Chinese school for underprivileged kids pledges $20,000 to Shenmue 3 Kickstarter

A non-profit school in China dedicated to helping underprivileged children has pledged $20,000 to Shenmue 3’s Kickstarter to help raise awareness of its organisation.

The Volunteer English Teacher Program, which helps teach children from small villages and orphanages how to speak English – initially offered $10,000 to have dinner with creator Yu Suzuki. But following “an amazing amount of attention in China”, it has pledged a further $10,000 to have one of its teachers appear as an NPC in the game.

“We are not wealthy!” said one of the school’s volunteers. “This was a hard decision. We could have given $20,000 directly to building the school and it’s programs but we feel that this pledge will lead to more exposure and support than what we could do through other mediums.

“For those who don’t know our school yet. We are called The ‘V.E.T. Program’ (Volunteer English Teacher). You can find us on Facebook. We teach children and young adults English to help in their educational and career pursuits. Many of these kids come from small villages in the Guilin area and may not have an opportunity to learn elsewhere.”

“We really need help in reaching our goals. We would love for you to like us on Facebook. We will eventually look outside ourselves and setup a way for donations to be made but we didn’t want to distract from the Kick Starter or be overbearing donation hunters.”

The school requests that Suzuki doesn’t make the NPC an aggressive character, however, as the Kickstarter suggests.

“We decided to make the second $10,000 pledge a character in the game,” the volunteer continued. “We don’t want to be a character attacking Ryo though. We are going to try and ask Yu Suzuki to let us have one of our Volunteer Chinese teaching assistants be a character in one of the villages. They deserve to be recognized for their hard work. They are volunteers and many of them come from poor rice farms.

“We are also hoping that since we will be listed in the credits as a special sponsor that it can have our school with a logo and a website rather than our names.

“I don’t think any of this would be asking too much. I think it would help get attention to the school. We would love any assistance in helping us achieve this. We also would love to have Yu Suzuki come to the school some day but we won’t don’t want to be greedy.”

“Please, help our little school!”

Shenmue 3’s Kickstarter campaign ends on July 18, upon which funding will be secured. The Kickstarter currently stands at over $4.3m.

Source: shenmuedojo.com