My dream will come true because of World Vision’s hand-up

“My grandmother often says to me that our life would have been hard and I would have become illiterate if we did not have such support from World Vision. I have experienced the same every day I grow.

“I was born into a female-headed farming family in the rural district of Hoa Vang of Danang city in the central region of Vietnam. Since the days we were born, my half-brother, another full brother and I live with our mother in our widowed grandmother’s house. Our fathers don’t live with us. Their names were only written on our birth certificates.

“My grandmother and mother’s sole livelihood is cultivation of wet-rice, but their humble 500-square-metre field with stiff soil, which depended only on rainfall, could not produce enough rice to eat. My mother used to toil away as hired hands in lenders’ farming fields, brick-kilns, construction sites, or acacia plantations of paper chips to pay for the rice she borrowed to feed the whole family with five mouths.

“Since the day World Vision came to our village, I became a sponsored child. My mother and my grandmother became good breeders and farmers through training. At that point, I was six and kept on moving to Grade 1 from the community kindergarten built by World Vision.

“I would have missed my first kindergarten education, my grandmother said, if village teachers, as World Vision’s local volunteers, did not patiently urge her and my mother to send me there. My mother left me home with my grandmother so she could work from dawn till dusk to get some rice to ease our dizzying hunger.

“My grandmother and my mother not only received training in animal husbandry, they joined the cow breeding group and took a cow to raise for generating key income. Raising cows allows them bigger expenditures such as repairing our house and [paying for] my siblings’ higher education.

“I dream of becoming a kindergarten teacher so all children in my village will grow healthy and receive a proper education in their early childhood. There will be still a long way for me to achieve that dream because I am now just thirteen years old and study at Grade 7. However, I believe my dream will come true because World Vision has given a caring hand-up to my grandmother, my mother and me.

“A new year is coming. I would like so much to say my gratitude and warm wishes to all World Vision staff and volunteers. During these days, we – sponsored children, do the same for our sponsors through our New Year greetings cards. As for me, I drew my warm home with flowers, fruit-trees and some chickens as my best thankfulness to my sponsor.”