Reaching Out's Annual Adventure

Every year, our friends at Reaching Out are treated to an outing. This year 65 people, employees and their families ventured to the Ba Na Hill Station.

An early start aboard buses got them to the gondola at the bottom of the hill and after a thrilling ride over the forest tree tops they disembarked at this fabulous Vietnamese "Disney Land".

I am always so moved when I see how the team helps one another to get to and enjoy the attractions.

Binh and Quyen and groups of advocates throughout Vietnam are working hard to create awareness and implementation of new legislation requiring access for the disabled in public places. They have a long way to go, but seem tireless in their efforts.

In the meantime there were rides that thrilled, delighted and frightened the group!

Reports were that the buffet lunch was only mediocre.....but these cheeky monkeys thought that the scraps were just fine thank you very much.

 Journeys of the Heart continues to contribute volunteer services to both the Reaching Out Craft and Gift Shop and the Tea House and has provided training scholarships, thanks to generous annual donations from our supporters.

We are so happy to see this hard working team having some fun!

One Hundred and Seven Children

There is a pagoda outside Da Nang on the Central Coast of Vietnam where no unwanted child is turned away. On January 17th, 2014 the 107th baby was taken in.

The head nun, Thich Nu Minh Tinh has for more than 20 years been housing, clothing, feeding, educating and nurturing these children, both boys and girls. Their quarters are increasingly cramped and the orphanage is chronically under funded. A small foundation has been established and our friends Le Ly Hayslip of Global Village Foundation and Manus Campbell who lives in Hoi An have been working to support the orphanage.

The rate of unwanted teenage pregnancy, now at 20%, is on the rise in Vietnam. Abject poverty still plagues many farmers and village people who can not afford to feed nor educate their children and so they leave them on the pagoda steps. Sometimes the children are disabled or disfigured and thus discarded. Children who are left on the streets are vulnerable to trafficking into labour in factories or the sex trade.

Co Minh Tinh knows the threats to these abandoned little ones and has stretched her mission beyond its capacity and yet the children keep coming. She refuses none. She ensures that each child gets the medical help he/she needs and very importantly she also does all the necessary paper work to have these children officially named and registered so that they will have an identity card and eventually be able to obtain work.

The staff include nuns and lay persons from the village. I think that there are nine babies in this enclosure with one very young attendant.

Village women prepare food, some of which is donated, to feed the children nutritious if simple meals.

The hair cuts and robes on the older children reflect their Buddhist teaching. Some chose to follow the monastic life after their schooling.

Despite the obvious simplicity of life at the Chua Quang Chau, there are lots of clean, bright, happy faces.

At Journeys of the Heart we are hoping to add Chau Quang Chau to our list of projects and to help Thich Nu Minh Tinh to shelter and love these precious young lives.

Please let us know by e-mail if you want to contribute to this fund. 

elainehead43@gmail.com

One Family's Story

When I saw this photograph accompanying stories about home visits on the Children's Education Foundation blog....it stopped me, as they say "in my tracks." I hovered over the image for a long time.  I looked at those beautiful, intelligent faces, the clear eyed smiles, the health and cleanliness of the children against the backdrop of a humble bamboo house with no electricity and probably no running water, certainly no inside toilet facilities. 

The little girl's education is sponsored by CEF....thank goodness. My first thought when I saw the three brothers was that her education might be the first to be sacrificed, that she would be obligated to stay at home to help with the cooking and cleaning like so many young girls.  Because of the research that we are doing for Bruce's new book about the sex trade, I have became aware of the real threat to young Vietnamese girls of being trafficked. Linda Burn and I exchanged e-mails about this family ...I needed to know the story.  Linda hears variations of this story in every home she visits. 

That's Dad in the picture with the kids. He is in charge while Mom works in a factory. He has a degenerative disease of the spine and is only capable of light, infrequent work in the fields. The eldest brother who looks to be about 12...certainly no more that 14 has recently quit school and is working to help support the family. 

