Saturday 29 March 2008

Le Ly Hayslip (part one)

On Friday we had the pleasure of meeting Le Ly Hayslip, an American-Vietnamese woman who is the founder of both Global Village Foundation and East Meets West Foundation, and "author of two autobiographical bestsellers, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War, Woman of Peace, which were adapted into the 1994 film Heaven and Earth, directed by Oliver Stone and released by Warner Bros."

We were aware of Le Ly after our research into NGOs in Vietnam, although we had some misunderstandings regarding her current activities. We had expected (apparently many others are similarly confused) that her current activities were under East Meets West - a large NGO with a budget in the hundreds of millions.

As we have previously mentioned, our plan is to work with much smaller, less bureaucratic NGOs where the founders' vision and energy drives the activities on the ground. We are kinda wary of larger organizations which can be highly bureaucratic, hierarchical, with high administrative and overhead costs, many of which lack flexibility... Don't misunderstand us, it's not that larger organizations don't do good work, it's simply our preference to work with smaller groups, and it is our understanding that many others who are donating time and money share our preference.

As we were saying, we thought that Le Ly was currently working with the large East Meets West, but she quickly set us straight! Le Ly is currently working exclusively with Global Village Foundation. As soon as we introduced ourselves and explained why we are here, she enthusiastically welcomed us, immediately agreed to an interview, offered to take us around to see her projects, and offered the help of her staff! In fact, this is how it went: after a brief introduction, she asked "What are you doing now?" and within minutes we were in a car with her on our way to have lunch with her and watch (and film) her give a lecture.

Over lunch, we had a few questions that we had planned to ask her about working with large organizations, but almost before we started eating she was already chatting about the problems with large NGOs, talking freely about the fact that many of them are corrupt...

In absolute terms she expressed her determination to maintain Global Village Foundation (GVF) hands on, action-oriented, and driven by her leadership on the ground. Putting it under her terms, she likes the idea of a "One-woman shop." It is our understanding that there are only a handful of staff, and of course, she is here in Vietnam, overseeing the implementation of several ongoing projects.

As we discussed in our interview with Bruce and Elaine last week, one of GVF's projects is the Portable Library Project which furnishes books to remote schools. When GVF began the project 18 months ago, they hoped to deliver 35 'library units' - they already have over 200!

Some of GVF's other projects are in the areas of education, emergency relief, health and wellbeing... In the next few days we will be following Le Ly around some of the various projects and will report back to you the details... She has also volunteered to accompany us into the countryside to a few schools, orphanages, and family homes of Agent Orange victims. We'll have the full scoop on all of this in the days to come. Meanwhile, a great way to get a sense of her is to watch our recording of her lecture based on her autobiography. By watching these clips you will get a good sense of who she is, what she is doing, how she is going about it, and why...

Here is the lecture in four parts - you'll get to meet her as a child of war, as a survivor of war, as a teenage mother, as a dedicated and passionate activist, as an accomplished leader, and as the founder of Global Village Foundation.

Part One



Part Two



Part Three



Part Four



More soon.

Thursday 27 March 2008

An interview with volunteers Bruce & Elaine

As promised, here is our interview (3 parts) with Bruce and Elaine - a volunteer couple from Canada that we met in Hoi An.

Bruce and Elaine provided us with a wealth of information and perspective from their experience - they have been here five times, with the current trip lasting over 80 days. They have been working with two organizations here, a well-known and well-established non-profit, Global Village Foundation, and the other is a for-profit organization called Reaching Out - and interesting project which manufactures and sells "a fine collection of handmade crafts made by talented disAbled artisans from all over Vietnam."

The interview is in three segments. In the first segment we discuss their projects in Vietnam and they offer some recommendations and suggestions for others who are looking to volunteer in Vietnam.





In the second video, Bruce and Elaine talk about Vietnam in general, offer some cultural awareness pointers, and share an interesting anecdote or two.





The third segment includes Bruce's perspective on Vietnam as a returning veteran from the 'American War.' We love this segment, and thank Bruce for his openness and sincerity in sharing these highly emotional perspectives.





Elaine and Bruce have also been keeping a blog, EB to Vietnam, during their time here. If anyone wants to contact Bruce and Elaine regarding either their time volunteering here, or issues related to veterans returning to Vietnam and 'replacing negative imagery,' we can forward emails to them for you.

