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Taiwanese missions: Lending a helping
hand
By Jenny W. hsu
STAFF REPORTER
Saturday, Feb 20, 2010, Page 2
For 15 Taiwanese health workers, the arrival of the Year of the Tiger did not
mean red lanterns, lavish banquets and festive fireworks. Instead, they ushered
in the Lunar New Year with flashlights, meager meals and the sound of sick
children crying.
The location: Haiti.
On Jan. 12, the Caribbean country suffered its biggest earthquake in two
centuries. Already the poorest country in the western hemisphere, 95 percent of
the capital, Port-au-Prince, as well as eight surrounding cities, were reduced
to rubble.
The quake left more than 200,000 dead and 1.2 million homeless, the latest UN
report said.
Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive estimated it could take at least 10
years and US$10 billion for the country to rise from the ashes.
As one of Haiti's allies, Taiwan has been an eager participant in helping the
country get back on its feet. It has pledged US$10 million and donated more than
17 tonnes of supplies — including medicine, equipment, food, tents and clothes.
The International Cooperation Development Fund (ICDF) — Taiwan’s Peace Corps —
has also dispatched various medical missions to offer emergency and long-term
health services to the Haitians during this dire period.
The last team of 15 volunteers — including pediatricians, podiatrists and
infectious disease experts — gave up their Lunar New Year break to help the
people in Haiti. The next team is already packing supplies and waiting to leave.
Taiwan's efforts have earned praise from different media organizations,
including Time and the New York Times, as well as the UN's Office of
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
However, Taiwan's humanitarian presence in Haiti and in the world started long
before the earthquake.
ICDF said Taiwan has been sending teams of agricultural experts to Haiti since
the early 1970s. Upholding the principle of “teaching a man how to fish,” the
agricultural missions have undertaken several public welfare projects, such as
livestock breeding, planting vegetables and fruit, building irrigation systems
and maintaining water sanitation.
Haitian doctors and healthcare workers have also been invited to further their
studies in Taiwan.
Six decades ago, Taiwan was a developing agrarian country dotted with rice
paddies and fruit orchards. However, thanks to generous aid from the US, it grew
rapidly and steadily into the world class high-tech giant that it is today.
Many older-generation Taiwanese still remember wearing “flour sack” outfits made
of the scratchy cloth the Americans used to bag flour.
For 15 years, Taiwan received an average of US$100 million in aid annually from
Washington.
But in spite of its poverty, in December 1959, Taiwan sent out its first
overseas humanitarian team to Vietnam and another to Liberia the following year.
These missions have blossomed over the years, with more than 70 technical teams
being dispatched over the years to non-allies or former allies around the globe,
including Jordan, Macedonia, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Congo
and all of Taiwan’s 23 ally nations.
“It is with a spirit of gratitude and solidarity that we are engaged in global
humanitarian efforts and it will continue for a long time. We have taken on
other countries' development, especially our allies, as part of our own
responsibility,” said Chen Lien-gene (陳連軍), former ICDF secretary-general.
Millions of lives have been improved but some lives also lost, such as Lee Da
(栗達), a hydraulics expert and the first mission leader to Gambia who is credited
with starting several agricultural projects and turning barren lands into
fertile tilling grounds.
Lee died in Gambia from a heart attack at the age of 44. The locals erected a
bronze statue in remembrance of his contributions, the ICDF said.
Veteran agricultural expert Chen Hsi-hu (陳西虎), who was part of the mission in
Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, also died from fatigue in
2002 after serving as an overseas technician for 38 years.
To date, 39 ICDF overseas humanitarian mission members have died in the field
from work-related causes, while three have been murdered.
Liu Wen-li (劉文利), a former mission leader in the Ivory Coast, remembered the
jittery but excited feeling he had when he first “enlisted” as a volunteer in
1965, aged 29 with a promising career ahead. Instead of accepting an offer from
Taisugar, one of the most lucrative state-run enterprises at that time, he chose
to join the overseas humanitarian mission.
“The director-general of the Department of African Affairs told us the reason
why our group was called a ‘mission’ and not a ‘team’ was because we were
embarking on an important mission in which there was no room for failure,” he
recalled.
It took Liu two weeks and six stops before reaching his destination. When he
arrived, the mission wasted no time and quickly started a grain-growing project
that saw immediate results.
The team not only won the respect of the locals, he said, but his counterparts
from France, Italy and Germany also lauded the Taiwanese team’s accomplishment.
Liu said back then, the Ivorians were used using traditional methods to grow
crops, which were left to the whims of nature. No one used pesticides or
fertilizer.
The mission taught the locals farm management, including the importance of
timing — when to plant seeds and when to till. In the first year, the Ivorian
farmers saw two harvests and rice production shot up from 13 tonnes to 310
tonnes, he said.
The Ivory Coast mission unfortunately came to a halt in 1983 when it severed
relations with Taiwan. The embassy and the agricultural mission departed at the
same time, lamented Liu, now retired and living in Taipei.
The Ivory Coast was one of the many countries that Taiwan's agricultural and
technical mission had to leave because of what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA)
called “the cruelty of political reality.”
In spite of China's interference, Taiwan’s willingness to be an active player in
international humanitarian efforts has never wavered.
In 2001, the government sent its first batch of conscripts who were allowed to
serve their one-and-a-half-year compulsory military service as volunteers to
Taiwan’s allied nations.
In 2004, the government also dispatched its first team of information technology
engineers to help narrow the digital divide in various countries by setting up
basic telecommunication infrastructures.
Two years later, the Department of Health established the International Health
Action (Taiwan IHA), a platform for qualified health workers in Taiwan to find
opportunities to do volunteer work abroad.
“We might be small, but we are effective. No matter what the political
circumstances are, the fact is Taiwan is a big-hearted country full of
compassionate individuals who are always ready to lend a helping hand,” said
Jeffery Chen (陳志福), an ICDF doctor and leader of the medical mission in Haiti.
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