I never stop being astonished at what Thomas Stader and the Library Project accomplish. TLP is a testament to the power of good social marketing. More importantly the group delivers more than it promises.

Here is a letter from Thomas about their recent work:

I am so proud of what The Library Project has accomplished over the past three months. We have far exceeded The Library Project’s goals and expectations. There is so much to share - from an incredible and growing list of elementary schools which have benefited from new libraries to how you can get involved in helping to improve the lives of China’s rural children.

Before we start sharing our library’s successes, I would like to discuss how The Library Project is providing assistance to the people affected by the recent earthquake in China. On May 12, 2008 China experienced a 7.9 earthquake in Sichuan Province, located in central China, 70,000 people died, and over five million people were left homeless. Thousands of elementary schools were damaged in Sichuan, Gansu, and Shaanxi Provinces. The Library Project will continue to do all we can by providing books and libraries to elementary schools and orphanages by way of our new 2008 Earthquake Program. The Library Project will be providing our first libraries to six “tent schools” located 25 km from the epicenter. To learn more about this program, please click here.

Over the past three months The Library Project created twenty-five school libraries and donated more than thirty thousand books. Each of the twenty-five schools received a wide range of high quality children’s books including: history, science, short stories, fairy tales, reference books and comics. We also provided a full set of children’s encyclopedias for older students and pinyin language books for the kids just learning to read. The Library Project also provided colorful child-safe tables and chairs, posters and a world globe to all the classroom and/or library rooms.

These fabulous new libraries are located throughout China in the countryside of Shaanxi, Anhui, and Gansu Provinces. At each library site, The Library Project held book drives, which collected over thirty thousand quality second-hand books from local donors. We also purchased over ten thousand first-hand books from Xin Hua Books Stores at just $1 a book.

In addition to books and supplies, the school librarians received library management training. Since most rural elementary schools have never had a single book in their libraries our Librarian Training Program gets them up to speed starting day one.

The Library Project is very happy to announce that Scott Perkins and Nicholas Ingleton have joined our Board of Directors. Scott Perkins is President and CEO of Connectify Networks based in San Francisco, California. Nicholas Ingleton has lived in Asia for 50 years and currently is a director of Aston Holdings (Overseas) Limited in Hong Kong and Aston Associates Limited in Beijing. I am honored to have them a part of our growing team.

In addition to providing libraries to twenty-five elementary schools in rural China, we have had over twenty small awareness and fundraising events since March. Our volunteers hosted most of these events around Asia and the world. For example, Celia held an all women’s wine tasting in Beijing that raised enough funds for one library. Siok Siok Tan has been doing charity screenings of her new documentary on the 2008 Beijing Olympics, “Booming Beijing” and raised enough funds for five libraries. Sophia and Eric organized an event at Kommune (great Ozzie BBQ) and a lecture on ”rural education in China” at the Glamour Bar, both in Shanghai. We raised enough funds at these two events for libraries in two different rural elementary schools. I would also like to thank everyone that came out to our San Francisco, Phoenix and New Jersey events. We raised enough for seven libraries during that USA fundraising run! Finally, a huge thank you goes out to Napoleon and Marcel in Hong Kong for organizing our lecture at Web Wednesdays and the XL Results Foundation. We raised enough for three libraries at these events. Thank you everyone for your hard work and dedication!

WE NEED YOUR HELP

There are three ways to get involved:

Help by spreading the word. You can help out in so many ways. Forward this newsletter to your friends, family members and coworkers, make a post on your MySpace page, blog to help raise awareness for The Library Project, or join our Facebook Group by clicking here. You can also help by hosting a small event at your home, work or local restaurant. . If you need help organizing a fundraiser, please contact me anytime at tom at library-project.org. Thank you!

Help by volunteering. You can make a huge difference in the lives of countless children in the developing world by becoming a volunteer. There are so many different ways to volunteer: you can throw a wine tasting or dinner to introduce The Library Project to others, hang a poster above the water cooler at your office, or introduce us to your company’s HR Department.

