A ray of Sunshine

ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD Tin-kai, whose family is from Hong Kong, spent five years at home in Beijing because there was nowhere for him to attend school. Then in October, the wheelchair-bound boy joined Dolores van Dongen's Sunshine Learning Centre.

A month later, sitting in a trademark yellow-painted dining room at Sunshine, Tin-kai is feeding himself laboriously from a bowl, helped by one of van Dongen's teachers. For Tin-kai, it is a major triumph, and one he has achieved in the short time since joining. He is also walking a little. 'We don't let him sit in the chair all the time,' says van Dongen, who is from the Netherlands.

The Sunshine Learning Centre is China's first school for the disabled children of foreigners living on the mainland. Its emergence marks a turning point in the maturity of the city's international community, which now numbers upward of 60,000. Sunshine is still in its infancy, but founder and director van Dongen, an emphatic, energetic woman, is already thinking about opening a sister school in Shanghai. 'It's incredible that a city like Shanghai doesn't have a special needs school' that can cater to the international population, van Dongen says. 'There isn't one in Guangzhou either.'

Having a special needs child was long an obstacle to foreign families coming to live on the mainland. Chinese special needs schools - there are only 400 in a country of 1.3 billion - are by and large little different from ordinary schools in stressing rote learning, discipline, and order. None of these qualities suit special needs children, but their needs traditionally have not been at the centre of the schools' thinking.

Van Dongen recounts a trip to one school where she saw lovely paintings on the wall. Startled, she asked if the children had done them. No, the teachers, replied. 'I said to them, take them down! Put up the children's paintings!'

At Sunshine, things are different. Van Dongen, former chief representative of KLM, the Dutch airline, is a sinologist by training, and not an educator. She began the school project through pure need. 'Basically, I was stuck with my own Down's syndrome child and she was having so many tantrums at home,' says van Dongen, who has lived in Beijing for 16 years. 'I needed a proper school.'