A Tale of Two Student Groups-Michael and Hanh

We didn't draw straws for this, but Jerri and I are off to two very different assignments. Jerri is in Singapore. We were all going to go to the Singapore American School to make a presentation to Michael Hsun's service project. Michael, an enterprising young 16 year old at the school has been very helpful as an intern at the school. He and the students in the Singapore American School created the website for Anh Linh school, a blog, and have regularly visited the students. He is responsible for finding 25 used computers that got "lost" during shipping thanks to UPS services, (forget about tracking through them in Vietnam--and they have been very unresponsive to him). See his letter to UPS

Michael has succeeded in capturing the attention of the Singapore American School and will be bringing 20 of his classmates to Anh Linh School in March as a service project.

Hanh Hong is another dynamic student giving back to the world in ways that exceed her age and stature. Thanks to Long Vo in Minneapolis, who introduced me to Hanh on this trip, I will be boarding a bus to the Mekong Delta to a remote village on the Cambodian border called Dong Thap. B2L is looking at adding some schools to our portfolio of support and caring. In Vietnam it makes sense to support the city and country schools that serve poor people because the movement back and forth between the city and the country is quite fluid. The government assigned everyone a district in which to live. However, some districts in Vietnam don't support a livelihood and so often poor people have one foot in the country where they should be living and one foot in the city where they can find work. Many of the children of Anh Linh school have parents who are in the country and they stay with a grandmother, aunt, cousin or stay in the Anh Linh dorm if they were on the streets.

I will be boarding a bus and will be meeting An Pham and Thanh Pham who are both student volunteers of the Chap Canh Uoc Mo Charity Community. After seeing the school and staying the night, I will go to Can Tho City to join Cam Thuy and Jerri for a day. So, looks like about 8 hours of crowded bus ride to the school!