Entertainment Classified Business
South Florida couple pour souls into aid for
Vietnamese street kids
By
ROBERT NOLIN and MAYA BELL
Web-posted: 12:53 a.m. Apr. 30, 2000
MIAMI -- He was a warrior who for 13 years carried a gun. She
was in college, studying literature.
They had yet to meet when each fled Vietnam more than
two decades ago, but Minh Thai Vu and his future wife, Ngoc Anh Huynh, had much
in common: lives as shattered as their war-scarred homeland -- a homeland
they’re now trying to rebuild one child at a time.
April 30, 1975, the day South Vietnam surrendered to
communist invaders, was beginning and end for Vu and Huynh. They left behind spouses,
children and a ruined country. Then each set off for the uncharted territory of
the American Dream.
During the past quarter-century they achieved that
dream, prospered, raised children and mended their wounded souls. Then a trip
to a graveyard three years ago in their native land brought them full circle.
Now they’re focused once again on Vietnam, opening their hearts to the hungry
children of a still-stricken nation.
From a well-appointed home in Kendall with a tranquil
orchid garden, they operate a nonprofit foundation to provide food, clothing
and schooling for a handful of Vietnam’s estimated 19,000 street kids.
Currently, they support about 225 homeless children in three government
shelters around the country.
Novices in the art of fund-raising, the couple have
exhausted their savings and rely on Vu’s exterminating business -- and generous
customers -- to keep their operation afloat.
“All my retirement money gone after 21
years of working in the United States,” Vu said.
Twenty-five years ago, Vu was a battle-hardened soldier for South
Vietnam, far removed from the unassuming, tea-sipping man he is today.
There were firefights, “so many I don’t remember,” and he was wounded
six times.
It grew worse when South Vietnam surrendered.
“I stayed until the last minute on April 30 when Saigon fell,” Vu said.
“By that time, everybody was crazy.
“Crazy,” agreed Huynh. “Gunfire everywhere.”
Vu had a wife and three children. He urged them to leave the smoldering
country, but his wife opted to stay. “I lost my family, I lost everything,” he
said.
In the confusion, Vu made his way to the coast, where he and other
soldiers commandeered a fishing vessel and took to sea. Fifteen days later, a
U.S. aircraft carrier picked them up.
Huynh, 50, “Annie” to her American friends, was also married and had two
babies. She fled Saigon with them, but like Vu’s, her spouse opted to remain.
He died two years later.
In 1979, by then both American citizens, Vu and Huynh found themselves
in Harrisburg, Pa.., where Huynh was a student. Vu heard about the pretty
Vietnamese woman and sought her out.
“I was so lonely,” he said. “I had a very sad, broken life.”
They fell in love, married, and raised Huynh’s two children, Bao Nga
Nguyen and Huy, who are studying at Nova Southeastern University and Florida
International University, respectively. Eventually the couple moved to Miami,
where Vu worked as an exterminator and later established his own thriving
business, Rodi Pest Control. Huynh studies computer science and teaches Vietnamese
children.
Under his wife’s gentle tutelage, the tough soldier reacquainted himself
with his Buddhist religion. He softened his ways. “She said to obey and
forgive, to keep your mind peaceful,” Vu said.
“Now, when his old friends see him again, they don’t recognize him,”
Huynh said with a laugh.
Cemetery living
Vu rebuffed his wife’s prodding to accompany her on a visit to the
country where communists had imprisoned his friends. So in June 1997, Huynh
returned without him to the land she loved.
What she saw in her hometown of Da lat, a city in central Vietnam, again
changed her life’s direction. She went to a cemetery, seeking her grandmother’s
grave. Instead she found two fresh-faced boys who would become the first of
“her” children.
Their home was among the tombs. They dug up graves and collected the
bones, later to be cremated, to make room for new corpses. Their wage: about 75
cents a day.
Everywhere Huynh looked she saw the lost children. With empty stares
they begged on the street for food or money. Young children clutching younger
siblings. Children carrying their belongings in ragged garbage sacks. Children
eating runny eggs from scrawny chickens. None could afford to go to school.
In Hue, she asked a shoeshine boy where his parents were. He had no idea
what a parent was.
Huynh was heartbroken by such stark contrast to life in the bountiful
United States. “I feel sad, so terrible,” she recalled. “After 25 years living
here, you see so many beautiful things.”
