About our trip to Hue to learn about the prevention of trafficking ~ Guest blog by CEF's Ms Kim Chi

We had a fantastic trip to Hue in order to have Anti-Trafficking Training. We started in the morning from Hoi An, so we had enough time to enjoy morning tea when we arrived in Hue. For me, it was amazing to have morning tea at the Peaceful Bamboo Family Cafe. After our tea and biscuits a kind man there took us around and talked to us all about the Peaceful Bamboo Family. There are many disadvantaged children and adolescents there and many are passionate about drawing or painting or doing lacquer painting. Some do training in cooking and make cookies and drinks for guests. All the drink and food were made by them with love. They also have a school and kindergarten as well as productive garden where they grow their own vegetables.

CEF at Peaceful Bamboo Family

  A vegetable bed at Peaceful Bamboo Family

Pagoda in Hue we visited

After having lunch at a vegetarian restaurant, and visiting a pagoda, we had the excellent training and presentation about the prevention of trafficking and child labor at Blue Dragon Children's Foundation. They were very informative and we learned a lot more than we knew. They are doing wonderful work to both prevent trafficking of children and to help those who have been trafficked to adjust and reintegrate.

CEF at Blue Dragon Children's Foundation in Hue

Part of the presentation we viewed

The prevention of trafficking of children is very important to us at CEF as we work with children who live in the mountains, in remote areas and near the Laos border. There it is quite easy for traffickers to come and seduce children and their families with money because the parents are frequently uneducated as well as very poor. We now know much more information to help identify the ways traffickers work, what we should do when we suspect or know of trafficking, and how to help the children in those circumstances by referring them to Blue Dragon for help and support.

Money is very important to poor families. Parents therefore often ask their children to quit school to go to work, or to help their relatives in big cities like Ha Noi or Ho Chi Minh. Although they are frequently very young and under 16 years old the parents don’t realize that this is very dangerous for them to do; the parents are just thinking about money. In poor communities they often don’t know that it’s illegal to let children work when they are under 16 years old. They also don’t know it is called ‘child labor’. Therefore, by understanding about child trafficking and child labor, we can explain to both parents and children, and therefore help to prevent our CEF children from quitting school and going to work.

In the future, we hope that we can organize workshops about Anti-Trafficking of children for parents and children to understand more about it.

Thanks Blue Dragon and thanks CEF’s Founding Director for supported us to have this useful training.

The challenge of helping ethnic minority girls finish high school ~ Guest blog by CEF staff Thuy

The number of ethnic minority high school students who leave school early is still rising because of many reasons, with one major one being gender discrimination.

The first reason they leave is because their awareness of the importance of education is still low. They haven’t seen the long term benefits of education so they don’t care about it. Both students and parents want to earn money to help their families and themselves. A few students can’t find work after graduating from college, or from vocation training, making the communities confirm their negative thoughts about education. Many of the ethnic minorities still have strong traditional customs, especially the belief in early marriage. Another important reason is the financial support of the government for minority students is not enough for their needs. Another reason is the poor quality education some receive and the lack of equipment and facilities of the schools in the mountainous areas compared to schools in the cities.

 Young ethnic minority girls who are mothers

 

Understanding this challenge of the girls in the mountainous areas needing to complete their education, CEF started a scholarship program for poor females from minority ethnic communities around in Phuoc Son district, Quang Nam province last year. We hope with our support this can help the girls continue and complete their schooling. We provide scholarships for the 26 poorest girls who also have attained the educational standard of ‘good’ or ‘fair’.  We also explain to them about the benefits and importance of completing their education and encourage them to complete their education.

After the first school semester the school results of most of the 26 girls has improved. We – the CEF team, are very happy and proud of these girls. However, we were very sad to hear the bad news from the school that among these 26 girls, there are 3 girls who quit school. The vice principal of the school we work with said, each year, there are about 50 students who leave school prematurely; this being 5%-6% of the total number of students at his school. Teachers try to encourage them to return back to school, sometimes with success. The students who leave mainly help their families to do farming work, and then they also get married early even though they aren’t old enough to legally get married.

Keeping ethnic minority girls in school is a big challenge which needs lots of effort and time from all sectors; from government, schools, communities and charities, and especially needs the co-operation of their families.

