped out of a building and killed himself. Chun went to live with her grandmother.

With an incomplete family structure, unreliable income and unstable life, her unsteady childhood is filled with unhappy memories. Whenever her grandmother finds something unpleasant, she simply gripes about it. When Chun is not doing well at school, her grandmother only frets and nags her about it. She does not try to understand Chun's feelings. Having long been in an environment with no personal communication, Chun has become very quiet.

Shan is an aboriginal boy. After his father passed away, his mother remarried. His stepfather suffered spinal injuries in a car accident. After Shan graduated from elementary school, all these misfortunes forced him to stay in the mountains and work in a fruit orchard for his family.

The social workers are heartbroken. If there were a high school close to his home, Shan could still go to school every day and work in the orchard after school. If there were sufficient social resources or if the adults put more stress on education, maybe Hsiao-shan would have different choices and a different life.

Poor education, low family income, or even insufficient medical resources threaten the rights of these aboriginal children to have good health, nutrition and education.

The most wonderful thing is that aboriginal children are inherently optimistic and are easily made happy. They are curious about strangers, they enjoy talking, and they can spend their whole afternoon simply running around and chasing each other. They sometimes go with adults to hunt or to work in the fields. They may make a mess of themselves, but that is just a joyful sign that they are in contact with nature. What really worries people the most is that one day when they have to survive among the different values of Taiwanese society, will they be able to adjust?

Recently, laws regarding children's welfare have been passed, and they seem to have raised public awareness of children's rights. However, child prostitutes, street children, abused children, abandoned babies and other problems regarding children's happiness are still overlooked in Taiwan.

When can we really learn to respect children as ourselves and love all children as our own? We hope that someday Taiwan can become a happy heaven for children.

Expectation
- Mainland China -

Hopei province, December 1996.

While we were distributing padded cotton coats in a farming village deep in the mountains, I noticed Hsiao-hung standing by herself on one side, her eyes filled with expectation. I asked her how old she was, and she murmured that she was ten. I asked her why she wasn't in school today. Two rows of tears rolled down her round face, and she replied in an almost inaudible voice, "I don't have money for school."

Her parents had died a few years before, and she had been taken in by kind-hearted relatives. She was grateful even to have food to eat, and she didn't want to ask for money to go to school.

Many provinces in China often suffer from floods, which destroy farms, houses and even schools. But when the floods are gone, you can see children under trees or in houses, doing their lessons with temporary tables and benches pieced together from wooden boards.

The adults shout the slogan, "No matter how difficult our lives are, they will not be difficult for our children." Even though they have no money, they still find ways to let their children study.