SHIPMENT FEEDBACK
Children from mountainous tribal villages in Vietnam come top of the list for the wrong reasons. According to UNICEF, they’re the most likely children in the country never to attend school, and those who do, tend to drop out sooner than their urban peers. In the mountainous district of Quang Nam, in Vietnam, many families are very poor. Parents are eager for their children to get ahead, and escape poverty, and they know that education is the key.
Crossroads shipped to a part of Quang Nam province where most of the village schools operate out of temporary buildings without proper desks and chairs, and it’s not an environment that makes it easy to study.
These villagers decided they wanted to rally together and write a different story for their children. “Together with a little support from the government, they built some good school rooms,” wrote our partners, who run projects in the villages. “But they were stuck for a source to buy desks and chairs.”
“Your shipment enlightened their hope!” – Crossroads’ partner in Vietnam
School desks and chairs, health and medical equipment, computers, office furniture, school supplies and more, made a significant impact on the work of our partners in Vietnam, who estimate the shipment impacted the lives of around 2,300 people.
Along with educational goods, toys and medical equipment, the shipment we loaded included a quantity of excellent school desks and chairs donated by Hong Kong schools. They were able to share 100 sets of the school furniture with this village school, bringing it to life.
“Your shipment enlightened their hope!” wrote the staff. “The teachers, children and the government thank you for bringing help on time!”
We are so grateful to all who made this shipment possible, through funding, donating goods, and volunteer efforts.
ONE STUDENT’S STORY OF HOPE UNLOCKED
‘Y’ is 21 years old and although she’s an orphan, she has aged out of the orphanage system, meaning she now has to find her path in life on her own.
Thankfully, Crossroads partners are supporting and mentoring Y, and were excited to learn that she had successfully passed the entrance exams to a degree in hospitality at a big city university. She needed a computer to keep up with her studies and to start learning computer skills, but had no way to afford one herself. When Crossroads’ shipment arrived, our partners were able to give one of the computers from the container to Y, helping her study and learn, and work towards a better future for herself!
It will come as no surprise that Vietnam’s rural villages see many trapped in poverty. What is a surprise, perhaps, in today’s world, is that this grip is much stronger on women than men. As a young girl, Huong took every step she could to change that story. The odds were not in her favour. Her father had died when she was little and her mother, dependent on seasonal earnings from their little family farm, needed to bring up five children alone. “All I can give you is education,” she told her children. “Study, study, study!”
Many of Vinh Hoa’s staff can’t do fine embroidery work in their homes. A lack of electricity means the dim lighting weakens their eyesight badly. After 2-3 years working in such conditions, Vinh Hoa staff told us, the women’s eyes can be so damaged that they can’t continue embroidering at all.
At just 5 years old, Khang*, of Vietnam, had almost no way to ‘make it’ with the options life had left him.
