Teenage girl sells 1.6-meter-long hair to help needy children
Published: August 15, 2005
A young girl who has just won third prize at a national long-hair competition sold here Sunday her 1.6-meter-long hair for 42,000 yuan (5,200 US dollars) to help raise money for the country’s needy children to continue schooling.
The 18-year-old Zhu Jing,a fresher at the Hunan University of Technology,had been nurturing her hair for 10 years, China Daily reported Monday.
Zhu’s thick, black hair reached her calves before the haircut and she had been treating it as part of her life.
Zhu had her hair cut off in tears at a national long-hair competition in Beijing in which she won third prize and sold it bycharity auction, which raised a total of more than 135,000 yuan (16,700 US dollars).
The money will go to an impoverished mountain village, where the annual personal income is less than 200 yuan (25 US dollars), in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
Zhu was quoted by the paper as saying that she had originally wanted to sell her long hair to pay for her school fees to reduce the burdens of her parents.
She changed her ideas after learning the plight of the childrenin the Guangxi’s Hongyao Village and decided to donate the money to help the children as she thought they need money much more than herself.
“I want to lend a hand to the children there who are forced to drop out of school due to poverty,” she was cited as saying.
“I hope (the sale of) my hair can bring hope to the children,” she added.
China faces serious challenges in providing universal educationto its population of 1.3 billion and particularly to its rural population despite steady progress made in this field over the past years.
According to a survey conducted by the Youth and Teenagers’ Fund, more than one million pupils drop out of school to help support their families in China each year.
China has initiated a string of measures and projects, such as “Project Hope” and “Chunlei (Spring Bud) Program” to help poor drop-outs to return to school.
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