Linda reports that there is a special sweetness to this family who are gracious and grateful for CEF's support. They ask for nothing extra, despite the fact that in the rains their house leaks, the children scramble for study space by the light of the lantern hanging from the wall. 

Several donors to Journeys of the Heart ask annually that their funds be directed to CEF and education support. We are so appreciative of your support, as are so many families like this one. 

Please remember CEF, Journeys of the Heart when planning your gifts for 2014. These young 

children can break the vicious cycle of their poverty, with an education and opportunity through your support. Check on the Links to the right for a link to CEF.  For more information about how you can help send an e-mail to: info@backtovietnam.com.

Thank you....and Cam On from "the girl in the picture." 

There Is Always A Way To Say "Thank You"

The Reaching Out Tea House is silent. ....blissfully so, according to all of the reviews on Trip Advisor!

Somehow the customers enthusiastically savour the experience of tasting delicious teas, coffees and delicate cookies whilst sinking into the enveloping silence. Such a contrast to the cacophony of the streets of Hoi An!

It is delightful to watch our visitors melt into the gracious surroundings and service.

We are charmed that so many customers respond with respect and awe to our speech and hearing impaired staff. Spur of the moment sign language lessons happen everyday and "thank you's" are often the first two words to be exchanged.

In August we will return to Hoi An and are really looking forward to seeing all of our friends at the Tea House.

First Micro Loans Issued

Our target for 2014 was to issue, through VAVA,  (Vietnamese Association for Victims of Agent Orange) 7 micro-loans.

In a quarterly report that we received today, we see that four families have taken advantage of the loan program to start a variety of home based businesses.


Hoa has borrowed the equivalent of $500. She recently lost her husband and is struggling to support herself on a government pension of less than $100 dollars a month.

Hoa maintains a small tomato garden.

 With her loan she has bought some chickens for breeding.

She will also renovate an old workshop and equip it with tanks, where she and her son will breed fish.

Good luck to Hoa...a woman determined to have a better life.

Vinh is a second generation victim of Agent Orange and his young son is also affected. Vinh and his cousin have collaborated in opening a barber  shop. The loan of $400 was used to set up the business in his house with chairs and equipment. Vinh is the barber seated in the picture below. We wish him success in this endeavour. Looks like he has some customers already!

Be and his family exist on a pension of less than $100 a month and with their VAVA loan of $400 he has fenced and enhanced his small mixed farming effort. His pigs, ducks, chickens and vegetables will provide food for their table and a small profit from the market.

The fourth loan of $800 was issued to Tri, an elderly man of 85, who with his daughter have opened a booking  office in their home, booking bus and railway tickets.  Our partner at VAVA reported that Tri did not want his picture taken...he was embarrassed. Sure hope that we can meet Tri when we return to Vietnam to assure him that we enthusiastically support his efforts to improve life for himself and his daughter.

Once again, a huge thank you to all of our contributors to this aspect of our work, the veterans of Company A, 4th Battalion, 23rd Infantry and friends and neighbours.

The Gift of Electricity

Since the inception of Journeys of the Heart we have had many consistently generous donors.

Some of our donors designate their funds towards specific projects, others leave the distribution up to Journeys who decide where there is the greatest need.

Two supporters have always chosen Reaching Out to receive their annual gifts. Through the years they have:

• sponsored many trainees through their initial skills training and longer term staff in Leadership Skills, sign language or salesmanship 
• high intensity lamps for the women doing stitchery
• looms for the weavers

Last year their gifts bought a portable generator! 

The Reaching Out family is very excited about their generator! Not only can they stay open in the retail shop during power outages, but they also can continue production in the workshop with power for the  metal work and jewellery making and of course those high intensity lamps for the sewers.

How often does the electricity go off and why? Here is one reason!

  

Tourists find these "rat's nests" of service lines so amusing that there are T-shirts available with graphics depicting the snarls! But of course if you are trying to run a business and are concerned about the safety of your workers it is not so funny!

