Some of the scenery from when we do CEF's home visits in Dai Loc

Dai Loc district is where many very poor families live and where we have many of our CEF families. The more isolated your home the cheaper it is to live, but the back of that is they have few options to earn any extra income. Most people try to scrape by working as farmers and living off the land. Not many of the young want to stay there as they don't want a life like their mothers and it is not a life anyone would choose.

The countryside is very beautiful there and when we go there we breath in the good air and take in the beauty. We feel that there must be some spiritual sustenance from their environment to help them through each very challenging day.

"A father is a son's first hero, a father's daughter is his first love" ~ Guest blog by CEF's Ms Thuy

‘N’ is a lovely 7-year-old girl but she does not talk a lot when seeing other people. According to her father, she talks a lot at home but when having other people around, she is quite shy.

Her father has been suffering from final – stage kidney failure for 7 years. He now is very weak but he still tries to live positively without any complaints or groans because he doesn’t want to make his mother, his wife ...and his two daughters worried or upset about him. When he was still strong enough, he took ‘N’ to school and picked her up to take her home. Because of his kidney failure and the effects it has on him, his skin looks quite strange and scary for children. When her classmates saw him they teased her about her ‘scary’ father. Later, her father knew that when he saw ‘N’ shouting to her classmates in an angry voice saying, “My father is always a good father. Are your fathers as good as mine?” At first, her father was upset as he thought she might be ashamed but then he was very proud of his very little, but strong girl. 

Someone told me ‘A father is a son’s first hero, a father's daughter is his first love’; I believe so.

Thanksgiving

As a friend said each day is a day to be thankful for.

But why I like Thanksgiving Day is because it actually is a day in which I think most of the time about all that I am thankful for and since most of my life is given to helping girls in Vietnam to receive an education then most of my thoughts turn to all those people who support us to do this work.  

If I wrote the names of all the individuals who help I would be writing all day, so this is all the wonderful people put into general categories:
Friends
Sponsors
Donors
Advisors
Partner organizations
Our managers
Board members
Staff
and government officials we work with

And then I also have the help of social media, which in this time in our history is crucial.

If CEF didn't have all this amazing support we wouldn't be able to help the children here in Vietnam. So I am so blessed to have all this loving support as it has and continues to allow me to spend my life helping many impoverished and marginalized girls receive an education, which gives them a much better future with many more choices, than if they remaining uneducated.

Love and thanks to all of you,
Linda

If you are an Amazon user ~ please use Amazon Smile and help CEF while shopping

Amazon has created Amazon Smile to enable purchasers to contribute painlessly to their favorite charity –  for example Children’s Education Foundation – Vietnam.

We will receive .5% from all purchases through the Amazon Smile website, which is identical in all respects - including prices. There's no downside to helping out your favorite charity!

The easiest way for people to sign up to donate to CEF is by going to the following link and then signing in using their normal Amazon username and password.
http://smile.amazon.com/ch/27-0552998

Once you sign in that way, your computer should remember for future purchases and go there automatically. Very painless. (If it doesn't automatically go to that site, just type in 'smile.amazon.com.’)

Alternatively, people can go to smile.amazon.com and type in 'Children's Education Foundation - Vietnam' in the charity search box and then 'Select' it as the charity they would like to help fund. Thereafter, when they make purchases through 'smile.amazon.com' we will receive .5% of their purchase price from Amazon.

Thank you for helping CEF-Vietnam, and please let me know if there are any glitches in the system. Also - please pass this along to your family and friends who may be interested in helping our charity or at least some other worthy cause.

About having to be both a father and a mother ~ Guest blog by CEF's Ms Vy

Every child wants to have both a father and mother looking after them and staying beside him or her to the end of their parents’ life. However, in fact, some children are not so fortunate and unfairly in this life they have only a father or a mother due to their parent becoming a widower or widow.

Compared to widows, widowers often find they have more difficulties in bringing up their children. They tend to stay hot-tempered and impatient in a normal family life; however, they have to be both a strict father and a patient mother as is the case with widows. Also, they have to face the change in their lives to an irregular life that they have never considered they would ever have. Especially, the widowers often have trouble in bringing up their daughters, sharing their personal challenges with them when they reach the age of puberty.

In Duy Xuyen district there is a father of one of our children that is a specific example for this topic. Before dying of breast cancer one year ago, his wife had been staying in bed for 5 years dying. At that time he took the main responsibility for looking after their three children, one of whom has Down’s Syndrome, developmental delay and congenital heart disease. His daily work included both farming to make a living, and looking after his disabled daughter and in addition, while the two other children were at school, he had to cook the meals and do housework so that his children would have a clean home and rice to eat as soon as they come back home from school.

He has two daughters who have already reached puberty which makes him worried a lot about how to deal with many things such their personal hygiene, understanding the sensitive problems his daughters are facing, and helping practically to prepare them for each of the important events in the year such shopping for the Tet holiday and getting new clothes for them, and all the preparation needed for the start of school each year with purchasing school supplies and uniforms and being ready for the school opening ceremony for each new academic year.

Despite a lot of financial and spiritual burdens, he still lets his children’s education continue so that poverty will no longer be present in their future.

About mothers and daughters ~ Guest blog by CEF's Ms Ngoc

Whenever I visit families it is touching to witness mothers who have devoted almost their whole lives to their daughters.

There is a family in Dien Ban district, where the mother not only looks after her beloved daughter very well but also provides spiritual support to her daughter. She is always by her child’s side, encouraging her and guiding ...her to go in the right direction. The mother never has new clothes or good food because she gives all of that to her child. No matter how challenging and hard the situation she has, the most happiest moments for her are to be with her daughter and to see her girl growing up day by day to become a mature and successful young woman.

Beside this family, there is another family in Da Nang city that I have been working with for around 3 years that has made a strong impression on me about the mother’s efforts and love for her children. She is bringing up 3 children on her own, which makes me really admire her. She has 2 jobs and both of them are at a garbage company. She starts from early in the morning at about 7am, and works till late in the evening, around 9pm, when her children need to go to sleep, just in order to make ends meet. She works very hard however she never complains about her job. The only thing that causes her sadness and regret is that she is unable to have much time with her beloved children and would especially love to with her daughter, as she is about to enter puberty. She wishes she had time to share many things with her daughter and have lunches and dinners with her children. It is such a normal thing to do in most families but it seems impossible for her. The fact is she has to work so that she and her children can survive. 

Each family has their own challenging situation; however, most of the mothers just want to give the best to their daughters. It is from their deep love in their hearts.

Video by partner organization Go Philanthropic about CEF from 2013

https://youtu.be/RK7UaSZ_o-8