She left money for school for the young cemetery dwellers. Then she
thought: I can go back and forth to help them, and others. Such help is needed.
“Vietnam is stagnant,” said Carlyle Thayer, a professor with the
Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. “It’s down at the bottom
of world standards. Vietnam is being compared to Bangladesh and the other
basket cases.
The United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, estimates that 19,000
children, a tenfold increase since 1993, live on the streets of Vietnam. In a
country with an unemployment rate of up to 8 percent, they spend time working
petty jobs to survive and have nothing left to pay for school.
Until economic reforms in 1986, the communist government provided free
schooling. Now, students must pay.
Today, families trek from the country to the city, competing for rare
jobs. There is a high birth rate, and parents often can’t afford to care for
their kids, who then go begging.
“They should be going to school, and there’s nothing effectively being
done about it,”
Thayer said.
Back home in Miami after her first trip, Huynh grew depressed. She lost
interest in work as well as 10 pounds. “She kept lying down on the couch,
crying,” said Vu, who suspected she was having an overseas affair.
Huynh begged Vu to return with her to Vietnam but wouldn’t tell him why.
“Come back with me and see with your own eyes," she said. Finally, Vu
relented.
In December 1997, the couple returned to Da lat. Huynh took her still
unsuspecting husband to the graveyard to meet her bone-digging boys.
“When they saw her they were yelling and screaming and crying and
hugging her,” Vu recalled. “They said, ‘You’re an angel come from nowhere.”’
A fragile existence
The couple traveled the country in a 1987 clunker of a van. The
once-stately home where Vu grew up in Phan Thiet had been converted into an
office. On the sidewalk outside, under a dirty plastic tarp, lived a mother and
four children. For days, their only food was the sugar cane stalks the
youngsters sucked.
“Looking at Vietnam and the way it is, it broke my heart,” Vu said.
Vu and Huynh met with social services agencies, which operate Street
Children’s Centers throughout the country, and pledged to contribute money to provide
the neediest kids with hot meals, schooling and shelter until age 18.
They started with 50 children, giving each $100 a year to pay for food,
housing and school. The fragility of existence there eventually cost the life
of one of the graveyard children, who died of disease when he couldn’t get the
proper medicine.
“I said, I’m going to be broke pretty soon, but that’s OK,” Vu said. “I
would help her to do it with my hand, my heart, my everything.”
They assist children in three centers across Vietnam, traveling there
once or twice a year to hand money for school and food directly to parents,
then accompany the parents when they pay the school. When a center needed a
remodeled bathroom, Vu and Huynh hired a contractor and paid him personally.
When a girl needed a new dress, the couple bought the fabric and hired a
seamstress.
Huynh, whom Vu credits for their entire operation, earned a new name
from her young beneficiaries: “The one who brings the heart to the children.”
A charity is born
But in the United States, the couple faced some hard realities.
“We know (how) to help, but we don’t know how to get the money,” Huynh
said.
She spent hours at the library learning about charitable foundations.
She took a second job to help save for “her” kids.
Vu consulted his accountant and paid a lawyer more than $6,000 to draw
up articles of incorporation. In late 1998, their nonprofit charity was born:
the Far East Help Foundation.
They solicited businesses and other charity groups for help. “Nobody responded,”
Vu said. “It’s very sad.” A Web page (www.fareasthelp. org) goes largely
ignored.
They organized a fund-raising dinner and lost $4,000 when not enough
donors showed up. Their strongest commitment comes from Vu’s “heart customers,”
25 of his exterminating clients who pay $25 a month to sponsor a child. The
rest comes from the couple’s salaries.
But the old soldier and his gentle wife are undaunted, still full of
faith. Vu totes photo scrapbooks of Vietnamese children and reams of foundation
material on his exterminating calls. Huynh keeps mailing out corporate requests
for donations.
“I believe one of these days somebody’s going to help us out,” Vu said.
Besides, the intangible returns of their work are too great for them to
give up now.
“The foundation is our life,” Vu said. “We receive happiness from the
children, we receive the big smiles on their faces when we come back, we
receive their love -- our picture on their heart.”
The Far East Help Foundation can be
reached at 14543 Sw 97th St.,
Miami, FL
33186, or at 305-752-6954,
fax at 305-387-
0251, or e-mail at
hngocanh@yahoo.com.
Robert Nolin can be reached at rnolin@sunsentinel.com or by calling
954-572-2024.
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