Since 2002 I have worked with the Vietnamese community in California. At that time, we had a plan to collect money and bring it to Vietnam because we wanted to help the orphans to get education, food, clothes and place to live, and also help them to have a better life. Finally two years later, we got enough money and we went to Vietnam. When we got there with everything we saw, it was incredible for us to see. And I cried because I was like an orphan when I was ten years old. But I was lucky because my mother was still living and in the U.S., though far from me, when my father died. Seven years later my mother came to visit me in Vietnam.

Back to the orphans, some of them were very young, but they have already been vendors. Some of them go looking for bottles to recycle. They couldn't go to school because they had no money. And on some of the bad
days, for example rainy or stormy days, they were very sad because they knew they might starve. They were very concerned about the future because they didn't know how to survive.

At that time we asked them some questions about their parents. "Have you ever imagined or do you know where your parents are?" They couldn't answer us because they didn't know who are their parents and where are they. After that, we gave them some of the money to help them to survive in the future, and also we built a house for them in that time. When we left Vietnam and went back to the U.S., they cried because they had to say goodbye.

Now we are still sponsoring them and usually send money to them, and we hope for them to have a better life because they are still very young. But they now know how to write and to read very well, and they usually send thank you cards to us. This is also a result from what we did, and we are almost successful in the job we went to do.

Attention, ladies and gentlemen. If you guys still have your parents, that means you guys are very lucky, and never, never and never make your parents feel sad. If two of them are lost, or either one of them, you just see them in your dreams. Make sure you don't make them feel sad. Thank you.