Graeme will be helping with Australian sponsor communication

Growth is a wonderful thing to happen in a charity when it means that more children are being educated.

One of the challenges of growth is keeping in touch with all the children's sponsors as well as doing everything else that needs to happen for them to get their educational support and other help they sometimes need, and to also work along side our government partners with whom we have to do everything in accordance to their requirements. Staff too are busy and it takes them quite a while to get all their thorough end of year reporting done, to type up school results and to translate the children's letters.

There are now many wonderful sponsors for the children and the end of the academic year is the time we like to get information out to them. The holiday period for the children here is very short  and now it is no longer long enough for us to communicate with everyone before school starts again.

Graeme will share sponsor communication with our Australian and New Zealand sponsors. This is wonderful as it is very hard to write to everyone at the end of the school year in the small gap of time we have between doing end of year home visits and assessments and term 1 payments and home visits.

As we have grown considerably and are helping more children with each year this means that with the two of us on sponsor communication we will be able to be in touch with all our sponsors over June, July, August and September each year. I am most grateful he has made this time available to help with this important part of our work and is very happy to help.

I am happy to say Graeme will also help with putting together short newsletters with links every three months to help keep each of you up to date with some of our work and events.

These are two important new steps as we want to keep in touch more with our sponsors as they are precious, as they make it possible for the children to have an education. 

                     Graeme with one of the children he sponsors

International Women's Day - a few thoughts

I feel there is so much more consciousness these days around the challenges that women and females  face around the world, especially females in developing and third world countries.

It is now internationally being questioned whether is it right for an 11 or 12 year old girl to be forced into womanhood and marriage, and what can be done for young girls whose health and lives are at great risk in having to give birth before their body is developed enough and is ready, and what can be done to protect girls and women from being gang-raped, as well as looking at legislation that allows men to beat and rape girls and their wives.  Much more is being questioned and challenged gradually bringing about a better life for girls and women around the world.

The right to education is being pushed internationally too. CEF has been working to enable impoverished girls to be educated and to receive some vocational training, a college or university education. I am very happy that 10 girls have now completed school, 2 have completed university, 2 completed college, and we have about 200 in school, college or university allowing them all now or in the future to have better lives with higher incomes. They are, and will be able to be meaningfully employed, enabling them to help support their families. These young women will be more respected and have more self-respect than those who have been deprived of an education.

On this day I reflect on all the amazing work that so many NGO's are doing around the world to help girls be able to be children, to be wives and mothers when ready and for women to be respected and treated fairly and as equals.

I am most grateful for all the people around the world helping this to be possible and to our board, donors, sponsors, partner organizations, staff, friends and family who help to improve the lives of the females we help in Vietnam.

Pam has joined our CEF board recently

Welcome Pam!

Pam is our most recent board member and we are thrilled she was able to join us, as her enthusiasm, compassion, love of life, life experience and her many skills are wonderful gifts for CEF. 

Besides being a lovely, multi-talented woman, she also is a sponsor of two girls with challenging situations. She knows Vietnam well and understands the challenges that girls have here in Vietnam. she understands our work well.