A girl turns round his head upon her entry into the dormitory gate on the campus of the Orphanage School for Ethnic Minorities in Lijiang, southwest China's Yunnan Province, October 28, 2009. [Xinhua]

Every time the bell rings signaling the class over, the campus in tranquility seethes over shortly afterwards as students swarms out of classrooms with canteens and water cups in hands, stepping towards the playground ......

The school broadcast echoes over the campus, elocnte of poetries on Toiling Farmers Weed and Plough resound overhead, following a children's ballad of Grateful For the Meal. A song floats from the loudspeaker, singing: "Although it not you who breast-fed me, only because of all the unselfish lover you bestowed on me, so I call you my dearest mom ......"

All the students in the Orphanage School for Ethnic Minorities are orphans. The school has received some 241 orphans belonging to 18 ethnic minorities studying and living on campus here so far. And during the past decade, the school, founded in 1999, has adopted more than 500 orphans through self fund-raising and receiving donations. Great changes have taken place thanks to the persistent devotion of love heart and social solicitude. Now, a 3-storey teaching building, office building, teachers' dormitory, grand hall, dining canteen and bathhouse are all built and in consummate layout. Students in various ethnic groups live in the courtyards with their own ethnic characteristics.

A 2-mu-sized plantation of vegetable, preserved for the students to plow by themselves, grows with affluent greengrocery, leek and radishes. Over there some boys play football in high spirit on a small weed-rampant playground.

20-year-old Yang Li who used to be an orphan students here, returned to teach at the school after she graduated from senior high school. "Children need education beyond catering," as she was quoted as saying, "Only with good education and affluent knowledge can these orphans shake off the misfortune of their destiny." The school is dedicated to streamlining fosterage-education-professional training, endowing the children with a useful expertise of speciality to claim a profession in the society. Students learn an extra curriculums including weaving and knitting, martial art, and zither playing, along with the regular curricula.

Students are smiling, frolicking and capering about on the campus ubiquitously, with their sunshiny complexions that belies their once sorrowful life. The school becomes a big family for the forlorn and stranded children who better understand how to cherish the current merry life and be grateful and bear in mind their thanksgiving incumbency.

(Xinhua News Agency November 17, 2009)