Elaine & Bruce, we hope you get home safely and painlessly!

Tuesday 25 March 2008

The Next Stage: Hoi An

We made it to Hoi An and will be spending at least two weeks here on this trip. We decided to spend most of our time here because there are many organizations and NGOs in Hoi An that deal with children - particularly orphans, street children and disabled children.

Hoi An has some other advantages; it is centrally located, it is easy to travel to other areas, and it is relatively clean and quiet. The dining here is also great!

We've done a lot of research over the past year on many of the organizations here, and we are really looking forward to seeing them in action; how they operate, the challenges they face, and most importantly, the impact they make.

One of the main issues that we came across in our research is that it is difficult to evaluate the many organizations we came across. How can we help most effectively? Where are our resources best utilized? Which organizations have the best intentions, the best plans, and the capability to meet their goals? We suspect that many others also have similar difficulty in choosing which organization to support. Are some of the organizations too bureaucratic? Which organizations have high overhead and administrative costs?



How to Choose?


There are some great websites available for travelers who want to research restaurants, or hotels, or any other travel-related item - from beaches to zoos and beyond - with an abundance of critiques and reviews etc. We haven't found anything similar for NGOs. Our goal is to provide a blog which, in some small way, will be useful to others when they are trying to decide which organizations to help.

Of course, we will only be giving our own personal opinions about the organizations, our likes and dislikes etc, and we certainly aren't offering a professional evaluation. We will give organizations the right to reply to any of our posts, and all will be welcome to offer any further information and make any corrections etc. We also welcome feedback from any readers - either in the comments section of the blog, or via email. We are not associated with any organizations, we are not promoting or advertising any of them on their behalf, we will simply give our own personal opinions. Again, we are not professionals, though our opinions are based on some experience working with NGOs.




Our Objective


Our plan is to select some organizations for review here in Central Vietnam. For this trip (Part One) we will mainly focus on organizations that work with children, primarily orphans, street children, and disabled children.

We will try to learn about these organizations via various perspectives; information provided by directors, managers and employees, information from the beneficiaries of the organization, feedback from people in the local community, and interviews which we will post on the blog.

Last but not least, we will offer our own personal evaluation/perspective of the effectiveness of each organization - based on their goals, and their ability to deliver.

One of the most important elements in determining whether to donate time and/or money to an organization is transparency. All organizations tell a great story with their websites and other marketing materials, however it can be difficult for others to scratch below the surface and determine whether the organization ought to be supported. We hope to be able to take an extra step and take a closer look at the operations. It will be interesting to see how open and transparent some of these organizations are, and to what extent they will open their doors and let us see their actual operations so that we can evaluate them more fully.

We will contact our target organizations, explain our goals, and try to set up interviews and meetings. If we find that any of the organizations are not fully transparent, we'll report that too. We recognize that some organizations may not always be fully transparent to us for a variety of reasons, some more legitimate than others, so we'll simply report that.

We already have a list of five or six organizations that we'll start with, some of them have come through recommendations from other people that we have met and interviewed.

We are excited and very interested about this project. We'll keep you informed as to progress along the way. We will be here for another 3 weeks or so for Part One of our project which will mostly be focused on Vietnamese children. We plan to return to Vietnam for Part Two later in the year when we hope to expand the project to more areas and more organizations.

We conducted an interview yesterday with two volunteers, Bruce and Elaine, who have been here in Hoi An for the past 2+ months, their fifth visit to Vietnam. They worked with two organizations - Reaching Out and Global Village Foundation - and we'll post that interview shortly.


Here are a few touristy pictures from Hoi An to start with - we'll have some more soon.



The river and the associated hustle and bustle is the focal point of Hoi An



Delicious open-fire roasted corn offered by many vendors along the banks of the river



A typical cafe in the center of the town, housed in an old building; a great place to people-watch and sip Vietnamese coffee





One of many store-fronts in the town center - they are mainly fabric and tailor shops


Central Market, Hoi An - one section is dedicated to seafood, others are dedicated to vegetables, spices, clothing, and of course, souvenirs for the many tourists.


Monday 24 March 2008

Ma Trang videos

We took a couple of videos at the Ma Trang village school near Sapa.

