Saigon’s Children Charity
SCC supports children of empoverished families with a scholarschip program and cooperates with a number of local schools in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
We support three children and do some interesting labor at a school in the city: we clean up schoolbooks with erasers and ink killer, so that they can be used again.
| Name | Saigon Children’s Charity, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam | |
| Aim | to help disadvantaged Vietnamese children to get an education and a fairer start in life. | |
| Since | 1992 | |
| Staff | 17, fulltime and parttime, plus volunteers | |
| People reached | SCC reaches out to hundreds of families in the poorest districts of HCMC and its rural fringes. | |
| Contact | Saigon Children’s Charity 59 Tran Quoc Thao, District 3, Ho Chi Minh CityTel: (84 8) 39 303 502http://www.saigonchildren.com/Contact_Us |
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| Donation | 300 USD supporting three secondary school scholarships plus 50 USD for schoolbooks. For donations: http://www.saigonchildren.com/Who_We_Are/Our_bank_details |
In a modest backstreet home, on the first floor, is the office of SCC. We visit them on Monday and have an interesting talk about volunteering. We make suggestions about an efficient screening process and putting to use of specific skills volunteers often bring along with them.
We wish to make a donation and the best way is to use their well-established sponsoring program. Yeon and I pick three secondary level children at risk of dropping out as a result of poverty, and provide them with a year-long scholarship. SCC will send us information about those children, and we will be able to get in touch with them.
SCC implements these scholarships in a smart way. Rather than giving the money to the parents, they provide the child and his family with bare necessities: “10kg of rice each month of the school year, a uniform and all the textbooks, notebooks and pens they need.“
The children all wanted to become a teacher. We suggested that this sounded unrealistic, and they told us about job introduction courses they are already planning to run.
The next day, we visit the Thang Long school in Saigon’s district 4. We perform the painstaking but interesting task of… erasing schoolbooks. The headmaster had decided to reuse schoolbooks and the answers, marks, smears, smudges and blots of their former owners had to be eradicated. We took a rubber and an ink eraser and laid hand on a few dozen textbooks.
Meanwhile, the headmaster and me went to buy books to stock up the school’s libary. I felt great on the back of her motorcycle, carrying big bags with books worth one million dong. The libary gained a set of dictionaries, bilingual books, and a lot of exciting stories. We were very happy we could do something concrete here, and promise the headmaster to keep in touch.
SCC is an efficient organization that is a challenging and rewarding option for volunteers, especially those who can commit to work with them for three months or longer.
