Translation of a letter of a CEF child to her sponsor ~ Guest blog by CEF's Ms Kim Chi

An interesting and sweet letter by one of our CEF students to her sponsor. Translated by CEF's Ms Kim Chi:

Firstly, I wish you and your family happiness and good health. I am writing this letter to tell you about my Tet.

This Tet, my house was more beautiful than the last Tet. We cleaned the house and garden some days before Tet and my sister scolded me a lot because I was too lazy. My sister and I also repainted all the doors. We looked very dirty but we were very happy when we saw our house looking refreshed.
It was cold at Tet so I didn’t go out much. On the first day of Tet, I just visited my grandparents’ grave and put incense on it for them. My mother bought enough food and things for Tet, so Tet was so blessed.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see any fireworks. I tried to go to bed late so I could see the fireworks on New Year Eve, but I was very sleepy and missed them by 5 minutes. What a pity!

This year, I got a lot of lucky envelopes with money in them and I spent it on my breakfasts so I didn’t need to ask my mother to give me money. This Tet, my mother was well and she also wore nice clothes and went out with my aunt. She looked nicer as she took more care of herself and it made me happy because my mother worked really hard the whole year. It was great that she got to go out at Tet.

My sister is still well, and she is looking for a new job. She used to wake up early when she had a job but she’s got lazy which makes my mother angry.

My uncle is the same as usual, I felt sorry for him as he couldn’t have a nice Tet like others.

It was lucky for me as my birthday was at Tet, so many friends came to celebrate my birthday with me. This is my best birthday ever so I was very delighted. I got a lot of gifts but my favorite one was a gorgeous necklace from my sister. Everyone loved it but I thought I was more beautiful when I had it on. I was very confident about myself, wasn’t I? I was very excited because everyone told me I looked prettier after Tet.

My friends were full of life. We went around the town and played many games in the fair. This was my best Tet yet.

I must stop now. I wish you and your family a great year too. Thank you so much for your help.

*Note: Her uncle is severely mentally ill.

CEF's Ms Ngoc writes about one of our tertiary students with pride

This is about a CEF sponsored girl that I have known for over 3 years and she is a young lady I really admire. Being born into a very poor family and suffering from the most severe emotional trauma, she has been able to overcome them and become a wonderful girl with a good education.

It was the unexpected suicide of her parents that put her into a most challenged and sad period and in that time she was very reserved, shy and did not communicate with others. Now she already has come out of her shell, has gradually gotten over her difficulties, and now enjoys her life more.

She has a passion for art and is pursuing her dream. However, when she was in grade 12, her uncle who partly supported her family and her siblings did not allow her to study art because he felt it would be hard for her to find a job later. He asked her to apply to be a kindergarten teacher; however, she was not keen on studying this. She talked to her grandparents and her uncle a lot. She tried to persuade them to give her permission to study art. It was 4 or 5 months that she kept trying to convince them and at the last minute, she was successful. They let her do what she wanted.

She passed the entrance exam and she has been studying a 3 year art course to become an art teacher. This is her last year at college and she has just finished her internship as an art teacher at a secondary school. She intends to find a job in her hometown then she will be able to live near her family.

Seeing her in her elegant 'ao dai' and going to school to teach her students I felt very proud of her although it was just her internship. She puts all her efforts into making her dream come true. I hope all of our children can see her as a good example in order to dream and pursue their dreams.

A touching letter by one of our CEF students ~ Translated by CEF's Ms Thuy

My name is 'T' and I am in grade 12. I felt very lucky and happy when receiving your scholarship. To me, it not only helps me in day-to-day life but also gives me courage to overcome difficulties and challenges in my life.

My mother died of cancer when I was in grade 11. Her four - year treatment was actually a difficult time for my family. When discovering my mother’s illness, my father took my mum to many hospitals for treatment. The amount of money that my parents had saved wasn’t enough for medical bills, so my dad had to borrow money from our relatives and friends.  After the first 2 years of treatment, my mother’s health was worse and at the same time, my mother realized that she was 4 months pregnant. My dad continued taking my mother to many hospitals and found many Occidental and Oriental medicines; however, my mother couldn’t recover. My mother passed away when my youngest brother was just 2 month old. The death of my mother was a great loss and pain for my family, especially for me.

Since that time, my family has faced many difficulties continuously. My younger brother was so young and didn’t have mother’s milk; he had to have formula milk. At that time, I was a student at high school and my eldest sister was at university. My dad had to work, so we had to hire a baby sister to look after my little brother.

Although my father has arthritis, he still has to work very hard to look after the whole family. His salary is just enough for my younger brother‘s expenditure.  Sometimes, thinking about the difficulties and pressure in my life, I used to feel powerless and tired as well, as well. Fortunately, thanks to the support and encouragement of people around me, and your education scholarship, I feel the caring and the sharing of many good people. It makes me stronger and able to keep going. Your scholarship was very meaningful to me and my family as it reduced our financial pressure a lot and pushed me to work harder.

I’d also like to share with you my good news at school. In the first semester, I was the best grade 12 student in the whole school. I also won the ‘Consolation prize’ in the Provincial advanced chemistry competition.

Lastly, I would like to give grateful thanks to you. I will try my best to improve my studies more. I wish you good health, happiness and success. I hope CEF can continue to help more poor and good student.

It’s harvest time in central Viet Nam and the heads of the rice plants are bent over in the paddy fields heavy with their grains. 

Once harvested the rice has to be thoroughly dried. What better place than a hot black road surface?

And it needs to be regularly turned over too. Feet are a good way of doing this.

And if the whole road is taken up with drying rice it’s fine to ride over it.

In Hoi An you’ll find rice paddies between houses, shops and hotels. 

