Vietnam Children's Fund

February 2005

Today was our first visit to one of the schools built by the Vietnam Children’s Fund, which is an NGO set up by American Veterans to build schools in rural Vietnam.

The effects of war had destroyed the educational infrastructure and the literacy rate of the country has dropped enormously from its original 90%. Lew Puller, the founder of VCF, felt that schools would be the most effective monument to the past, to the people that had died in the war and the greatest hope for the future of the country. The funds come from donations from private parties. Sam Russell and Lan Vien represent and facilitate the actions of the VCF throughout Vietnam.

It was very exciting to finally be able to see a VCF school after the many years we’ve known Sam and heard about the VCF project. We were visiting the schools to give out prizes to the children that had won in a painting contest. The 40 best paintings out of about five hundred were chosen to be displayed at the Jardin Gallery in New York.

The first school we visited was called An Binh, in the Hai Duong province. It was dedicated to Pete Peterson who was the first ambassador to Vietnam after the war. He had been shot down during the war and the people of the region had taken care of him.

We drove for about an hour and a half through industrial countryside. As we approached the school we turned off the main highway and drove through a village that was quite dense with small houses made of brick and cement. The roads were paved and very narrow. Dust from the region had settled everywhere, yet the town was very clean and tidy. There was absolutely neither trash nor garbage anywhere, which was amazingly different from other parts of rural Asia I was familiar with.

On the way to the school, we passed in front of a beautiful, old, wood pagoda with a carved roof. It was set back from the road and seemed to be in the process of being restored. It had a silent, ancient beauty of the past emanating from it. The school was next to it, which somehow felt appropriate. The structure for learning was next door to the ancient center for spiritual development.

As we approached the driveway of the school we came to a tall important gate quite formal, letting whoever should pass through know that they were entering a special place. The schoolyard was very big, surrounded by tall shade-giving trees. This made the yard feel peaceful and comfortable to play in. I imagine during the summer months the heat was immense.

The children greeted us at the gate full of cheers and excitement. We certainly felt well received. We spoke with the director a few minutes in the teacher’s room, while the children settled into neat rows sitting on small plastic stools they had brought from home. The children at the head of each row held a sign on a post showing his class. A lot of them had blue school caps on. Soon the ceremony started, with a speech from the school director and another from the head of the district’s Party director. Sam then explained to everyone, with Lan interpreting, how their paintings had gone to New York to be in an exhibition, presided by the Vietnamese ambassador to the US as well as the Vietnamese ambassador to the UN.

I’m not sure how much was understood regarding the vast reaches of their artwork but as we sat there listening to Sam, the magnitude of the effect of their paintings seemed absolutely enormous. The prize giving was very moving. The children were very nervous to be standing up in front of everyone, some of them even looked frightened. However when Sam and Lan spoke to them with warmth, congratulating them, they glowed with happiness. There didn’t seem to be any jealousy or bad feelings among the children regarding who had gotten the prizes and who had not. They all clapped and even cheered as the winners walked up to the front of the assembly. The prizes were a block of paper with drawing and painting materials.

Once the ceremony had finished the children went to their homes to eat lunch. The director invited us to the teacher’s room again, as he wanted to celebrate the occasion. We had tea and ended up celebrating the recent marriage of the art teacher as well. It felt good to be included in the life story of one of the teachers. As we drove away some of the children still at school stood in the driveway waving.

The following day our second school visit was to Dong Son School, in Bac Giang province. We drove again about an hour and a half, through agricultural land this time. Rice fields and vegetable rows spread as far as we could see. The vegetables were planted on long mounds with furrows about a foot and a half deep. All the farming was very neat and tidy. Once again the towns were amazingly clean and well taken care of. I had imagined the countryside would be much more run down so the tidiness was a total surprise. As we approached the school we turned off the main paved road and followed a red dirt road. Rice growing was still the main occupation but ovens for brick making slowly became apparent everywhere. The land was used primarily for making red bricks, though rice fields were still all around. I imagine the quality of the soil was very poor for rice. The bricks were cooked with handmade charcoal patties – a mixture of charcoal with cinders formed into a patty that was then dried for the brick cooking. The patties, once dried, were then slipped between the bricks throughout the oven and then heated.

