San Francisco– A group of ethnic Tibetan youth from a poverty-stricken village in China’s Sichuan province will make their first overseas trip to the US to widen their horizons as part of a UN poverty-relief programme, an organiser said.
Hwa A. Lim, a board member of Asian Hustle and Salsa Association (AHSA) World, a California-based non-profit organization dedicated to skills development, literacy promotion and poverty alleviation, said on Sunday that six ethnic Tibetan youth from a village in Pingwu County, Sichuan province, will come to California in celebration of World Dance Day.
“They’ll be visiting us for about 10 days. We’ll take them to different schools, to different places and even to visit some companies,” he was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency.
The ethnic Tibetan youth will perform a Chinese intangible heritage “Yak Dance”, a traditional ritual dance popular among ethnic Tibetan groups in Sichuan, at the 2019 AHSA World Dance Day Charity Night on April 28 in the San Francisco Bay Area, Lim said.
This year’s celebrations will focus on the theme of poverty-relief and quality education, said Lim, who is a bioinformatics expert at the UN Food and Agricultural Organization and a member of the International Dance Council (CID).
The CID is a non-governmental organization founded in 1973 within the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) headquarters in Paris.
“We encourage everybody to help out so that everybody can be on the same boat,” Lim said. “This year we target those impoverished children of the ethnic Tibetans in remote areas of western China.”
AHSA World is the sponsor of the project “When Creativity Meets Poverty Alleviation and Education” nominated for the 2018 Unesco Literacy Prizes, which was later incorporated into the SDG4-Education 2030 agenda.
Its aim is to help poverty-hit children become literate and develop skills for future careers. (IANS)
