Looking Ahead

By Nguyen Thi Hong Phuong, ChildFund Vietnam
and David Hylton, Christian Children's Fund

This is the final entry in a series of blogs detailing the day in the life of Nam, an 11-year-old boy. So far Nam has gone to school and helped his mother prepare lunch. The rest of the day is a busy one as he continues to help his parents and ends the day studying.

2 p.m.
Nam follows his parents to the field, helping to weed their rice paddy. This year, they have had much rain and the crop looks promising. Nam likes to go here with his parents since he often meets his friends who have also come to help their own parents in the fields. Despite doing hard work, they play together and have fun.

7 p.m.
Nam prepares for tomorrow’s lessons. He wants to study hard to become a doctor. He remembers what his father often says: “I only finished grade 3 and I understand the disadvantage of a limited education. I will try my best to support my sons to study as long as possible. I believe they will have a brighter future.”

Nam is one of more than 18,000 children in 16 communities in the northern mountainous areas of Vietnam, where ChildFund Vietnam is working to create better lives with programs in education, water and sanitation, livelihood, health and child protection. Since beginning work in Xuan Phong, CCF and ChildFund Australia have helped to improve the physical learning environments and teaching quality in kindergarten and primary schools; increase families’ income through agricultural cultivation and livestock husbandry; deliver clean water to homes; build hygienic family toilets; construct a good-quality health clinic and train local medical staff for better health care services; and lay a foundation for better child protection.

Beyond all these achievements, we also emphasize the importance on the local children and people’s capacity for their self-sufficient future development. ChildFund Vietnam is working hard to realize the dreams of people like Nam and his family for a better future.

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Helping at Home

By Nguyen Thi Hong Phuong, ChildFund Vietnam
and David Hylton, Christian Children's Fund

This is the second in a series of blog entries detailing the day in the life of Nam, an 11-year-old boy in Vietnam. After a morning at school, Nam returns home to help out his family. His fathers offers an insight to how Christian Children’s Fund and ChildFund Australia have made a difference in their lives.

Noon
Nam returns home. His parents have just returned from field work. Nam helps his mother to prepare lunch. Sipping tea, Nam’s father, Duong, talks.

“Our life now is easier than five years ago. My family used to be suffering 4-6 months of food shortage per year,” he says. “ChildFund came and taught us to improve cultivation, lent us money from its savings and credit projects, and discussed with us how to generate and manage family income. Now, we have enough rice for food. The borrowed money is used for raising pigs. ChildFund also teaches us how to raise pigs for profit. In the past, we harvested pigs only every two years.”

Duong says the family sells pigs twice a year and makes between $100 and $150 each time.

“This year, I don’t have to borrow money because I use the profit from previous sales to invest,” he says.

What’s next: Nam continues to help his family and then closes the day off by studying.

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Time for School

By Nguyen Thi Hong Phuong, ChildFund Vietnam
and David Hylton, Christian Children's Fund

This is the first in a series of blog entries detailing the day in the life of 11-year-old Nam. Nam is one of more than 18,000 children in 16 communities in the northern mountainous areas of Vietnam, where ChildFund Vietnam is working to create better lives with programs in education, water and sanitation, livelihood, health and child protection.

Christian Children’s Fund works with ChildFund Alliance partner ChildFund Australia in Vietnam. The area we work in is less than 100 miles from Hanoi, the nation's capital.

On this particular day Nam is beginning a new grade level.

6 a.m.
Nam, an 11-year-old Muong ethnic boy in Xuan Phong, wakes up early and eagerly prepares to go to school. He will have his first lessons in the sixth grade. A long session of mathematics doesn’t seem to lessen Nam’s eagerness for his new school.

“I like secondary school because I feel I am older and more independent. I have new friends, play more grown-up games, and the lessons and teachers are different,” Nam says. “I do miss my primary school, my classroom and my teachers. But if I hadn’t gone to primary school, I would not have had the chance to continue studying and would not have the opportunity for high school. Then, I would not have a job for my future.”

Primary school is free in Vietnam. However, the affordability for children’s schooling is limited in rural mountainous areas due to other shared expenditures such as school construction costs, text books, electricity, water and other fees. These contributions are a burden for poor families like Nam’s, whose monthly income is less than $30.

Tinh, the headmaster of Xuan Phong primary school, said: “Since we’ve had ChildFund projects, we have more children going to school. This is because of two reasons. First, the school is much better in terms of teachers’ capacity and infrastructure. We have concrete-built and well-equipped classrooms, clean water and hygienic toilets. Our teachers are trained to improve their teaching methodologies. Now, children’s families are more capable to send their children to school. ChildFund has helped increase families’ income.”

Tinh says children are provided with text books, school bags, and school uniforms, which ease the difficulties of family financial contributions for their children’s schooling.

Nam’s father Duong also recalled the time when Nam’s elder brother, Dan, went to primary school: “It was a thatched roof and bamboo walled school. The class was so poor. Children from far-off hamlets had to cross long distances to get to school. Children nowadays have better schools. Farther hamlets now have satellite schools where teachers can stay. Both children and teachers don’t have to travel daily to get the remote hamlets, which lengthens the time they are able to teach and learn.”