As we approached the school along the narrow dirt road the children saw us coming and started to cheer. It was a truly heart warming welcome. They swarmed around the car, laughing and yelling and jumping up and down. As we walked toward the school building they continued to laugh and swarm around us with bursting excitement. It was quite touching. We then met the director, his assistants and several teachers, who calmed the children down. Again, each child had brought a small plastic stool from home to sit on in the courtyard for the big event.

The ceremony started with a speech from the director and then moved onto a wonderful show of singing and dancing that the children had prepared. It was a real gift from their hearts. One of the shows was done by a young girl of about 8 years old in a white gown like a communion dress. She did a full solo performance of singing and dancing that almost brought tears to my eyes. Her voice was so clear and fine and she danced with such grace. The performance felt like an essence of beauty held up above all the struggles of daily life.

As we sat there watching the show and then listened to Sam and Lan explain to the school about the exhibition in New York City, once again it almost felt incongruous and magic. The paintings were reaching around the world to places and people the children would most likely never know. As I looked beyond the end wall of the school I could see through to rice fields behind and beyond the school, where their parents were planting rice in water up to their knees. Some were further away making bricks or perhaps following a water buffalo that was pulling a very rudimentary plough through the mud. Perhaps at most, their parents ran a rural shop. The effect was enormous in my heart. What a wonderful project, what a huge yet very small world this is. The interconnectedness was amazing. The power of their gestures felt so moving, as well as the power of the VCF in it’s essential groundwork to create schools where this outreach was possible. What grounds for hope and development. This was a big event.

When the children who had received prizes for their paintings walked up to accept their gifts they were shy and serious but their classmates seemed so happy for them and cheered and clapped as each winner took the stand. Afterwards we walked around to the classrooms and saw the children with their teachers. The teachers were proud of them too. It was in the classrooms that we saw the real excitement come out and the joy to open the prizes with their classmates present. Some of them put the prizes up on a ledge for all to see. There was such joy. We took a lot of photos of the celebration and some portraits as well. As we walked around it became clear that the joy felt by everyone was a reflection of every person’s desire to see the school successfully advance the children on paths of development and growth.

Lan was walking around asking questions, laughing, and translating I had the feeling that the school and the children were part of her family. She was concerned about their welfare – and making sure they were taken care of. As I looked at Sam, with the swarms of kids around him, he too felt like he was visiting his family. There was a warmth and concern expression that didn’t need a verbal translation. After months and years of struggle to build schools, what we were witnessing was the joy and the bonding that the schools were creating. This was the foundation of the happiness, the hope and trust that would cover those many years of extreme difficulty and sadness.

The teachers offered Sam a beautiful bouquet of flowers as he walked back the car. It had been a totally inspiring and nourishing day.

Our third school was Hoa Son School in Da Nang province. We flew to Da Nang and then took a taxi directly to the school on the outskirts of town. The highway had been widened and was in good shape. We drove for about forty-five minutes before turning off onto a dirt side road. When we arrived midmorning the sun was very hot. There were newly planted trees in the yard, which meant there was no shade to be protected from the glaring sun.

The Director received us briefly and then organized the assembly of children in front of the school steps with a bullhorn, while we organized the prize giving. The children stood up this time. I guess it was too hot to sit down. A lot of the children looked quite poor. Many of them had on orange baseball caps. These had been offered by a different NGO that was helping with their educational costs. The difficulties of their lives were written all over them yet they still remained full of smiles and excitement about the ceremony. Once again there was a touching – a reaching out and a grasp that was felt. The sun scorched everything as it came down. Hopefully the small trees would grow to create shade soon and allow for more comfort for everyone.

After the Hoa Son School we drove though Hue to visit another school in Dong Ha Town. The roads over the mountain pass were jammed so the drive was slow it took us about three hours in all. We ate lunch and then drove directly to the school.

This was Dong Le School in the Quang Tri province outside Hue in the demilitarized zone. This was the first school that the VCF with Sam had built. It was dedicated to Lew Puller, the founder of the VCF.

The majority of the teachers in this school were women with one male teacher and the Director, who was an elderly man. Right away we felt a warmth and camaraderie among the teachers and with the Director. The children seemed composed but more due to an inner calm than because of a command to be so. One of the teachers had been elected as the best teacher of the province and had again been nominated as such but had lost the second nomination because the school could not afford a slide projector for the contest. (Part of the competition involves the use of modern teaching materials). She had a very gentle and calm face. All of the teachers seemed happy and the children well taken care of.

