Katie found herself partnered with Bob Gibson, the general manager of Heng An Standard Life Insurance. Standard Life is one of Scotland's principal insurance companies, and Heng An is their Chinese subsidiary. When Katie told Bob about her hopes for her song, he was delighted to offer the support of Heng An to the project.
Gibson said: "When Katie first mentioned the idea of the song I thought that it would fit very well with our Corporate Responsibility Programme. We are involved in a lot of activities where we are looking to give something back to the community – we consider that as a business we are part of something that is bigger than just ourselves. We provide help particularly to schools, to children, to orphanages, and to the arts and it did seem that there were a lot of threads coming together. Katie is Scottish and we are here representing Scotland through Standard Life – we are delighted to be involved with the project through our sponsoring of the song, and we wish Katie every success in promoting the song and through it helping us give back to the community."
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Katie together with Bob Gibson, general manager of Heng An Standard Life, in front of the banner that will accompany Katie to Sichuan. [David Ferguson/China.org.cn]
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Heng An Marketing Manager William Yuan played a key role in organizing the necessary support, and his efforts were assisted by PR Group Edelman, who offered their services free of charge for the promotional side of the work. Katie will now travel to Sichuan, again with the support of Heng An Standard Life, where she will spend three days in the area of Huang Ping Xiang village and Chengdu working with some of the young victims of the earthquake.
She is understandably a little apprehensive about her first visit to the earthquake area:
"I was in Hong Kong at the time of the earthquake, and one of my friends was studying in Chengdu. She got out on the last plane to leave, and arrived in Hong Kong with nothing. Although I was not in the mainland I was not half a world away, and to hear her personal story made the whole thing very real."
"Even so," Katie continues, "you cannot really hope to understand what these people have been through and what they are still going through. I have been feeling a little nervous about the experience because I think I will be very affected by the emotion of situation once I am there. As a musician I am an emotional person, and meeting and working with the children will be very touching – you don't really know how you will react until you are there. We will take musical instruments and English dictionaries provided by the contributions of those who have already given to the charity, as a means of showing our support."
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A youngster adds his personal wishes to the Heng An banner that will accompany Katie to Sichuan. [David Ferguson/China.org.cn]
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Katie is a popular and well-know artiste in China. She first came here in at the invitation of Xu Tong, a representative of the Chinese Ministry of Culture, who heard her perform at Edinburgh Castle in Scotland, and asked her to sing at the Nanning International Folk Festival. She recalls the event with pleasure:
"I have so many wonderful memories of China, but that first time I went to the festival in Nanning I had no idea what to expect. We were taken on a three kilometer parade and I went down the street waving as if I was the Queen. There were lines of people waving and cheering and presenting us with flowers, and then they took us to a stadium of ten thousand spectators to perform. It was a lovely experience…"
