If you have no special plans for your holidays, why not spend your time helping others?

Don’t listen to people who say the young people today often think only of themselves. It’s not true at all. More and more young people in the U.S.A. volunteer(志愿) to spend their school holidays working for others. And they don’t do it for money. Here are some of their stories.

Alice Hamilton,17

I’m going to help the Forest Center build new hiking paths in the mountains. It’s going to be terrific（极好的）— I’ll spend the whole summer living in the tent and breathing the clean mountain air. I’m going to sleep under the stars. It will be a nice sport, and I’ll be able to do something good at the same time.

Jason Moore,18

This summer, I’m going to volunteer with Special House Program. They build good, low-cost(低成本的) houses and sell them to families that are not very rich. They’ll teach me what to do, so I’ll help people and also have a chance to learn how to build houses.

Trish Anderson,16

I’m going to teach kids who have trouble in reading. I’ll work for a program called Reading for Life. Every day, I’m going to help kids choose and read books that they like. I want to be a teacher, and I love children and reading, so this is going to be a great experience for me.

On a small hill in Huaping, Yunnan, there is a small school. However, over the past 13 years, it has rewritten the fate (命运) of over 1, 800 poor girls by sending them to universities.

Zhang Guimei, born in 1957, is the head teacher of this school. She began teaching in Huaping—one of China’s poorest areas in 1996.The teacher wondered why many girls in her class would just one day stop coming to school. After some investigations. Zhang learned that they were from very poor families. These girls had to work or get married at a young age. “We often say that we want every child to have a fair star,” she said. “But these poor girls don’t even have a chance to stand at the starting line.”

Zhang wanted to change this. She spent years raising money. Finally, in 2008, she set up the Huaping High School for Girls. It’s China’s first free public high school for girls.

Zhang gets up at 5 a.m. every day to turn on the lights on each floor of the teaching building. “Many girls are timid,” the head teacher explains. She wants them to feel safer on their way to classes. After years of tiring work, Zhang is now in poor health, but the school and the children matter more than anything else in her mind.

Zhang’s story has warmed hearts all around China and inspired many to follow in her footsteps. Zhou Yunli was one of her students. After she finished university, she heard that her alma mater (母校) was short of math teachers. She at once returned to the school to teach. “Without Ms. Zhang, I would be nobody,” Zhou said with a smile.