Such a rewarding time.

There is something quite surreal about volunteering in a foreign country. Last week I went along with a group of 15 other people to help a very poor family in the Hue area of Vietnam. I was working with a company called “we are bamboo”

www.wearebamboo.com

They, in turn, were working with the charity ” hearts for Hue” who choose families in the area who suffer from extreme poverty.

http://heartsforhue.org

The lady of the family spent her days begging in the local markets to get by. She was only 52 but looked a lot older, her husband was 78 as far as we could see didn’t work. We found out later that he has another wife in a different village. They had two sons aged 12 and 23, although we didn’t see either of these boys, we were told that the elder boy had mental health issues and wandered the area all day. Hopefully, once we have improved the living conditions he might stay at home a bit longer.

We had been asked to build a pit for a septic tank, a chicken coop so that they could have 30 chickens to create a livelihood for themselves. We also changed the back room from a storeroom and basic kitchen area into a wet room with a squat toilet and shower and a new area for her to cook. She was offered gas to cook with, however, she told us she was frightened of using gas and wanted to stick to using wood to cook with, the way she knows.
The money we had paid for our trip included funds towards the materials, the chicks and the local workforce.

We all set to work doing as much as we physically could, stopping for regular rests and water replenishment.

Some of our tasks involved:

Digging a pit through the very rooted ground for the septic tank.

Creating a trench for the walls of the chicken coop.

Clearing the house so that work could take place.

Moving 100s of bricks for the walls and septic tank base.

Mixing gallons and gallons of concrete for various uses.

Sewing a chicken coop curtain

Laying floors

Bricklaying

Putting chicken wire around the coop.

Putting the chickens in their new home.

All the time the lady of the house wanted to help us and kept trying to take over, she would take our shovels when digging or mixing concrete, rush to hold up posts or pour us large amounts of coke to drink, whereas the man just kept wandering about watching us and shaking our hands.

The second day brought torrential rain, but we worked on regardless, wearing local spotty designer ponchos. Our gloves got heavier and heavier giving us interesting finger patterns to compare! Once we were wet, it really didn’t matter, making cement in the rain was interesting though.

The joy on her face with her chicks

The locals came to watch.

Lunch appeared with 2 wonderful ladies on a scooter, they set it up in the homestay next door and just fed and fed us. There was so much, all so fresh and delicious. We polished the lot off!!

We all carved our initials in the wall.

At the end of the first long hard day, we stopped the bus at a small shop to buy a couple of cold beers each for 10.000 dongs each (a whole 33p each) only to find that the beers weren’t in the fridge, big mistake!! Fortunately, there was another shop a further mile or so away and the shop keeper was only too happy to serve us our much-needed beer!! She obliged for the other 2 days as well!

Cheers!!

This is the article written about volunteering:

http://heartsforhue.org/november-mrs-phan-thi-tuois-family/

I urge every one of you to take some time out of your busy lives to help others less fortunate than yourself, you don’t have to travel to the other side of the world, just open your eyes and find someone locally near you. It’s so good to pay back and be thankful for what we have.