Interviewed by Chinese TV

Last Thursday my friend Armin and I were interviewed by a Chinese TV-channel and it were broad casted the same evening on the 18:00 news. Of course there is a story behind this;

About 2 months before I moved to Ningbo I was reading about the city in forums on the Internet. On ningboguide.com I found a post with the topic "Can you help this girl?". I started to read the post and was caught by the story. Short version; It was about a girl who worked as a nanny for a British/Chinese couple. The girl became very ill and was dying. The nice couple took her in but could not finance her treatment by themselves. They turned to the citizens for help in order to buy a dialysis machine. The whole story about Penny can be found here:  http://www.ningboguide.com/node/5613

Kath, our international student coordinator, told us about the story last Tuesday and I thought it seemed familiar. The Wanli university and the Ningbo group needed 2 foreign volunteers to represent the school in a meeting with the girl. Since I have been following the story for 3 months I saw an opportunity to meet the girl, so I gladly signed up along with Armin. We were suppose to hand over an envelope with money, flowers and a fruit basket. We added some money ourselves. The bouquet of flowers was huge! And the fruit basket as well, it was heavy to carry. I couldn't help my self thinking that it might have been better to give the girl money instead of spending it on flowers and fruit.

On Thursday morning a car picked us up an drove us to the family's apartment. After the 30min drive we stepped out of the car and became a bit surprised. We were met by a TV-team and a photographer from a newspaper along with other visitors such as 2 kids from an elementary school and Craig, the founder of Ningboguide.com. In the apartment we delivered the load of presents and had a nice chat with Terry, the husband, and we exchanged a few words with the girl, Penny (Yu Ping), over a cup of coffee. The news team interviewed most people in the room, including Armin and me. It was kind of lousy and very hard to understand the reporter. I had to "freestyle" a bit and surprisingly a clip with me in it appeared on the TV-screen later that evening. They said something about the American student "Han Sen", hehe. You can watch the clip at this adress:
http://www.nbtv.com.cn/video/index.asp?channel=1&contentid=120100319062000
Story starts at 08:08 minutes and the part with Armin and I starts at about 09:20 minutes. I had problems watching it in Chrome but IE works well. The site is Chinese so the connection might be a bit slow.

I must admit it was kind of cool to be subtitled in Chinese.

If you have any interest in the story about Penny please read the forumpost on Ningboguide.com, and don't hesitate to contact Penny's family on friendsxofxpenny@gmail.com if you can help in any way.