Be inspired! Read the following story submitted by Linda Silvius of Project Cornerstone, a Healthy Communities • Healthy Youth Initiative in San Jose, California. (Make sure to visit their initiative page. For more information about Project Cornerstone, you can e-mail Linda Silvius at linda@projectcornerstone.org).
For the past four years, Hoang-Anh Nguyen has been a parent volunteer for Project Cornerstone’s ABC Program. She is one of 1,100 elementary school parents who volunteer with the program every month, reading asset-building children’s books in classrooms, holding reflective discussions, and doing activities to empower students in grades K–5 to deal with bully behavior they may face at school, in their neighborhood, or even in their home.
Last summer during a visit to her homeland of Vietnam, Anh was telling a niece about the ABC program and how much she enjoys volunteering because she sees the impact and influence it has on the children. Her niece shared with Anh that bullying also goes on in the rural village school, where she teaches and wondered how she could share this same information with the 330 students at her school.
When Anh returned home to San Jose at the end of the summer she met with staff from Project Cornerstone and asked if we could help her “export” the ABC program to her niece’s school. She shared stories of how she was bullied in various settings as she was growing up and said that she felt the messages we bring to children in our schools in Silicon Valley could be just as valuable in rural Vietnam.
Anh went on to share more of her personal story. She began her journey to freedom when she was just 13 years old in 1980. Five years before that the Communists had forced her father and uncle to enter a “re-educator” camp—and she never saw them again. When they took her family home away from them, her grandfather had a heart attack and passed away. It had become clear they had no reason to stay in Vietnam. Anh’s mother put her and her younger brother on one of the many boats headed out of Vietnam during that time.
They tried to escape more than 10 times, but were caught off the coast and returned. Of three of those returns Anh and her younger brother were actually put in jail. The older women in jail bullied Anh – and left her feeling very unsafe in that city.
In 1984, her mother gathered all the small pieces of gold she could find and sold it all for a place for two on another boat to escape. Since her mother couldn’t afford a space on the boat, she had to stay behind and once again hope that Anh and her brother get somewhere and weren’t captured by communists or pirates patrolling the coast, and that the boat wouldn’t capsize and cause the people on board to drown. This particular trip was successful. By the time they made land they had been lost at sea for a week without food, having only water for nourishment.
They landed on a small island in Indonesia named Kuku and lived there for seven months in what Anh describes as “very poor conditions.” Catholic Charities was one of the many aid organizations working with the “boat people” of Vietnam to find sponsoring homes and foster homes for children, and they found a family in New York that would take both Anh and her brother as foster children.
Bullying and abuse was a part of the daily life in their foster family. Luckily for Anh and her brother, she was able to share this information with the teacher who was teaching her English, who reported the abuse and the authorities removed them from the home. The authorities were able to find a loving, caring home for them and Anh and her brother were able to successfully finish high school and college.
Over the intervening years, Anh has married and is the mother of two beautiful girls. She and her family live in San Jose, CA, which is home to one of the largest Vietnamese populations outside of Vietnam.
In August 2008, Anh gave Project Cornerstone the opportunity to take their ABC Program outside of Silicon Valley, to rural Vietnam where children were experiencing the same interpersonal problems as children everywhere. Together we chose the books and lesson plans from the existing list that seemed most appropriate for the types of bullying students were struggling with the most.
But the books and lessons needed to be translated. Thanks to current technology, Anh has developed a very workable system for that task. Every morning for 15–20 minutes, she and a cousin living in Vietnam spend time together via Skype. Anh reads aloud the children’s book and lesson plan in Vietnamese while her cousin types the translation. Anh sends several copies of each book to her cousin who then gets the books and lessons, with translations, to her niece teaching in the countryside.
Over 300 students are then exposed to a Project Cornerstone ABC book and lesson, sharing new skills with them to help cope with hurtful peer-to-peer behavior, as well as how to be a good friend. As our global community continues to become more reachable with the assistance of technology and deeply caring adults, perhaps that goal of embracing all kids as our kids can become a reality.