Another reason, especially in Hoi An is simply that generation and supply can not keep up with the demand and often there are planned outages (sometimes even announced!) to conserve.

As you can imagine, the gift of a generator allows the team at Reaching Out to continue the production and sale of their beautiful crafts to ensure a steady income for these hard working and lovely people.

Thank You to our donors who have helped to keep Reaching Out running during blackouts!

One 2013/2014 Target Met

Over the years, Journeys of the Heart has worked closely with Children's Education Foundation. This small grassroots organization, run in-country by Linda Hutchinson Burn, is an NGO with Boards in both the USA and Australia.

We work with CEF for a number of reasons.

• we endorse the mission of CEF…their focus is education for girls from poor families, who without support, would not attend school and therefore would not have choices as women and sadly, may be trafficked. Trafficking is increasing with the growing gulf between rich and poor in Vietnam.
• we have been impressed with the "hands-on" approach that Linda and her staff take in assessing needs, administering funds, auditing student progress and family health and income levels. Home visits are frequent and school reports are monitored.
• we appreciate that the whole family situation is taken into consideration in each case.
• we applaud the fact that CEF is creating new programs ( a new lending library for example) and is flexible about sponsoring boys who may also have extremely difficult family situations.
• we also were thrilled that CEF took on the challenge of housing and educating children from the leprosy village of Hoa Van, who would not have otherwise have had an opportunity for a high school education.

This is Thuy. Thuy lives with her Grandmother and other relatives in a simple house. She has been sponsored by a generous donor to Journeys of the Heart for a number of years. Thuy is a good student and is also very helpful around the house and caring for her younger cousins.

Each child has a different story and different but always difficult challenges: single parent households, serious illness of one or both parents, physical disabilities, abandonment, and crushing poverty.

Journeys of the Heart has been able to send enough funds to CEF this year to sponsor ten children who would not otherwise go to school. 

Thank you to all of our donors who have made this possible! 

So Much to Overcome

Once again Hoi An where we live and work while in Vietnam has been slammed by a typhoon, this one called Nari. Pelting rain accompanied the winds and of course there was significant flooding. The streets became waterways.

This is a shot of our precious Reaching Out craft shop, with the entire store under water. Wisely, the staff had lifted all of the machinery and merchandise up onto slings from the ceiling so that the water damage was limited to the structure.

Beachside the devastation was significant....trees snapped off and buildings were destroyed. Our favourite bistro is hardly recognizable.

Many residences lost roofs and the damage to trees, vegetation, rice fields and crops is heart breaking. There was no electricity for several days and repair work is slow.

We spent a few tense days, until we had heard that all of our family, friends and associates survived and are well.

However, the families in the countryside, and those of the girls sponsored by our partner, Children's Education Foundation have suffered the most damage. This is yet another setback for these poor families who struggle at the best of times.

Your donations to Journeys of the Heart will be appreciated even more this year.

If you have not yet sent your cheque, there is still time:

Journeys of the Heart
105 Hilltop Road
Salt Spring Island, BC
V8K 1V9

We hope that our mail box is flooded with envelopes, to help the courageous people with whom we work overcome yet another hardship.

Gracious Giving

Grace and gracious.....two lovely words....meaning elegance and beauty or divine blessing. Both meanings apply to the recent gifting through Journeys of the Heart, to Children's Education Foundation in Hoi An, Vietnam.

Our dear friend Carole Earle Musgrave died recently. Carole was a brilliant, funny lady. Her friendships were many. She was a lover of words and books; in fact Carole was an early and patient editor of the manuscript of our book Back to Vietnam: Tours of the Heart. Throughout the years Carole was also a staunch supporter of Journeys of the Heart and so was her book club....the Red Tent Book Club. The RTBC annually donated funds for libraries in remote villages.

