Everyone dreams of a good life, a better life – but what if your search for a better life means that you need  to work a long way from home and perhaps away from your children. ?
 

That’s the dilemma of some 230 million people in China who leave hinterland villages where living standards are basic at best, for the booming construction sites and workshops of China’s coast, where living standards are … basic at best, but that offer what the villages cannot – money.  Money to educate children, money to start a shop, money to buy a home.  Money for a better life.
 
But when they leave home they travel not only hundreds or thousands of miles, but into a culture that is vastly different from what they came from, into a life with different rules and ideas that none is prepared for.  It’s not easy on them … and it’s not easy on their children.
 
“Last Train Home” is a haunting documentary about the strains and tensions that can shatter the families of modern China’s workers.  This is Fan Lixin’s award-winning second documentary about the lives of the people doing the backbreaking, enervating work of building new China.  It has been praised everywhere it has been shown, and it is available on DVD in China and many other countries.
 
The tragedy shown in the film is that while the couple who are the central characters leave home to make enough money to educate their children, their children wind up being terribly estranged from them.  It is in order to avoid seeing their families break up that many of China’s migrant workers bring their children with them to the big cities, but there they find another dilemma.  As non-local residents, the children have no access to big-city schools.  Desperate to see their children get an education, migrant parents will often set up informal schools on their own – in one family’s living room, for example, with whatever books and materials the families can afford to provide themselves.
 
Youdao is a charity that tries to address this issue.  We are involved with others in education and in giving scholarships to the most needy of the children.  We’re close to the families and to the children, which is where we want to be.  But there are almost 500,000 migrant children in the city, and we’re in constant need of more volunteers and more contributions to serve them.

Join us?  Support us?  Help us help, to alleviate the plight of so many like the family in “The Last Train” home.

 
For movie trailer and pictures go to http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1512201/