On my home visits ~ Guest blog by CEF staff Quan

On many of my home visits to the children’s homes, I myself sometimes question how to change people’s minds about some of the old habits here; especially the drinking habit of Vietnamese men which has become a serious problem with many consequences.

My story below is one about an experience on a home visit and I feel it is hard to do anything to promote more awareness of this issue as it is the same situation for almost all male workers.

Just last week, I visited the family of a girl in Thang Binh who has been recently sponsored. Both of her parents have quite bad health problems. The mother had traffic accidents twice which damaged her legs and it has cost a lot of money for operations, while her father has suffered from spinal degeneration. The medical treatment and the education costs of their three children has put them into a very difficult financial situation with a big debt from the medical treatment for the girl’s mother.

Having known their challenging circumstances which already has stopped their first child from completing college, and having to work, CEF decided to help the girl who is in grade 10.

He seems addicted to alcohol because whenever we see him, he smells very strongly of alcohol. It is funny when you know what his answer will be as it is what most men here would say. I asked why he drank so often, as it seems he drinks every day and this is not good for his health and has an impact on his family financially. Guess what he replied? He said drinking some wine could help release his tiredness after a hard working day. I wonder is this true!? And well, I can say I never believe this. It does not make any sense that is creates any balance or even refreshes the body physically, and after wine people lose energy. However, this is happening in Vietnam throughout the country and leads to many social issues such as alcohol addiction, domestic violence, traffic accidents and other health problems such as cirrhosis. Also drinking is not an expensive past-time here, but still the family’s economy definitely gets impacted. In this particular case, it is totally not good to have the father drinking and putting his family under even more financial pressure.

Although we have explained to him about how bad this habit is and encouraged him to stop it, it’s unlikely he will stop unless he is really serious about stopping.

As drinking alcohol is a serious social issue, there should be education on a wide scale for all communities and this would gradually bring about more awareness on this subject. The Vietnamese government has introduced some policies to stop drinking, but it will actually require much more education still.            

Visit and donation to support education of girls from minority tribes

Today I was able to meet the son of a lady who has set up a group in Italy who meet regularly to have English lessons with her, and they the students then make donations that go towards charity.

This is the second time they have donated to CEF. Her first donation went to scholarships for three minority tribe girls near the Laos border to enable them to complete their last year of high school.

This donation will be used towards the costs of tertiary education for the most hard working of the three; the girl with the highest standard of the three girls she has helped. For a girl from a poor minority tribe family to go to university is wonderful and unusual. This means she can have a very different future to her mother and grandmother. It is very exciting what donations can do and we are very grateful for these two donations!

Our first CEF visitors of the year ~ Guest blog by CEF's Thuy

Today, we had the great pleasure to welcome the first group of this year at our CEF office. They were Ms. Miriam,  and Ms. Aurora, from ‘Focus on Women’ (from Spain), and their tour guide.

Normally, Linda, our founding director, is the person who is responsible for talking about CEF to visitors. However, she is in Australia now, so we, the CEF staff, were very excited to take over. Thanks to Linda’s advice, we discussed, prepared and shared the work with each other. We also prepared a Power Point Presentation which made us all remember about our lectures at university. After the presentation and talks with them, we felt happy when they said that they were interested in CEF's work and commented that CEF was doing a great job. We are looking forward to hearing from them soon.

About my maternity leave & returning to work ~ Guest blog by CEF's Kim Chi

I have come back to work after 5 months off work to have a baby.

Having a baby has changed my life a lot. The time off seems to have passed quickly. All my personal likes and habits have to stop to focus on taking care of my daughter. I only have a short time at night to read books and to do household chores when she sleeps.

My daughter always smiles even she sees people for the first time. Vietnamese people say she always smiles because I smiled a lot when I was pregnant. That seems true to me as I smiled every day when I worked at CEF during my pregnancy. I felt very happy every morning when I went to CEF for working, and with having humorous colleagues, I laughed a lot.

I was very eager to come back to work to see my co-workers. There is a lot of work I have to update even after a short time off work, but I will catch up quickly.

Leaving my daughter at home with my mother is quite hard for me as I miss her a lot, but I will adapt because I love work.

Why so many CEF students find English difficult ~ Guest blog by CEF staff Ms Ngoc

As we visit many CEF children we have a chance to talk to them about their schooling. I found out that 80% of them have challenges in learning English, especially with their listening and speaking skills.  In my opinion, the main reason is that they are from remote areas and they do not have many opportunities to work on, and improve their English.

