Today’s Good People, Good Works will be presented in Mongolian, with subtitles in Arabic, Aulacese (Vietnamese), Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mongolian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai.

We are planning to open a summer kindergarten which will be named “Vegetarian Kindergarten” and expecting to receive over 40 children.

Welcome gentle viewers to Good People, Good Works. This week we introduce to you a caring kindergarten located in Mongolia’s national capital Ulaanbaatar called the Bambar Children’s Care Center that offers free of cost education to disadvantaged children. Our Supreme Master Television correspondent had the opportunity to sit down with the director and the founder of the Center, Ms. Tsogzolmaa Sanjaa, to find out more about this special facility. Let us now meet the director.

My name is Tsogzolmaa. I graduated from kindergarten college as an instructor in 1992. After graduation, I worked at a government-run kindergarten. I worked there for 10 years. And I opened this kindergarten on my own. We started our operations with four staff members and 40 children. All the children who attend our kindergarten are from a family where the parents are serving a sentence in jail, or the parents are disabled, or from very disadvantaged families.

The main reason for opening this kindergarten was just after moving to a new district called Tolgoit, I met two orphaned children. They were crying while walking. And they attracted my attention. So I asked them why they were crying. They replied that both their father and mother had died. They didn’t have anyone to care for them and they were adopted by one family. But the couple who adopted those two children were very strict and cruel people.

So it gave me the idea to empty my own house and establish a kindergarten, especially for those underprivileged children who have a hard life. And I established this kindergarten in 1998 and since then we have been working here exactly 11 years.

The Center has a unique approach to enrolling students. Instead of waiting for the students to come to them, the Center’s staff actively goes out searching for potential students, particularly in Ulaanbaatar’s ger district, an area adjoining the city where people live in traditional circular huts or tents.

Our kindergarten is basically located in the center of the ger district. Really indigent people live there. So we conduct a survey and choose our children. We go around to the families together with the district social workers and register the children depending on the survey. Whereas other kindergartens just register the children and enroll them, we survey their family and look how they are living, talk to their parents and after that we register the children.

Parents want the kindergarten to be 24-hours a day because there are even homeless children in our kindergarten. Our children are requesting to stay in the kindergarten during the winter season. We are also working towards making it possible. Now our kindergarten has a total of six workers — two teachers, one cook, one principal, one watchman and a contracted teacher.

With funds provided by the government, the Center has cared for hundreds of children over the years. The students receive an education that helps ready them for lifelong learning.

Our kindergarten is basically cooperating with the government foundation of the district of Songinokhairkhan. They give us a specific amount of money for us to buy food for our children and for the salary of our employees. So far we have provided preschool education to 480 children and prepared them for school.

From all these children who attended and studied at our kindergarten, the oldest ones are now third year university students. All our graduates always reconnect with us and we meet each other all the time.

The Center is known for helping its students in the areas of self-cultivation and personal development.

Children who attend this kindergarten leave with very good discipline. Many, hundreds of former graduates of this kindergarten often come to show their gratitude. Our job is a very blessed job. We are so proud to work with children who are very pure in heart which is just like a clean, spotless white piece of paper.

For these children who live in hardship, we are disciplining them with a warm family atmosphere by becoming their mother and father, brother and sister, and even by becoming like their grandparents.

The Center also gives opportunities to children to attend national competitions and develop their talents.

We also work with the team who organizes the national Little Miss competition. Right now four of our children are preparing to compete in that competition. Our children’s minds are becoming very clear, so we are developing their abilities to further compete in various competitions. We are registering them.

To compete in all kinds of competitions we are going to give our name to the district administration office, and also planning to invite meditation teachers to work with our children on a daily or hourly basis. Children can do yoga or meditation with their teachers. And since we have realized the benefits of a vegetarian diet, we are exploring more of the benefits that are out there.

One of the notable aspects of the Center is that in one class the children are served exclusively vegetarian food.

Another feature of our kindergarten is that there is one vegetarian group in our kindergarten. Children from three to six years of age are enrolled in one class. This vegetarian class began last year. There are 38 children in this class. We are also teaching our children how to protect the environment and how to live peacefully and harmoniously by becoming vegetarian.

