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.