First I think at school in rural areas, they do not have enough school equipment for students to practice their listening skill, so students just hear their Vietnamese teachers’ voices. Besides, students are poor so they also do not have computers at home to listen to English conversations every day. Therefore, their skills are not as good as that of other students who live in urban areas. Second, because they live in rural areas they do not have any chance to talk with foreigners, which students need to do. They need to practice speaking English as much as they can in order to improve their speaking skills.

It is interesting that some of CEF students are willing to talk whenever they see Linda or their sponsors. However most of them are very shy and do not want to communicate at all. They lack confidence in speaking in English. Last but not least, when learning another language, from my perspective, we have to take full advantages of our time to do English exercises and practice our skills every day. However, CEF students are from poor families so they spend most of their home time helping their families with household chores. They do not have much time to study, although they have lots of subjects and homework to do at home. Due to some of the above reasons, I think CEF students find English challenging.

English summer classes for CEF tertiary students

With CEF’s support, the children can have better conditions to study; especially opportunities to develop their English.  If they have good English, they are able to communicate with their sponsors whenever they see each other.

Thoughts about why very poor children work hard at school ~ Guest blog by CEF staff Thuy

She helps her single mum with making small lanterns, but she is also an excellent student

For the very poor and disadvantaged children to get the same school results as children who are not from poor families, they have to make much more effort. Due to their low income, most poor parents can’t spend enough time and money on their children’s education.

Some of the parents have financial stress and it affects not only their emotions and behavior, but also their children. Lack of good study conditions (text books, reference books, tutoring and good health care) are a big disadvantage. Poor children also have less studying time than others because they have to help their families to do housework or even help their parents to earn more money in various ways, such as making straw mats, or working on the farm.

She helps her mum with straw mat making but it does affect her school results

Children with a disadvantaged situation generally have two approaches; the children study much harder and make lot of efforts in order that they can have a better future and some just give up due to it being too hard and go on to live a life like their parents do.

Most of students that CEF supports have ‘Good’ and ‘Fair’ school results as they understand how important education is and how it affects their future. Some students have excellent school results and are the best students at their school. They study so hard and spend most of their time trying their best to get those results. When I asked the exceptional students about their motivation, they answered that they want to make their parents feel happy and proud of them, and to have a good future to help their parents and themselves.

I think the reasons why some poor children study very hard at school is to overcome the difficulties in their life, to have a brighter future and for some it is simply to make their parents happy and proud of them. It’s also the reason why we always advice and encourage all our CEF students to keep working hard and making great effort with their schooling.

Funds raised for Tet Food Parcels for poor families CEF works with in Quang Nam

Tet', or Vietnamese New Year will be bountifully celebrated by some of our CEF families in Vietnam because of the generosity and support of LTC staff.

Raffle tickets were bought by the staff of a Sydney based company 'Language and Testing Consultants' who ran IELTS tests on December 5 and 12 at the University of Technology Sydney. They bought enough raffle tickets to enable us to present 22 Tet Food Parcels to some very poor families we work with in Vietnam.

Thank you to all of you at LTC who support our work in Vietnam, and especially to those of you who gave wonderful raffle prizes and to Graeme for organizing the raffle.

 

When they are poor they can't celebrate Tet ~ Guest Blog by CEF staff Thuy

Tet is the most important, popular and longest festival in Vietnam. This period begins one or two weeks before the actual celebration. It is traditional that before Tet every single household decorates their home, cooks traditional Tet food, organizes their end of year party, buys new clothes for their children, and prepares 'lucky money' for their children and their elders. 

People also try to pay off their debts and resolve all the arguments among colleagues, friends or family members. During Tet, people also have many small parties with families and friends. With all those required activities you can imagine how much people spend and need to spend before and during the Tet holiday.

Tet is also the time for everybody to go back to their hometown, gather with their family, visit relatives and friends, and have a relaxing time after a year of working hard. 

For very poor people will they feel the same about Tet? Will it be a meaningful time for them? Will they feel happy, excited and relaxed about Tet and during Tet? Or will they feel worry, stress and ashamed because they have too many things they are expected to spend money on but they can’t afford to do so?