Teenager quits school to make money to save ill brother

At six o'clock in the morning, three-year-old Wei Kanghu lies on a bed in the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University to undergo a blood test. For more than a year, the fight against leukemia has been the most important thing in the little boy's life. His 17-year-old brother Wei Kangren even dropped out of school and went to Guangdong Province to earn money to pay for Wei Kanghu's high medical costs.

"Since 2013, when the boy was found to be suffering from severe leukemia, he has spent most of the time at the hospital," says Wei Kanghu's father Wei Haitang. The sudden and serious illness caught the family unawares.

To treat his son's illness, the 40-year-old farmer and his wife brought the boy from the village where they lived to Nanning, capital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. However, the high medical bills put the struggling family into an even more precarious economic situation.

"Every time we came to the hospital, my son had to undergo chemotherapy, for periods from one week to a month." The medical costs over the past year, excluding medicare reimbursement, amount to more than 200,000 yuan. The household's economic situation has been worsened by the fact that the boy's grandmother is sick too.

Wei Kanghu's treatment will have to continue for at least three and a half years, and he is only half way through the course, said the little boy's father, looking at his son on the bed with frustration and sadness.

Both of the couple have had to give up their jobs to look after their son. So the elder son has had to don the heavy burden. He left school and found a job in a factory in Guangdong Province for a wage of 1,000 yuan per month. He hopes that his brother will recover soon and be able to go back to school.