Of the 12 charitable kindergartens which are located in the Songinokhairkhan district, our kindergarten is the first to start a vegetarian class and to continue having one. We buy soybeans and with them we are making soy milk for our children. We realized that there is a lot of calcium in this soy milk. We make soy milk every morning and give it to them.

Also we give them soy meats. We make fried dumpling, pirojki and soup with soy meat and give it to our children. They love these dishes so much. They like their food very much and eat them so enthusiastically.

The benefits of consuming plant-based foods are immense. Children who grow up eating vegetables, grains, and fruits and avoid meat, eggs, and dairy products have a significantly lower risk of hypertension, cancer, and elevated cholesterol levels as adults when compared to their non-vegetarian counterparts.

From looking at past experience, by eating vegetarian food, the human body becomes lighter, healthier, and the mind becomes clearer. For these reasons we thought it is absolutely correct to encourage our children to become vegetarians when they are young, so we celebrated last year’s graduation of the vegetarian students.

By becoming vegetarian, children become smarter and show all kinds of constructive changes. Parents are very happy and saying that they will support us and they are going to buy and eat vegetarian food and that their children are really changing and so on. They are very happy. They always come and tell us this and give us their opinions.

Not only that, there are quite a number of parents who are vegetarian themselves. Parents are very happy about the vegetarian class that opened this year. They say that we are doing a very good job and are asking us to continue operations during summer so that they can send their children to summer school.

The Center not only provides vegetarian food to students, the staff also cultivates delicious vegetable crops to feed the children.

After receiving the parents’ requests we put in an application to our district administration office and they gave permission for us to have a small plot of land. By the way, we have planted tomatoes and cucumber on our land. We built a greenhouse for cultivation and harvested about one ton of these crops. We pickled the vegetables that we harvested and are making vegetable salad and juice for our children. Also with the soybeans we are making milk and all kinds of food to give to the children.

Ms. Tsogzolmaa Sanjaa has a vision to greatly expand emphasis on vegetarianism at the Center and the kindergarten is set to introduce the healthy veg lifestyle to other area schools.

As teachers, we also have an opportunity to become vegetarians. We are now half vegetarians. And in the near future we are planning to be pure vegetarians and planning to make our kindergarten vegetarian. We have the goal to open a summertime vegan kindergarten and have capacity for 120 children beginning next summer.

Furthermore we are planning to advocate implementation of vegetarian days at other charity kindergartens. To inform these other charity kindergartens, we are going to host a festival day on 15th of this month. On that festival day we are going to prepare many different kinds of vegetarian food and also our children will surprise them with their talents. The purpose of this festival day is to publicize vegetarian food to other the kindergartens and also to celebrate our children’s graduation.

The director sees great value in instilling respect for the Earth in the students. Using a variety of instructional materials, the Center teaches the children about loving animals and caring for the environment.

We bought all kinds of books about various vegetarians and how they love animals, how they love the environment and we teach our children according to the books. We also have some of the nice books by Master Ching Hai. When talking about loving birds and things like that, children really understand it and the teachers who were half vegetarian became pure vegetarian.

And these books are giving the children a very good education, and even the teachers who read it, realized it and understood it, became vegetarians. Seeing this we understood that we have made a big investment for ourselves and for the children, so we have set a goal to implement this and make our kindergarten a vegetarian one.

For providing learning opportunities to underserved children and promoting the wholesome vegetarian lifestyle, Supreme Master Ching Hai is honoring Tsogzolmaa Sanjaa and the Bambar Children's Care Center with the Shining World Compassion Award along with US$10,000 to support their good work.

We would like to convey our deep gratitude to Ms. Tsogzolmaa Sanjaa for establishing a loving school for the disadvantaged children of Ulaanbaatar and providing them with the nourishing vegetarian diet. May Heaven bless all the students at the Bambar Children’s Care Center and may all those who pass through its doors grow up to be happy, healthy and spiritually- minded individuals.

It was a pleasure having your company on today’s Good People, Good Works. Coming up next is The World Around Us after Noteworthy News here on Supreme Master Television. May you have a wonderful week ahead.