This first video is of a little 5 year old girl sweeping the classroom before class begins. The task had apparently been allocated to her for the day, and she took it very seriously!




This video is of a classroom of boys singing during their music class. They put on quite a show for us - although some were more enthusiastic than others... As we mentioned in the previous post, the only thing we could make out was the repeating of 'Ho Chi Minh' in the song they chose to sing.




Our next stop is Da Nang / Hoi An. We'll be visiting orphanages and schools in the nearby provinces and we'll conduct interviews with several NGO operation directors dealing with children.

Sapa, Day two.

On Thursday, our second full day in Sapa, we again visited some schools. Unfortunately our guide Trung was not available and we had a new guide, Cy (short for Lucy), a 19 year old H'Mong girl from a nearby village. Cy had an interesting background, and was very open with us and shared her story. Her father died when she was very young, and her step-father didn't want Cy around his new family. At the age 14, by sheer luck she met a nice Australian woman, Kirsten, who took Cy and 15 other kids from the villages to Hanoi for 9 months to teach them all English so that they would be able to support their families. Unfortunately Cy did not know Kirsten's surname or contact details but we are hoping to find Kirsten and establish contact with her. Thanks to Kirsten, Cy is now able to support her family, as well as another family in her village.


Our first stop was at the school of a village called Ma Trang. Cy helped distribute some of the school supplies and wellingtons that we purchased that morning with her - unfortunately she also demanded that we also bring some candy for the kids, something that we had promised never to do! Cy did not take 'No' for an answer... On the positive side, Trung had suggested that we also pick up some noodles for the kids, which turned out to be a great idea.

Unlike Trung, Cy was not particularly discrete in distributing the supplies, and the whole thing became a circus with Cy directing the kids and telling them to line up to receive their candies and whatnot... We cringed while she disrupted all the classes! The last thing we wanted to do was put the kids under the spotlight or embarrass them - unfortunately we did a little of both.

All that said, Cy was vivacious and adorable and really enjoyed her role distributing the supplies - she loved keeping track of all the inventory, constantly counting and recounting the goods and determining how they were to be allocated - exactly one of each item per kid! Every time she finished handing out something, she would recount the inventory, and dutifully report to us, again and again and again and again, how the remainder would be distributed... man, we got very dizzy! Thankfully we had the cameras in hand to distract us from her!

These first 12 pics are from Ma Trong school - the first is a group shot of some of the 100 kids from the school. Cy organized the kids to line up for us (I'm not sure if she even asked permission from the teachers!)


This little boy was all alone, deep in thought, at the entrance to a classroom.


Here are some of the kids with their packaged noodle soup - they were running around excitedly showing them off to each other.


Another good pic of young H'Mong girls carrying and caring for their baby siblings.

These next two shots are of the school's youngest class. They were gorgeous. Before the class started, one little girl grabbed a straw broom and dutifully swept the floor. Perhaps it was her assigned task for the day...




This girl seemed to be the youngest in the above class.


These poor kids were made to sing for us by their teachers! They did a great job - we have a video clip of them singing which we will post when we can. I'm not sure if they were singing the national anthem - the only phrase we recognized was 'Ho Chi Minh'



Here is a shot of three girls after they realized what our camera could do!


And some more shots of some of the school girls






Walking to the next school, we ran into these kids on the road... Cy dutifully handed one piece of candy to each kid.






Isn't she beautiful?



Here are two pics from a school we visited that was officially in Sapa, although it was a few miles out of town





We then stopped at another village, Sin Chai, but the school was closed. Cy took us into one of the homes where a baby was about to take a bath - she was the only baby we have seen crying in any of the villages.



This gorgeous little girl was in the same home. The wooden structure just to her right is the ladder to get to the upper floor where the beds are. (Cy also demanded that we take a photo of some dried corn that was hanging from the ceiling)


Many of the homes are 'Stilt' homes, where the animals (mostly pigs) live on the ground floor under the main home. The floors are plain concrete with an open fire in the middle of the house used for cooking (including cooking food for the pigs)

These next six pics are taken on the pathway through the village.







We thought this woman was the grandmother of the baby, but she is actually the mother. It's amazing how quickly the women seem to age here. Women here tend to be married by 15 years old - in fact our guide Cy said that she was too old to ever get married at the ripe old age of 19!


