By Yilu 2020.04.03
In June 2019, I received Billy’s email which says he has got a stroke and needed to do something before it’s too late. “I hope some of you will do something to help the world improve the way we relate to each other.”
Actually, Billy’s thoughts have affected many of us, making me start to think about the meaning of life and what we can to do carry on our precious humanity. When Billy’s in a bad health situation in June 2019, he wrote a letter during his wakeup to talk about what we can do to help children get a right. In that letter he emphasizes:
I think that all parents need to protect their own children but must be careful not to teach them to make quick all black vs all white , all good vs. all evil judgements. Indeed, people in this World are not all good or all bad. Every person has good qualities and misguided qualities. We should acknowledge and promote Goodness in all people. We should identify Bad Traits and Misdeeds, but should not condemn people totally.
I read about it and realized it would be great to let more parents see it. After all, Billy has devoted years in researching education and friendship, he knows more about them. So I decided to record Billy’s thoughts, hope that one day, those recordings could spread further and affect more people.
One of the things I learned from Billy is when we decide to do something, we should do it “before it’s too late.”
I discussed my ideas with my friends Wenmo and Yihua, they’re both very supportive, we figured out how to run this project very quickly, Yihua, as an engineer, helps to set up this website, Wenmo helps to manage the website. Later, we found another friend: Tingting, she helped us a lot in translation.
I’m more than grateful that the other three friends are of great help in this project. I’d like to introduce them one by one here to show my appreciation.
This article is all about the cute friends who help to build up this website for Billy and the stories of them !
Wenmo loves drawing, she recently has published a drawing series on her own website, telling the stories happened around her.
Yihua’s hobbies are a slightly special: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, rock climbing, Japanese (he has learned Japanese by himself for over two years) he always wants to make life shine more.
Tingting is currently an English teacher in Beijing, she loves to travel, yummy food and movie, just like all the other young girls of her age. Maybe you will be surprised, I haven’t met her so far, we just contact online and do this work together. We become friends online from strangers. haha~
I used to read about some books on psychology, those authors are trying to tell us the greatest happiness comes from the connections between people. Making friends is just like building connections, and the miraculous part of it is that when we know someone is caring about us, and we need to care about them, we don’t feel lonely even though we all came to this world all by ourselves. And I appreciate teamwork very much, it makes me feel powerful to work with different people for the same goal. I wanna say to my dear friends, thank you. Let’s “carry one our precious humanity”.
Here are the stories told by the three friends.
@ Wenmo
In July, my close friend Yilu asked me to help collect Billy’s articles and upload them to the website. I joined her without hesitation because I think she’s a very nice person and I wanna do things together with her. Yilu then told me about the story of Billy, I found out Billy is actually very charming. The more I read about his articles, the more I like him.
I have to say, Billy’s values and lifestyle really attract me that I think it’s a meaningful thing to collect his articles and spread them to more people.
@ Yihua
My thoughts are quite simple and straight forward. I’m in this project because Yilu wants me to help, she’s my friend, and friends help each other O(∩_∩)O
@ Tingting
I think my life’s get a little bit different after I get to know Billy, a truly talented and passionate “young man”.
In August 2019, I saw a message from our alumni WeChat group, it says, “We need a volunteer translator with the knowledge of education to help…” Back then I knew nothing about the person who sent it to the group chat, but I was touched by her because of her passion for life through her words. And I appreciated it that she also volunteered to do something for others with her spare time, I decided to contact her.
Then she introduced Billy to me, I learned that Billy cares a lot about education in both China and the US and has done his efforts to help improve it.
I didn’t expect Billy is such a passionate “young man”, always wants to contribute to society. I was impressed by him deeply even though I haven’t met him before. I immediately joined that team to do the translation on weekends.
The work of translation also makes me rethink my way of education, from this perspective the work is a special gift to me. I really hope we can continue to do more meaningful things for others and society.