And even the dead get a rice view.

Rice has an important place in the hearts of the Vietnamese. You can call the family to lunch by calling, ‘An com!’ ‘Eat rice.’ Many of the families CEF helps count on a good harvest to feed themselves.  If they have no land, they have to pay for land rental and fertilisers. If the harvest is poor then the debt is paid off the following year, with rice. Hopefully that year is a good one enabling them to make the repayment.

How two of our CEF students showed their love to their mother ~ Guest blog by CEF's Thuy

On the last International Women’s day, what did you do for your mother, grandmother or for women in your life? Here is a what a 9 year old girl in CEF's education sponsorship program did.

‘This year, my older sister and I had a plan and prepared it well in advance for our mother. Last year, we bought a gift for our mother, which she liked, but she told us that she didn’t want us to spend money on buying a gift due to our poverty. She only wants us to study well. She said our ‘Good’ school results are the most valuable gift for her. We always try our best at school, however, we still want to do something special to our mother. Therefore, this year we decided to do all the housework and home chores and also help with our small stall selling drinks and let our mother have a day off.

On a normal day we often help our family to do some chores, but not all. Our mother has paralyzed legs which makes it difficult for her to do housework. So on Women’s day we woke up earlier and shared the work together. I also had an important duty of buying the most beautiful rose for my mother. My sister washed clothes while I swept and cleaned the floor. We prepared and opened the store for selling. Of course, our father gave us a hand when needed. My mother still wanted to help but we didn’t agree as we wanted her to enjoy that day.

My sister went to the market to get food for preparing the lunch. I cooked rice as this job is very simple and easy. We already prepared all the ingredients and planned to cook food soon. We both knew that we can’t cook well yet. We were worried about that. Our mother appeared and said please let her cook and we can help her. We didn’t want to let our mother work, but more importantly we didn’t want all the family to have bad food. Therefore, this was the only work we let our mother do on that day. We had a beautiful lunch and our mother was very surprised when I gave her a flower. We than washed dishes and did other household chores. My sister and I felt very happy because we could see the happiness on our mother’s face.’

‘Children are the gift of God’, I believe that.

Honesty ~ Guest blog By CEF's Ms Ngoc

Honesty is one of the most significant factors for CEF when working with the sponsored child’s family. It is much easier for us, information is more reliable and it is altogether more relaxed than working with people who do not tell all the truth.

I was impressed with a poor family in Da Nang where I’ve just paid a visit. They have such a difficult situation as the mother looks after 3 children of school age all on her own.

Because of her situation people feel sorry for her and so she occasionally receives some help from other organizations and from government department in order to improve her life. When I visited her home, which actually is a shared room, she told me about the donation of the local military to her family. Due to her situation, they decided to give her some monthly funds for food. She asked me that if she could receive that donation or not, because her daughter already had a sponsorship from CEF. She also told me that she knew CEF might reduce the amount of sponsorship or not help her anymore, however; she read the CEF and family contract and saw an item in it that explained how the family could not receive support from many organizations at the same time. It is brave and honest of her to inform us, so we know clearly about her current situation.

I really appreciate her honesty. For me, it is amazing because not many families tell us about the extra help from others until we ask. Although her family is very poor and her income is never stable she was totally honest.

It is only a simple story but I think you will understand more and understand about the attitude of the poor people.  From my perspective she is an excellent example for her daughters and they are lucky to have such a lovely, honest mother.

Guest blog by Thanh Thuy about the first weeks of her internship with CEF

Thuy

Hello everyone, my name is Thanh Thuy. I am a final year student at Quang Nam University.
Like my other classmates, I also must do an internship period which lasts 2 months. The contents of the internship program are to train us students to be capable and independent in thought and work. The goal of this internship program is to help us creatively apply the knowledge we have learned into a real life work situation.

Thuy

We can select the training place ourselves. Most of my friends chose hotels, restaurants or schools to do their internship course at. I decided to give my internship application to Children’s Education Foundation, simply because I am already a part time CEF staff member, and this is a wonderful opportunity for me to enhance my working skills, and especially improve my English skills. This is a marvelous opportunity for me as constantly I am in contact with reality.

Thuy with Stephen Jackel, our US manager

After several weeks working as a trainee, I received a lot of enthusiastic support from CEF’s director and staff. I have joined in on many CEF’s activities such as meeting and communicating with members of Go Philanthropic (CEF’s US partner), and CEF’s USA manager who was visiting, participated in some home visit trips with Linda and some sponsors, helped on the most recent payment day, and had two days of important Nutritional Training with USA trainer, Keryn. We need to be able to talk with families about using their small incomes on nutritious foods. Therefore I have had many chances to listen to and speak with foreigners.

Thuy (on the left) next to Keryn, and the other staff. Keryn taught us about nutrition.

Through having these experiences I feel more mature, as I got many benefits and more knowledge for both my work and my personal life. I saw happy and bright smiles on lovely faces of the children when they received their CEF educational sponsorships, and when some small but significant gifts were given to them from their sponsors. Moreover despite the obstacle of distance of the sponsors, who live halfway around the world, they express warmth, support, pride in the students, and encouragement through their letters which they send over for translation. These poor females they sponsor are helped to overcome their disadvantaged circumstances in order for them to study better and achieve their dream of a good future through being educated.

CEF’s students also consider the presents as their treasures because they are a great spiritual motivation to poor countryside girls.

Although I have just done my first internship weeks, it leaves me with deep impressions and valuable working and life lessons which encourage me to try more in the remaining time. The most important thing is I have to spend much more time to practise my English so I can deal with my working requirements better.

Thank for your reading,
Thanh Thuy

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.