Another cutie without pants!


And another preschooler looking after her baby sibling





Cy then took us to her home village, Lao Chai.

These two pics are of some boys playing in the mud.







These next two pics are of some of the girls who tried to sell us something or other. All of the villages are very adept at striking up a conversation in order to begin the selling process. The three main questions are: 1) You buy from me? 2) Where you from? 3) How old are you? The girls even have responses tailored to each nationality!





This next shot is of a family of three working in the field, with the baby horizontal on mum's back as she toiled the crop which feeds the family's pigs. According to Cy, once this crop is harvested, they actually cook it before feeding it to the pigs.




Cy took us to her family home - here is her mum cooking rice on the concrete floor in the middle of the house with Cy's baby step-sister on her back. Cy's 5 year old sister, her uncle and her step-dad also live in this tiny little house. The house was very dark during the middle of the day (no windows), full of smoke from the cooking such that we could hardly keep our eyes open. It may be hard to see in the picture but Cy's mum was sitting on a tiny wooden stool, just an inch or two off the ground.


Our internet situation has been generally difficult for a variety of reasons, resulting in delayed postings and such. We are currently blocked from actually even seeing this blog, making Quality Control a little difficult! Hopefully things will begin to improve on that front.

More later.

Friday 21 March 2008

Black H'Mong School, Hau Thao Village

Here as promised are two video clips (one more to come) from our Day One Sapa village school tours.



This video covers our shopping expedition in Sapa when we procured some 'Wellingtons' (rubber boots), notepads and some pens and pencils.



Our guide, Trung, was a fantastic help, navigating us through the selection and bargaining process.



We picked up the boots in the Sapa outdoor market, and the other supplies in a couple of stores in downtown Sapa.










This second video covers our visit to a Black H'Mong school in a village called Hau Thao, approximately 20 minutes drive from Sapa, and another 20 minute walk to the village itself (the village is not accessible by car.) Hopefully this footage provides some more background to the previous blog post with the gorgeous photos.






The children are gorgeous, and the setting is stunning

Wednesday 19 March 2008

As in Australia, so in Vietnam

Just as the kangaroos carry their joeys (babies) around in their pouches in Australia, the people living in and around Sapa carry their kids around on their backs in very comfy-looking wraps. Even girls as young as 5 years old carry their baby brothers and sisters around all day on their backs as they stroll around the villages and mountains.


The infants look very content - and we have yet to see a single one causing a fuss or crying.


Here we tried to capture the natural beauty of this culture. The Westerners have yet to catch up with their expensive Baby Bjores!










Photos from Black H'Mong school

We visited a Black H'Mong school in a village called Hau Thao just out of Sapa yesterday. The kids were all adorable; fun, healthy and energetic.

When we arrived, the girls were in some gymnastics / physical education class outside. The music sounded fun, and the girls seemed to love dancing. We were told by our guide, Trung, that in the past these classes were done with music without lyrics, but now they use higher tempo music with fun lyrics etc and the kids apparently enjoy it more. It sure looked like fun!


The boys were playing a game called feathercock - they kick a shuttlecock like thing around to each other, and it isn't allowed to touch the ground. We play a similar game in the West with a little bag filled with sand or beans but I can't remember the name of it. I actually joined in and played with them for a while - mostly they laughed at my beginner skills!


This little girl in the next four pics attended the school with her two brothers while her father worked construction on the school site. We fell in love with her. Can you blame us?!








and here she is with her two brothers.



We took some lovely photos of groups of the kids, and then showed them the photos on the camera screen. They loved it, and would point each other out on the screen and crack up laughing. Whichever kid they pointed to on the screen usually got really shy and embarrassed and then they'd move on to make fun of someone else!
















This woman with her child lives in the same village as the school and had just stopped by to watch the kids play during recess.



This woman lived in a small home adjacent to the school. Many of the kids who lived nearby were running around happily without any pants on.



Here are a few more random shots of some of the kids at the school. We tried our best to capture the beauty, innocence, liveliness and happiness of the children - but of course we could never do that justice...

































We also have some video from the school of the boys playing feathercock, the girls playing and dancing and other shots from the school. We'll try to post them as soon as we can.