The ceremony was held under a thatched roof space out in the yard that warded off the sun. It was very hot but everyone seemed joyous. The children clapped and cheered as their classmates walked up to get their prizes. Maybe some day one of them would make it to New York? The Director sat at the end of one of the rows of chairs, keeping a discrete presence. There was a nice calm and almost jovial aspect to the ceremony. It became clear that the good relationships between the teachers, with the students, and with the director, made for the comfortable feeling at the school. The students had also won several prizes for being the best students of the region. (It felt like they would truly put a projector to good use!).

After we had walked around the school and visited in the classrooms we spoke with the teachers and the director in the teacher’s room. A student from each classroom was overseeing their group and apparently in total calm. This school was a true joy to visit and a real lesson on what peace of mind can do.

The fifth and last school we visited was Phu Da School also in the Hue province. We drove along a wide comfortable 4-lane highway for about 45minutes and then turned onto a narrow paved road, which then became a dirt road. The roads in the area were under construction and would soon be major well-paved roads. As we turned off the road we passed a small market where people were crouched along the roadside selling their homegrown crops. A couple of miles down the road we turned onto an even smaller dirt road that passed through a very elaborate graveyard. The road was red dirt and the land around the graves was white, like sand. The graves were most likely for families, as they were very large cement structures with areas that were glazed. They were quite ornate and traditional looking. Some of them had bowed sides, which gave them the appearance of a cradle. Every once in a while there would be a mound where pumpkins or sweet potatoes were growing amongst the graves. In fact throughout the trip we saw graves spread about in the fields and rice paddies. Each pointing in a different direction, alone or in a cluster, with crops growing all around. An open calmness presides over them.

The Phu Da School was built in 1999 and it was holding up well. The commune was clearly quite poor as the yard was all sand and the wall around the school had not been finished. We learned that the headmaster had had difficulties due to flooding from heavy rains and had moved the library and the teacher’s room into one of the classrooms in the new school and switched the classrooms out to the old school.

The rooms in the old school are very dark so this was not a good permanent decision. Sam and Lan explained how the school had been built for the children to have optimal learning conditions with light, comfortable classrooms. The teacher’s room would have to move back into the older building and give it’s space back to the children. Possibly even the library, I didn’t follow the exact conversation but it became clear that Sam and Lan were most probably trying to find a solution. The money that had been donated was for the children, and the children’s development so the old building had to be upgraded enough to keep the library books and teachers room dry.

As we traveled around visiting the schools it became clear that Lan’s translations were much more than translations or even interpretations of Sam’s words. She was repeatedly breaching a cultural gap that has no words – that belongs in part to the realms of culture, customs and trust. It became apparent that each step of the way from the moment of the conception of a school project, to it’s final achievement as well as, if not especially, during follow-up visits Lan was weaving two cultures together in an amazingly skillful way. How does one explain to one party that accepted cultural customs are unacceptable? Wit, humor, intelligence, patience, and an understanding of each side’s dilemma had to be used. Perhaps the key to this amazing endeavor of building schools was the process of having the egos of all the parties concerned stretch and compromise allowing the various goals to be achieved without hurting feelings and creating blockages. There was a dance to all of this. Everyone was stretching and ultimately nourished by the exchanges that had precipitated at each school, each ceremony and each class visit.

The ceremonies had often started with the tension of trying to be “correct” and then slowly real smiles replaced the nervousness. It was possible to see the glimmer of trust replace distance and see the children’s faces melt from anxiety to joy, especially as we visited their classrooms. VCF, via Sam and Lan became real and touchable. The organization (VCF) had smiles and jokes, and concern for their welfare in a manner they could feel emotionally. Sam and Lan had gained their trust and were slowly opening doors beyond set customs and beliefs.

I think very few of the people we met can imagine what New York is, or what was happening to the paintings on the other side of the world. What was clear though was the thirst for and satisfaction of an exchange that could make both parties feel nourished with a desire to open doors and see beyond an ideology for both sides. Essentially a need for an emotional bonding that would bring everyone to a higher, deeper level of exchange and trust.

It was happening before our eyes and was totally exhilarating. Trust is a big stumbling block in the world today and there before our eyes it was flowering. What a thrill. Participation in these visits was a gift.