Will You Join the Journey of the Heart Team?

Our campaign for funds has generated many gifts from our home team supporters for our 2009/2010 Journey of the Heart. How blessed we are that, despite some tough economic times for us all, donations received so far will help us continue our work in Vietnam.

Typhoon Ketsana has added misery this year on the Central Coast, including the village of Hoa Van where these victims of leprosy live. The Red Cross has reported that 350,000 people are without homes, 5,200 schools have been destroyed and many people remain hungry, have no safe drinking water and disease is spreading. The numbers are staggering, therefore we would like to include more projects to our list.

Please let us know by e-mail at brucelogan.bli@gmail.com if you would like to donate to our work.

So far we will be able to donate portable libraries to village schools, assist victims of agent orange, provide housing for a disabled woman who now has been diagnosed with breast cancer and help replace damaged equipment at Reaching Out, the workshop where disabled artisans create crafts and where we volunteer as business consultants, teach English and train management staff. BUT we would like to do MORE to ease the suffering of these warm people.

Will you help?

Le Ly Hayslip and Global Village Foundation Deliver Typhoon Relief

This is why we love Le Ly Hayslip! Although Le Ly is a published author and the founder of two humanitarian organizations....when the going gets tough...she is right in there with the troops.
Typhoon Ketsana left a swath of devastation in Quang Nam province and the fishing villages along the river outside Hoi An were particularly hard hit.
Le Ly sent out a hasty appeal. Even before the funds poured in, she and her staff were organizing the distribution of noodles, oil, rice and sugar to many families both in the town of Hoi An and along the river. Tons of rice and hundreds of boxes of noodles gave some relief to the hungry families, whose homes, crops, boats and therefore livelihoods were destroyed.
Journey of the Heart contributed $500 to this effort and we thank all of our friends who have generously supported our work and that of people like Le Ly.
By clicking on the slide show to the right you can see, near the end of the show more pictures of the work that Le Ly and a corps of volunteers accomplished in a matter of days.

Meet-Colonel Stocker, Bandage Brigade

For several years Linda Stocker and I have been corresponding via e-mail,telephone and Skype. She is the angel who has inspired hundreds of women to knit bandages for vicitms of leprosy in Vietnam. Linda created a blog, tended closely the growing network of knitters, and now is managing the task of collecting and shipping thousands of bandages.

Linda and I connected because we had both travelled, in different years, with our veteran husbands to Vietnam with Tours of Peace. Linda and her husband Gary continued to work with TOP, after their tour, as volunteers in the Personal Effects Program ( returning "dog tags" found in Vietnam to their owners or survivors). Bruce and I volunteered to head up TOP's Education Program. You can read about TOP on the link to the right and understand how this organization spawned a passionate interest on the parts of both the Stockers and ourselves in helping the resilient people of Vietnam. Through our work and interests we "met" on-line.

Along the way, Linda and I discovered our shared passion for alleviating the suffering of people with leprosy in Vietnam. Dynamic, determined, dedicated Linda created, with the help of her daughter Cindy, a blog which at first issued instructions for kntting, information about the disease of leprosy and ALWAYS encouragement(see link to the right). The Brigade has grown to hundreds of knitters, with an annual production of thousands of lovingly knit bandages.....so many so that the small groups of travellers with TOP were unable to carry the bandages to Vietnam.

Undaunted, Linda pressed on to find other ways to get the bandages shipped and distributed in Vietnam. The D.O.V. E. organization has taken the project under its wing. They will carry, thanks to EVA airlines, duffle bags ladened with bandages on their annual tours. Check out the D.O.V.E. website also linked on the right hand side of this blog to learn about their work in Vietnam.

Now Linda is also focusing on research and networking to find out why the drugs available to arrest leprosy are not finding their way to remote villages and estaablishing relationships with NGO's already deeply involved in providing aid to those who suffer from this disabling illness.