When 19-year-old Sophia Giorgi said she was thinking of volunteering to help the Make-A-Wish Foundation (基金会)，nobody understood what she was talking about. But Sophia knew just how important Make – A –Wish could be because this special organization had helped to make a dream come true for one of her best friends. We were interested in finding out more, so we went along to meet Sophia and listen to what she had to say.

Sophia told us that Make – A –Wish is a worldwide organization that started in the United States in 1980. “It’s a charity(慈善机构)that helps children who have got very serious illnesses. Make – A –Wish helps children feel happy even though they are sick, by making their wishes and dreams come true,” Sophia explained.

We asked Sophia how Make – A –Wish had first started. She said it had all begun with a very sick young boy called Chris, who had been dreaming for a long time of becoming a policeman. Sophia said lots of people had wanted to find a way to make Chris’s dream come true ----so, with everybody’s help, Chris, only seven years old at the time, had been a “policeman” for a day. “when people saw how delighted Chris was when his dream came true, they decided to try and help other sick children too, and that was the beginning of Make – A –Wish,” explained Sophia.

Sophia also told us the Foundation tries to give children and their families a special, happy time. A Make-A-Wish volunteer visits the families and asks the children what they would wish for if they could have anything in the world. Sophia said the volunteers were important because they were the ones who helped to make the wishes come true. They do this either by providing things that are necessary, or by raising money or helping out in whatever way they can.