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.