Fall 2019 Newsletter

Chau Thi Huynh Huong was born in 2008 into a poor family in a remote rural village in the Mekong Delta, 200 km west of Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam. With no land and no high school education, her parents are day-workers with no stable jobs or income.  The two old coconut trees by their dilapidated house are the only charming sights nearby. Her parents go to work from dusk to dawn to make ends meet. But at low season they cannot afford to pay all the living expenses of the family. Understanding her family’s circumstances, Huong often told her parents that she wanted to leave school to help them to earn income and to save the cost of her education, but they never agreed. Her parents told her that they had not had enough money to afford higher education for themselves, and that’s why they are so poor today.  

One day in 2017, when Huong was at school, she was told by her teacher that she needed to leave school immediately to go to the hospital because her mother had a serious motorcycle accident. After six months in the hospital, her mother was sent home but she needed a wheelchair to get around.

Recently, Huong has been doing all of the housework and taking care of her mother: changing her clothes, bathing her, and preparing her daily meals. Her father was offered a job as a security guard at a school nearby, earning a better income than before. 

Huong was on Dariu’s waiting list for a bicycle. The Dariu Foundation is the P4P partner agency in Vietnam. When the container of bikes arrived from Pedals for Progress in 2017, she was among the first girls to get a bike. Since the day she got her bike she got to school faster, saving time to help her family and attending class with better spirit. Her teacher has seen obvious changes in her attitude and feels happy about it. Besides, with the new bike, she can also run errands, such as buying poultry-feed, without waiting for her father to get home. 

The bicycle has played an important role in Huong’s and her family’s daily life, and also brought her more joy and motivation for going to school.