My education grows high from World Vision Sponsorship

Twenty-one-year-old Tran Thi Bich Diem pursues her dream of becoming an engineer of food technology at Nha Trang University, about 500 km from her home, in central Vietnam. The undergraduate is currently in the last academic year of her four-year curriculum.

"Next year I will graduate in food technology. I hope to find soon a good job with farming products from farmers. I will then be able to help my mother to support my siblings to continue their higher education as my father used to wish before he died,” the girl says.

Diem was one of the first World Vision sponsored children through the Hiep Duc Area Development Programme (ADP) back in 2000. She was born as the first child into a poor family. Now, there are five children, all girls, in the family that lives in Hiep Duc mountainous district, in the central province of Quang Nam.

Her parents’ sole livelihood was cultivation of wet-rice, but they lacked farm land. They also planted cassava and sweet potatoes to ease several hungry months during between-crop periods. They used to toil away as hired hands in lenders’ farming fields to pay for the rice they borrowed to eat.

“Before World Vision came to our village, my parents could not even harvest enough food for the family, let alone think of their children’s education,” Diem recalls.

She still remembers the days when she walked to school with an empty stomach.

“I could hardly reach home after class with dizzying hunger,” Diem says. “My mother gleaned every cassava and sweet potato in lenders’ farm fields. She usually mixed them with rice to prepare only two meals a day. My parents ate cassava and sweet potatoes, then left the plain rice for me and my sisters. Meat was a rarity for our meals.”

However, her most vivid memory is of staying home at four years old to help her mother babysit her newly-born sister My. Her mother had to leave the infant home while she was working in the fields.

“I was craving for going to school and playing with friends even more than eating rice and babysitting,” the girl recalls. “But my parents could not dig money out of their humble farming plots to pay for my three-year kindergarten education. They could only send me to its last class to enable me to enter primary education somehow.”

The girl still remembers the thatch-roofed house where she grew up. “It was only enough space for one beg for three, my parents and me, and a small square dinning-table with some stools,” she says. “It was made out of bamboo wattles and its floor was bare soil. On rainy days, it leaked and was wet on all sides. My father sometimes used a nylon sheet to cover our mosquito-net, so we could have drier sleeps.”

“Since the day World Vision came to our village, I became a sponsored child and my parents became good breeders and farmers through training,” Diem recalls. “At that point, I was nine and studied at Grade 4. After class, I liked to help my parents to graze the cows in our village grassland.  My parents were able to grow so much food, to rear pigs and cows that they could sell some and earn money to send us to school,” says the former sponsored child.  

Diem’s father died of liver cancer one year ago.  Her mother keeps on cultivating wet rice for food with two crops a year. Raising pigs and cows becomes the main income for her mother.  The family will soon have another new room built with their own money. “My mother’s pigsty has become our family piggy bank for many years now. It helps my mother to cover my family’s needs and my siblings’ schooling,” she says.

“Raising cows affords us bigger expenditures such as repairing our house or my university tuition. She has just sold one cow so My, my next sister, could arrange accommodation for her first year at Medical University in Hue city, about 200 km from our home,” Diem adds.

Today, Diem and her siblings have lunch in the shade of a star apple tree which their father planted right in the courtyard 21 years ago. “The tree is coeval with me. My father planted the tree to mark my birth in the land he received from my mother’s parents to set his own home.  My whole family often sits in its shade to have meals during summer. This is also the best place for me and my siblings to play with friends,” she says. “Whenever we sit at the foot of this tree, we always think of my father. We feel as if we are still in his warm embrace.”

“My Austrian sponsor is a dentist. She likes photographing and travelling. She and her husband often sent letters and small gifts to me and my sisters. Her name is Astrid and her husband Phillip,” Diem says about her former sponsors. “Also, we often wrote them about our family, village, education, school and friends. One day my sponsors wrote us that our letters carried sun to their hearts. We feel the same from their letters.”

“I treasure the child sponsorship, or rather, the strong friendship, that I and my family received from my Austrian sponsors. I have always brought these letters, photos and books along with me as reminders of my sponsors’ encouragement for my higher education,” she adds.

“To those who would like to sponsor children, I would say to them that their support is truly a helping hand to cultivate brighter futures with sustainable growths for those in need. My education grows high from such precious support,” Diem says.