FOR 30 YEARS, Guangdong primary school teacher Zheng Meiqiang had a recurring dream that he would regain the leg he lost to leprosy.
Now, Zheng, 67, says his prayers have been answered, thanks to the generosity of at least 50 South China Morning Post readers who were touched by our feature on October 1 last year about the poverty of villagers at the Shek Kong Cheung leper colony, 600 kilometres over the border in Guangdong's Lian Jiang county.
The readers' donations of $300,000 have not only provided Zheng with a prosthetic limb but have transformed the lives of his 10 pupils. The children have all moved out of the colony and now share a three-roomed stone house with him in the nearby town, Shi Ling, where they also attend a conventional school.
Until then, Zheng had led a lone struggle to provide Shek Kong Cheung's youngsters with a basic education. The children had not contracted the leprosy which had wracked their community, but they were shunned by neighbouring schools because they came from one of the 63 villages in Guangdong which were established in the 1950s to isolate and treat the disease.
The children have now seized the chance to continue their education thanks to the $20,000 from a Hong Kong businesswoman; the $8,000 from a retired American banker; and an American woman who read the Post article during a business trip in Hong Kong and sent a cheque for $15,000.
The Italian Women's Association also raised $15,000, as did a Sai Kung group, Silk Road Ministries, which has offered to donate even more money. A Briton, William Leigh-Pemberton, the Shanghai-based East Asia general manager of chemical transport company Suttons International, sent a cheque for $30,000 and later donated $180,000 more from his own pocket to buy a van for the Hansen Damien Welfare Association (Handa), a Guangzhou-based voluntary group which has helped leprosy sufferers on the mainland since 1996. The vehicle enabled the group's workers to treat sufferers in Guangdong's leper villages with greater speed and frequency. 'I felt total admiration for all the people at Handa who are devoting their careers to taking leprosy-affected people out of isolation and helping to cure them, to heal them,' Leigh-Pemberton says. 'Since their project consumes a lot of money, I could see an opportunity to play my part by assisting with the finance of their operation.'