Eric's Beijing Diary

Got a call yesterday from a company in Hong Kong that does incorporation. It was in response to an inquiry I had sent them some time ago. They guy who called me said he had sent me two emails. I didn't get either of them, and he was thinking perhaps they ended up in my spam folder. I told him to send me another one, and, sure enough, I found it in the spam folder. Not sure why--It was not a group message. There could possibly be some problem with his company's ISP. But that's only a guess. Just when I think I have a handle on what causes an email to be regarded as spam, something like this comes along and throws me for a loop.

But it was a good thing he called me, because he told me that we could not get non-profit status in Hong Kong unless we could prove that the primary beneficiaries of our work were in Hong Kong. That will not be the case, because we will be bringing young people from Asia to work with children in Afghanistan, so our primary beneficiaries would be the children we would be teaching. Not sure what I am going to do about this, but I am thinking now about the possibility of just setting up an NGO in Afghanistan itself. Afghanistan's NGO law is pretty straightforward. I actually do like it, and it would probably be a good bit simpler than setting up in Hong Kong. The one major issue there, though, is that at least one person would have to be a resident of Afghanistan. I don't know any Afghan residents. I guess I just have to take a trip there first and see what I can discover.