Ups and downs

It feels like weeks since I last wrote, but I see it was just 5 days ago. So much is going on!

There are some exciting things that I would LIKE to write about, but have to wait a few more days... To be honest, there have been major ups and downs in recent times and it's sometimes hard to get things into perspective.

A few of our staff have been in Hue, visiting children who were previously trafficked to Saigon and have since been reunited with their families. Van, Bich and Phuong travelled together to meet a group called the Hue Committee for the Protection of Children and Families, who were inspired to tackle this issue after hearing about our role in bringing trafficked kids home.

The whole issue of trafficking is a sensitive issue in Vietnam (as in every other country), so I was not at all optimistic about the possibility of us having an official project in Hue any time soon. But suddenly, the Hue Committee is ASKING us to do something. We are actually being INVITED in, on the basis that our work so far has been so successful. (And just so you know: our total budget to date has been less than $3500US. I'm boasting about this, because NGOs usually spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just buying stationery and business cards).

While the team was away, I took over the job that Van does de-facto in the evenings... supervising the 11 kids who live on "Blue Dragon Street." It's pretty tiring - and I am much stricter than other staff - but I can't complain about the swimming trips and the football matches at UNIS and the dinners as we sat around together talking about school and homework and the usual daily crises. I guess it's like being a parent, only with rather more mouths to feed.

So that's all the good bits, and it's the darker stuff that I have to leave out of the blog for the time being - suffice to say that there have been some explosive developments with the blackmailer I wrote about earlier, and an unrelated string of incidents around our center involving drug dealers and thugs. But there's always a happy ending, so stay tuned.