Help by making a donation. Without money, we can’t buy books. At a dollar a book, most of us can afford to buy 10, 20 or even 100 books. Make a donation and help bring the gift of education to countless children. Our libraries generally contain about 500 - 1000 books, thus every donated book (or dollar) helps!

Lastly, please check out some of our new products. We created 50 book, 100 book, 250 book and 500 book gift cards available at $1 a book. Each card also has a beautiful picture of a library we have donated. The gift cards are a perfect gift idea.

The Library Project is a non-profit organization. Your donation is 100% tax deductible. Thank you in advance for your kind support of our efforts.

Sincerely,
Tom Stader
The Library Project
Founder

This photo was taken in the city of Nanning by Robert Daboss, in which this billboard shows Chairman Mao, Deng Xiaopin and Jiang Zeming looking at the modernization efforts underway.

这张南宁的图片是Robert Daboss在南宁拍的,照片里的政治宣传牌描绘了毛泽东,邓小平和江泽民三代领导人展望中国的现代化发展的画面.

“Let’s strive together to revitalize Nanning”, the poster board reads

牌子上写着:”团结奋斗,振兴南宁”.

In China, tremendous progress has been made in reform, opening up and modernization, which was intiated by Deng Xiaoping over the past two decades.

在过去的二十多年里,在邓小平的指引下,中国的改革开放和现代化建设取得了卓著的进步.

Beneath the board, a sanitary worker is also on camera, watering the plants for use in improving Nanning’s urban landscapes.

在牌子下面,我们可以看到一个环卫工人了正在为城市的绿化植物浇水

While many of the National leaders in China have made a deep and lasting difference in the life of Chinese people, ordinary people like him are also performing their service to make China a better place.

很多中国的国家领导人为改善人民生活作出了很大的贡献,而像这位环卫工人一样的普通人民也正在为祖国的建设奉献自己的一份力量

This photo was taken by Fu Ling in a small water town in Zhejiang province, which is known as the “Land of Fish and Rice”.

这图片是Fu ling在浙江的一个水上小镇拍的,浙江又被称为”鱼米之乡”.

And this photo from Robert DaBoss was taken on one of the waterways of Shaoxing, where two little boats sat quietly on the water.

而这一张是Robert DaBoss拍的图片,地点是在中国的绍兴市.在图片上我们可以看到两艘小船静静的躺在水上.

There is a new blog in town. China Golf and has courses from around China featured on its pages. Soon, about 300 courses from around China will be featured on the site with prices, play dates and more.

新的博客来了:中国高尔夫 ,在上面有中国各地的高尔夫球场的信息

网站很快会提供大概300多个遍布中国的高尔夫场的信息 包括价格,场地数据等等

China Golf : Hainan, Mission Hills, Sanya, Great Wall Golf Tours

中国高尔夫:海南,观澜湖,三亚,长城高尔夫之旅

A couple of days ago my girlfriend HuaDi went to He Yuan city, China on a business trip, where she witnessed the first hand beauty of this marvelous fountain known as the biggest one in Aisa. The height of this gorgeous fountain is 169 meters, or 554 feet tall. The giant tall fountain is located in Xinfengjiang forest park in He Yuan.

几天前我的女朋友华Di去了中国的梅州市出差,在那里她看到河源亚洲第一高的喷泉.这座美丽的喷泉169米高,也就是554英寸.喷泉坐落于河源的新丰江森林公园

See the magnificent fountain below

看看下面这座宏伟的的喷泉的图

To get a better view of the fountain, refer to this video I found on Metacafe

想看清楚点的话,下面我找到个在Metacafe的视频,也是这个喷泉的.

[metacafe 849525]

A video I found on Chongqing over at my friend Thalia’s website The Chonx

我在我朋友的网站The Chonx上找到这个重庆的视频

Almost as good as our Guangzhou film

几乎和我们广州的宣传视频一样的好看

It has been a year since we began this blog!!! We have traveled, written, photographed and even started a business to help fund this adventure–more on that one day soon. It has been amazing and we love China even more than we did when we started.

