Hanoi update 9-10-11

Hi All,

HSCV board members will note that a few others are being copied in on this message. HSCV is doing great work in Vietnam helping children and I want to get our message out to as many people as possible. If you know of others who would like to also be included in getting these updates let me know.

As usual much is going on here. My only issue in reporting to you is trying not to make every update a novelette in length. So I will be brief, kind of.

Representatives of a wonderful organization, Seal Of Love, are now in Ha Noi. Lawrence and Lillian Chan run this organization. They lived and raised a family in San Francisco but now live in Hong Kong. They located HSCV via the Internet last year and visited a couple of times making contributions to our work on every visit. On this visit they advised they would like to make donations to 10 very poor families which HSCV works with. Easy for us to find them and two days ago the gifts were presented to them. Each received a bicycle, 50kg of rice, a bag of cooking supplies, including a gallon of cooking oil, a quilt, laundry soap and related cleaning supplies and a dozen bars of hand soap and related personal sanitary items. Overwhelming gifts for these very poor families. Yesterday Lawrence and Lillian were escorted to the Ha Cau Orphanage where each of the 54 children there received new school back packs.

Lawrence and Lillian have also initiated a post high school scholarship program. It will be called the Seal Of Love/HSCV Scholarship Program. Five students will receive scholarships in this first year. This is of course wonderful but the program has some very unique aspects. The scholarships will only be granted to those students dedicating themselves to helping others. They will be required to volunteer to assist some charity while in school as well as volunteering for two years after graduation. This may, of course, be of great benefit to HSCV. The students considered for these scholarships must be pursuing degrees in a field that will lead to a career in helping others such as social work, medicine or teaching. Lawrence's goal is to leverage these student scholarships into helping others and making this world a better place in the future. (He and his wife are truly inspirational people to be around.)

About thirty young adults showed up to be interviewed for the scholarships. Lien had located them and had them available for Lawrence and Lillian to talk to. All very special and needy and I don't envy Lawrence's chore in selecting the grantees. However, even considering how deserving all of these applicants were, one young lady stood out. Her name is Mai and even in Vietnam where there are many situations where children have been through trying times Mai's story is unique. In fact unique enough that the local newspaper did a full page article about her.

Mai is an ethnic minority who grew up in Dien Bien Province in northwest Vietnam. Her family was very poor and her parents were sickly. Her father had kidney problems and her mother had a heart condition. When she was an infant her two year old brother drowned and losing a son in Vietnam is truly a family tragedy. Her father worked as a carpenter. But when Mai was five she fell into his saw and her right arm was severed above the elbow. Her family struggled for years just to find enough food but things got worse as her parent's ailments became more advanced. The area where she lived is a drug processing center and when Mai was completing 10th grade the family became ever more desperate. To feed his family her father agreed to transport heroin to Ha Noi. On his first trip he was arrested, imprisoned and died a few months later. When in 12th grade her mother was also convicted of involvement in the drug business. She was imprisoned in a jail in Ha Noi. Mai had always been a top student and to be near her mother she applied for a scholarship to a teachers college in Ha Noi. Her scholarship request was granted and she is now a third year student there. Unfortunately her mother died in prison a few months after Mai arrived in Ha Noi.

Mai gets free schooling and lives in a dorm but has little else. Somewhere, and I don't know where, she came up with a large bag of noodles. That's what she lived on for several months, supplementing her meals with greens she picked in the school yard. Mai says her goal is to teach at a school caring for handicapped children. She volunteers at one now.

I have been involved in Vietnam for several years and have learned that some stories that are told about children in need are accurate and some are not. Mai's story is real. In that her story is so heart rendering we decided to adjust the entrance requirement for the HSCV Girls Foster Home. We had decided we could only accept girls up to the age of 18. Mai in 19. But she has been invited to come and live with us and she has accepted. HSCV will not only be providing her with a home and love but she should also obviously be a great inspiration to the younger girls.

One more part to this story. We had invited Mai to come to the GFH for an interview. Linda Bui served as the translator. I asked questions and explained about HSCV and the GFH. I think my comments became shorter and shorter but the conversations between Mai and Linda became longer and longer. Soon I became somewhat ignored. But this was a wonderful experience in that I was seeing two "sister soul mates" connecting for the first time. I'm not certain what the future holds for either of these two special young ladies but I feel quite certain they will stay connected for the rest of their lives. I consider it a privilege to have been present to see this very special bond being formed. Stay tuned. They will each do much good in this troubled world.

I remember reading a columnist's article about the pressures of his job. He said that he just sat in front of his keyboard until blood drops started forming on his forehead. I can't really relate to that in that I have to figure out what to leave out of these updates to make them shorter. I'm obviously not to good at doing that yet and knowing me I'm not that much into those personnel improvement things. Hopefully, you can just hang in there with me as I stumble along.

Thanks for your patience and interest in what HSCV is doing.

Chuck DeVet, President