What’s next: Nam’s busy day continues at home as he helps his family.

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Opposite Sides – A Time to Reflect

By Jason Schwartzman,
Director of Program Development

Note: This is the final entry from Jason’s recent trip to the Philippines.

I've been in a time warp for almost two weeks, delving into CCF's past, trying to understand the challenges past generations came up against. We stopped organizing orphanages when we realized that mothers were giving up their young children to them. When we were perceived as patronizing "great white fathers," we put families more directly in control of resources and decisions.

I'm reflecting on what I've learned. One morning I called home. My 4-year-old son was about to go to bed. Before I left home, I had shown him on the globe that hangs down from the ceiling, over his bed, where I was traveling to. Somehow he understood that when I'm on the other side of the world, my morning is his night. Opposite sides.

On day five of my travels, at breakfast, over fried eggs, bread and rice, Sergio and his wife shared with me that their daughter's education was most important, and that CCF is a good organization. I had stayed overnight in their house, as a way of further understanding how CCF programs are affecting the people and community that we work with. In a little while he was going to ask for my address so we could write, which I desperately want so I can watch from a distance as his daughters grow up and so my son can feel connected to a family different than him – something to learn from.

But that gorgeous human moment needed to incorporate a blunt fact – the father told me he wanted to write in case they were met with financial hardship. He needs a safety net for his family, and I was an opportunity. What's become clear is that I focus on aspirational programming and I try my best to work with colleagues so that concepts and ideas are clear, so program staff throughout CCF can use them as a guide in developing and implementing programs.

What I've fallen short of doing is sufficiently understanding what families expect of CCF and why they seek to engage with us. Their perspective seems to be on the other side of the globe. At least in the community I visited, what they prioritize is the comfort of knowing that from time to time, they can rely on CCF to provide a form of financial assistance to their family, and they appreciate generous sponsors who will be like minded.

The people I met did not seem greedy or unaware of others in the community who might also have similar needs. Their focus was just on themselves. I, on the other side, focus on programs that over time – over 12 to 15 years – will address the root causes of poverty, that require families to come together to exercise the influence they can have.

While our programs have evolved, and our ambition has certainly evolved, our evolution is also a continual confrontation with consequences, carrying two contradictory facts in your head at the same time, searching for a resolution.

If this is the relationship with families that CCF has created, how do we move it along? How do we maintain a strong connection with families, engage them in dialogue, maintain their interest and commitment, but evolve toward an appreciation that programs are the ties that bind. That programs are the basis for our relationship? And the success or failure of those programs is what we should be talking about? We have created the relationship and perception of CCF that stared me in the eye, on a porch, Coke in hand, in Taliba, a rural community filled with proud, animated, laughing, soft, concerned faces, exemplified by Sergio, his wife and his four daughters.

I'm on my way home. Tokyo airport. Changing planes. Health workers trot down corridors in full surgical gear with goggles over their eyes. Everyone's wearing a mask. Swine flu. Very futuristic.

I'm thinking about our future. I appreciate our legacy, and I hope our values and our strategy, our heart and our mind, will guide us to an answer that our history has courageously sought. I have a few ideas of my own.

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Seeking a Balance

By Mark McPeak,
Consultant to CCF

Note: Mark helped facilitate the workshop in the Philippines. After day five of the workshop, Mark sent us this blog entry.

We’ve just returned from a field immersion that was, for most of us, a real highlight of the workshop so far. Not only was it good to reflect about CCF’s program principles with community members and partners, and colleagues, but staying for a lengthy period, including overnight, really has refreshed and grounded most of us in the vivid realities of our work.

Of course, this workshop is all about connecting our hearts, heads and hands to advance CCF’s core outcomes. Together we are building our capabilities to translate principles and values into meaningful action for children and youth – a risk-taking, leadership ethic. So, essentially, this workshop is about building a foundation for our programs – through personal and organizational change and transformation.

Dola Mohapatra, Asia Regional director, asked me to introduce day three, and I think he hoped that I would reinforce that overall theme of change. I wrestled with preparing to meet Dola’s challenge, but really appreciated the opportunity to think about this for myself.

The center of my reflection can be represented by one of the slides – shown here:
I prefaced this by talking about the unstable times we are living in, and how old ways of thinking and reliance on those above us to make decisions on our behalf will no longer be of use in this new reality.

We need to seek a balance, where we can translate programming principles into meaningful action. Too much confusion is obviously unproductive; and where there is a need for clarification, we must seek this out, as managers and leaders within the organization. And in our new reality, it will be unrealistic to expect perfect clarity. The world is changing too fast to ever expect to be perfectly clear about what is going on.

Therefore, rather than yearning for complete clarity, it’s more important to build our skills in creating adaptive, dynamic responses to the unstable, nonlinear times we live in, in the framework of the clear principles and values contained in CCF’s Global Strategy and Core Program.

I think that participants appreciated the reflections. But the poet captured the spirit of our workshop better than I ever could, when he said: “Wanderer, there is no road; the road is made by walking.” I’m honored to be walking this road, in this workshop, with such committed and passionate professionals.

Coming soon: Jason Schwartzman returns with his final blog post about his Philippines’ experience.

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