We have had a rough few weeks for a number of reasons. The toughest thing to recover from was a spam hack of the site. I think we are OK again, but we lost a lot of pages to a security flaw in Wordpress. We are still working to get everything back.

You have helped immensely and we are asking you to give us a few minutes one more time!

At the bottom of tis post please comment and tell us why YOU love China. And help us reach the goal of becoming one of the longest comment threads on the net.

About us for those who are new:

For a year has been a place where we have posted positive stories, pictures, travel adventures and announcements about ways to help where help is needed.

All ad proceeds from the site are immediately donated to the Library Project which now has an earthquake rebuild fund.

The Dreamblogue is one long-term solution to this tragedy and any others that may come our way. It is also a way to support positive projects in China like the Library Project’s commitment to orphanages and rural communities.

We don’t ask for donations ever. We do ask that you send us original photos that we can post, keep us informed about great stories and do five simple things:

1. Favorite the blog on Technorati by going here:

TECHNORATI

We want The China Dreamblogue to be the #1 favorited blog on the planet. How great would that be?? It will take about 10,000 favorites to make that happen.

2.Comment on our “Why I Love China” post. We want to set a world record for longest comment thread in cyber-space.

3. Link to us on your own blogs. We will have badges later on, but for now a text link will do it.

4. Invite your friends here to ILC! so we can have a place to announce when other groups, like now, need your support. And feel free to post any needs and connections that fit with this goal!

5. Add this post to your favorite Social network: Facebook, Digg, Stumble….

We are already #1 in many key words on Google and Baidu for China Travel, China Pics and such. As we get bigger and stronger we will expand the site, so people can find only engaging and positive information about the country we all love.

Help us get to #1 and we’ll try to help people for years to come in China….

<h1>UPDATE </h1>

You can also help us by joining our group on Facebook: A Million People who Love China.

An update for new readers and a reminder for long-time fans: we regularly publish photos from our readers and group members who want to show others the interesting, curious, creepy, unusual, mysterious, elegant, odd, lovely, frumpy, and otherwise fantastic China that they have found from behind the lens. We publish work from beginners to veterans of photography, and our only requirements are that you only send us photos you have taken.

Some examples:

These first photos come from the China Photo Contest group on Facebook and were posted by Robert DaBoss.

These next photos come from our Facebook group A Million People Who Love China and were posted by Elisabeth Rowley Mitchell.

To see your photos here, post your photos first on the Blog of Dreams’ associated groups on Facebook: China Photo Contest and A Million People Who Love China. We will feature weekly photos on the blog from each group and from any part of China and its autonomous regions. Stories, anecdotes, notes about context, and information about the location where the photo was taken are more than welcome.

All money raised as a result of views of these photos and click-throughs on ads for these sites go directly to the Library Project and the Library Project Earthquake Relief Fund, a China charity now leading a campaign focused on helping to rebuild libraries and schools.

Tom Carter, an internationally acclaimed photographer currently based in Beijing, will be releasing his series of portraits from people all around China titled “China: Portrait of a People.” His photographs, there of which are featured here, provide a sense of depth and perspective on China, as does Tom’s career and body of work concerning China.

I wanted to feature Tom on the Blog of Dreams because of the intense passion and deep commitment his photos and writing seem to commit to understanding China. He does not seem to be content with the metropolises of Beijing or Shanghai, but has a deep interest in looking at parts of China that are often forgotten about or little-known to foreigners who have spent a short amount of time here. Most of us know that we need to go to Sichuan to see pandas, but how many of us are familiar with the Yao Minority people or Guizhou’s minority village of Zengchong? Tom’s articlulate stories and photos on both of these places are worth a thoughtful read.

More of Tom’s photos and articles can be seen on his China photo website, http://tomcarter.org.