I was very moved when one of the RTBC members e-mailed me to say that they would like very much to donate funds for a library in memory of Carole. I immediately thought of Linda Hutchinson-Burns' attempts to build a traveling library for the girls whose education CEF sponsors. These girls from poor families have no access to books and often are not close to a library. Some villages and schools simply do not have libraries.

We all agreed that this would be a sweet way to remember Carole and now Linda and her staff are happily shopping for books. Each one is stamped with the quote "Today a Reader: Tomorrow a Leader" and " This Book is from your Auntie Carole in Canada, who loved books".

The book topics range from fairy tales, to the environment, science, nature, art and self-improvement and the Auntie Carole library is still growing.

Remembering a friend, colleague or family member with a donation to a cause close to their hearts is a gracious way to honour their memory. We have also received gifts to honour birthdays, graduations, promotions and life milestones.

Thank you to the Red Tent Book Club for remembering Carole Earle Musgrave in this gracious way. 

Annual Appeal Launched

Journeys of the Heart 2014 Appeal

 Journeys of the Heart has been reaching out to the disenfranchised in Vietnam since 2008. When we leave in December 2013 for another three months of work it will be our sixth journey.

This is what we know for sure!

·       Grass roots, sustainable organizations and projects have a significant impact

·       Helping people to help themselves through education, training and micro-loan programs is far better than giving handouts

·       Locally run projects reach the real needs of people within their communities who “slip through the cracks” of government or international NGO initiatives

·       Our skills as retired business consultants and former educators are useful tools in our capacities as advisers to three of the organizations we serve.

·       We continue to garner great joy and personal satisfaction from our work with our Vietnamese “clients”, friends and family as well as the expats who are also there to serve.

·      With your financial support we ARE making a difference; changing lives, educating more girls from poor families, training more disabled young people, delivering more books to remote villages and assisting victims of Agent Orange in becoming self supporting

  

   

Results from our 2012 Journey of the Heart:

• ·       Delivered five portable libraries to a remote school district in the Mekong Delta in co-operation with Global Village Foundation 

• ·       Sponsored seven girls in the Children’s Education Foundation’s scholarship program

• ·       Provided micro-loans to five Agent Orange victim families for the purposes of establishing home based businesses

• ·       Provided training for four new employees at both the Reaching Out Craft Shop and the Reaching Out Tea House, where persons of disability are gainfully employed and learn to lead independent lives

• ·       Gave special gifts of shampoo and face cloths for an old folks home, Oxford Picture dictionaries for deserving students, medicines for a cancer patient, books for young girls being harboured in a pagoda

               

Our goals for 2014:

·       5 libraries - $500 per library

·       10 education scholarships for girls at risk -$150-$200 per child

·       7 micro-loans - $200--$500 depending on the business start up costs

·       5 -7 training sponsorships for persons of disability including housing -$500  per student

We combine the gifts of many donors to fulfill this wish list. Please send your cheques made out to Journeys of the Heart in either US or CDN funds to:

#10-115 Upper Ganges Road, Salt Spring Island, BC, V8K 2Y3, Canada

Inquiries: elainehead43@gmail.com or 1-250-537-4125

                  

 And..come along with us on our blog at http://ebtovietnam.blogspot.com on a Journey of the Heart.

An Inspiration

Last January, when we first arrived in Ho chi Minh City, we met Harry Pham Van Anh. He organized the book fair that we did under the auspices of Global Village Foundation. Harry's group is actually ECO Vietnam.

Since January we have been corresponding with this tireless young man, who has told us the stories of his many projects. He is very involved with the emerging concept of service education and has worked with teams of volunteers from Vietnamese and Singaporean universities.

His latest project was no mean feat. With a large crew of medical professionals and young volunteers he travelled to remote regions of Bac Lieu in the Mekong Delta. The team braved torrential rains as they motored by sampan down the river in torrential rains, to deliver free medical assessments to the Kho Me, one of Vietnam's ethnic tribes.

There are 100 pictures of the project....the crew huddling under tarps to keep themselves and the medical supplies dry.....scrambling ashore through the muck.....organizing the event and setting up systems....happy, grateful faces of the villagers.....all on ECO's Face Book page.

