Wednesday 28 May 2008

Awards and Volunteers



I came to Hong Kong from Beijing on Monday to attend a award ceremony, held by a private investment bank that is donating a portion of its management fees of its new environmental fund to environmental and animal charities for the first ever time. As the fund was established by a dear friend who has been very supportive of our ambitious project, our charity was recommended to receive 50 thousand US dollars. This money will be used to help us feed the rapidly increasing number of our tigers.


It has been a good month, almost as if to celebrate my and Stuart's birthdays. We were given a bequest of 75000 Australian dollars by the late Jenifer Bone earlier this month, after her legal representative had visited us in April. These donations hearten me as they show increasing appreciation of what we do by people who didn't even personally know us. The donations will help reduce the pressure on Stuart who has been the chief funder. I hope they will also lead us to more as people start to realize the great significance of restoring the South China Tiger and its habitat.


The biggest bonus of the trip to HK was to visit Shenzhen, just brief train ride across the border, where I met our numerous volunteers -old and new. I knew some of their names from the messages on my blog: Wind of Tigers, Summer River, etc and I was glad to finally meet them in person. I also met Hulooo's namer the beautiful Miss Wang! I feel so sorry though I missed Liao Wenzhe who had planned to come but could not...

It was such a warm feeling to meet these staunch supporters of the South China Tigers! I felt like I had known them all along...

Li in Hong Kong

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