It is our fond wish at Journeys of the Heart that we might be able to work with Harry again in the future.

In the meantime, we wish him all the best and send our encouragement to him and his team for a job well done.

It is wonderful to witness this new movement of Vietnamese helping Vietnamese, when in the past there has been such a reliance on foreign NGO's to solve their social issues.

Thanks Harry.

PEACE

The Reaching Out Tea House is Number One!

It is incredible to think that there are 278 restaurants and coffee shops in Hoi An on the central coast of Vietnam. True, this lovely heritage town, has become a tourist haven but to us it is "home" where we live and work every year and this number seems overwhelming.

Even more delightfully surprising is that the Reaching Out Tea House, (opened in January) has, after five short months achieved the rating of Number One on Trip Advisor.

The staff at the Tea House have consistently delivered excellent food and service and our customers are recognizing that quality.

But most heartening of all is that almost every review describes the tranquility of the unique experience of silent service and the graciousness of the speech and hearing impaired staff.

We at Journeys of the Heart could not be prouder! This new social enterprise has proven to be a magnet for travellers looking for a unique and traditional Vietnamese experience and most importantly has created work experiences for the disabled staff to interact with the hearing world and share their pride in
being part of this success story.

Check out the Reaching Out Tea House on Trip Advisor and Facebook to see more pictures and read the reviews!!!!

Book Launch promotes Journeys of the Heart

At last!!!! We have launched our book Back To Vietnam: Tours of the Heart.

 Friends and neighbours on our home island Salt Spring, on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada gathered to wish us well and hear a few stories from our recently published book.

The lovely Adina Hildebrandt of Salt Spring Books, along with her husband Andrew hosted the event. Adina is a lover of books and theatre and her gracious opening of the evening set the tone for an evening of listening, laughter and insightful questions from the audience.

Arthur Black, a legend in Canadian literature and broadcasting had endorsed our book, even though his first read of Back to Vietnam was a rough copy, spiral bound. He introduced us and our memoir with a sprinkling of his usual humour.

Bruce and I both read passages from the book and then we had a question and answer session. Of course there were questions about the "American" war, Agent Orange, the current political situation in Vietnam etc. But we also were pleased that some of the members of the audience were very interested to know about the work we do ...our Journeys of the Heart....and how one might help. We received promises of donations, more promised hand knit bandages AND even some interest in coming to Vietnam to help out!

What more could we ask? Friends, family and neighbours were there to wish us well with our book, to share our excitement and sense of accomplishment and most of all to support our continuing work in Vietnam.

Thank you Salt Spring for a super book launch!

You can order a copy at www.backtovietnam.com.

Women Helping Women and Girls

I just received this video from Go Philanthropic. Lydia Dean put it together to inform others of the work done by Children's Education Foundation and Linda Hutchinson-Burn. As you will hear in the clip, GoPhil supports several of the girls in Linda's program.

Many of our donors to Journeys of the Heart also sponsor the education of girls ( and a few deserving boys too!) who would be unable to go to school without financial help. The irony in Vietnam is that although education is "mandatory", the annual fees are sometimes too much for poor families to pay so children stay at home to work at a very young age. Some end up on the streets, some are trafficked.

At Journeys of the Heart, we are thrilled to be part of the network of dedicated people who get their hearts and heads around publishing the plight of these young students.

In January, February and March of this year we worked with CEF and Linda DeWolf of GoPhi. You may remember our posts about the day we visited the students in Da Nang who have been relocated from the leprosy village of Hoa Van and another post about an art day. We also co-operated with another NGO, Global Village Foundation who were generous in sharing information about library books for school kids.

Such a powerful thing this synergy! Thanks to Linda, Linda, Lydia and Le Ly...we appreciate our partners! Click on the link to see the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK7UaSZ_o-8

Email elainehead43@gmail.com if you would like to sponsor a child.