North and central

Tonight I am writing from Hue, in Central Vietnam, where Blue Dragon works with children who have been trafficked to work in factories. I'm on a quick trip to visit our staff and kids - soon I head south to Hoi An to catch up with children at the Hoi An Children's Home.

The 2 kids I met with today were both very happy girls! One, named V, is living in a pagoda on the outskirts of Hue. I've known her family for a long time, and we helped one of V's older brothers return home to Hue in 2006 after being trafficked to work on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City.

While V's family is in pretty good shape these days, Vi is severely hearing impaired and so is constantly harassed in her village. She's treated as a fool, denied education, and shunned by the other kids. So now she spends most of her time living in a pagoda and returns home every other weekend. She's studying now, and is treated with much more dignity than ever before in her 15 years. And she was positively beaming as she showed me off to all her friends in the pagoda!

It was also very nice to meet another of the girls, T, who has been studying English and basic skills in a training centre. T was overjoyed for 2 big reasons. First, she was able to speak to me in English, for the first time in her life - man, was she proud of that! And second, she's just been accepted into a charitable training program called Streets, which trains disadvantaged youth to prepare them for great jobs in the hospitality industry. There are lots of applicants and not many places, so she really deserves to take some pride in that achievement!

Meantime Blue Dragon's Child Rights Advocate, Van, has been trekking through the northern mountains to catch up with the 23 kids we just recently rescued from slavery in garment factories. A big part of his visit is to keep the families assured that we are still thinking of them and still committed to helping them.

Everyone is doing well, and the kids are really happy to see Van again. He was right there with the police when they raided the factories about a month ago, so all the children feel a very strong attachment to him. On the phone this afternoon, Van told me that many of the families are worried about the coming winter and are short on food supplies, so we'll get them some basic supplies on Tuesday.

It's great to be catching up with the children and their families - I only wish I could spend much more time out here in the provinces, much more often!

... and now a Post Script:

A few hours after writing this I arrived in Hoi An, and went for a stroll through the old town. Lucky for me, I stumbled across an old friend...

Kieu was the very first kid who I helped in Hanoi. I met him back in 2002, before there was any idea of starting a charity. At the time I met him, I thought I would be leaving Hanoi within weeks and would never be back!

Kieu was working like a slave in a hole-in-the-wall noodle outlet in Hanoi's old quarter. I know it's common to see young people hard at work, but this was exceptional. His job included washing the bowls in a basin which was carved into the floor, which meant that he had to reach down below ground level to work. Talk about back breaking!

His conditions were clearly awful and he was always tired. The final straw, though - and this was some months later - was when he was at work covered in chicken pox. Kieu was 13 years old. He should have been home asleep, not working 16 hours per day in a noodle restaurant!

The picture below shows me and Chung, Blue Dragon's co-founder, with Kieu around the corner from where he worked. We convinced his boss to let us take him for a walk to buy some ice cream, so that we could secretly ask his permission to get him out of there.


You might think, given the highly questionable fashion statement I was making that day, that Kieu would have had second thoughts... but he was only too happy to get out of that place.

His boss wasn't quite so happy. But that was not high on my list of concerns.

So... what's Kieu doing in central Vietnam? How is it that I ran into him tonight?

Well, he works at Green Mango - a very classy restaurant in Hoi An. And he doesn't just work there; he's the head chef, with a staff of 10 under him. Not bad for a 22 year old!

If only your old boss could see you now, Kieu.

Thanksgiving in Singapore

A quick call out to our friends in Singapore!

Come and join in a Thanksgiving dinner on November 20!

In my own words

Today we're kicking off a series of short films we've made here at Blue Dragon, in which our kids tell their stories in their own words.

We'll be uploading these on to Facebook, but for those who are not on Facebook the films are also being put up on the Blue Dragon home page.

A new film will appear each week!

Heroes

Earlier this year, CNN named me as one of their 2011 Heroes. This was a great honour not only for me, but for my whole team working along side me.

One thing that the CNN award didn't acknowledge, though, is that I too have my heroes. Many of them, in fact.

They are the girls and boys who I meet each day, who have struggled so much to have what many of us take for granted and do everything they can to make their lives better.

They are kids who have every reason to give up, but don't.

One of my heroes is in New Zealand at the moment, studying a business degree at the National Technology Institute. His name is Chinh, he's 21, and he has had a really tough life. I could write a very long post about all the problems he's had to put up with until now.

I met Chinh when he was 14 and working on the streets of Hanoi to support his family. But today I don't want to write about the hardships he's faced; I want to write about a mountain that he's conquered.

Last week, Chinh graduated from his first year at college. Despite having to drop out of school when he was barely a teen, and despite all of the obstacles that life has thrown in his way, Chinh came top of his course. Number 1.

Chinh is in the centre, along with Anne and Isaac from NTEC.

Do you see why this guy is a hero to me?

But that's not all. For coming first, Chinh was awarded a gift of $100. This is hugely helpful to Chinh, who has been working part time jobs in restaurants and cafeterias to make ends meet. However, he contacted me immediately to say that he wants this money to be given to Blue Dragon children at the upcoming Tet Awards night.

One of our prizes on this night is for kids who have done particularly well at school. Chinh would like his money to be divided among this year's award recipients.

What a beautiful thing for him to do.

Chinh, congratulations on coming top of the business course. You are an amazing young man with the whole world at your feet. You're my hero.

Joy

How's this for a photo to get you smiling?

Our staff recently stumbled across this image, which won a prize in a competition on the theme of Joy by local photographer Hoang Quoc Khanh.

It caught our attention as one of the boys is from Blue Dragon. What a great moment this photo has captured! Oh, to be that age again...

Inspiration

Late last night I received an email from one of the Blue Dragon boys, "Ton."

I'm in Singapore at the moment, catching up with friends and supporters, so it was nice to get a message from Ton. He's about 14 and has had a pretty tough life, but so far he's been able to keep on the right track.

Last night, Ton was asking if I would help him buy something. I couldn't understand what he was asking, so he sent me a photo.

It was a photo of a stun gun. He says he's afraid of being robbed because he lives in a bad part of the city, and he wants to protect himself.

In contrast, I have spent the past 10 days or so visiting international schools whose students have been supporting Blue Dragon. Each in their own way has done something amazing to help the kids in Vietnam.

The German European School uses its annual swim gala to raise the funds that we need to teach swimming to Blue Dragon kids. (About 10 children drown every day in Vietnam - learning to swim is massively important). The French School students create Christmas cards and sell them to support the children at our drop in centre. Some children from Chatsworth International presented me yesterday with $10.80, which they raised by making and selling origami items in their spare time.

Presenting to Grade 7 at the French School of Singapore

During the week I also received some emails from schools in rural Australia, including Narara Public School - a very small school on the Central Coast of NSW, where the students raised over $1100 by holding raffles and selling food... including this extraordinary cake! (I have never seen anything like it!)

The Blue Dragon cake at Narara Public School

I find all of this incredibly inspirational, because for all of the mess that our world is in - for all of the wars, and financial collapses, and child trafficking and corruption - the world is still full of kids who want to make things better.

On Thursday night I sat in a hall at United World College (UWC) watching brilliant dance and music performances, created entirely by the students, to celebrate UN Day. There were Korean pop dancers, American hip hop, Hungarian traditional dance... even a tribute a Bob Marley. I sat with tears in my eyes, stunned by what young people are capable of.

Which brings me back to Ton and his dream of protecting himself with a stun gun.

Ton is just as capable as any teenager of making the world a better place. Had he been born somewhere else, in another family or another time, he might be the one raising funds for kids in need rather than needing to receive the help from Blue Dragon.

I find it so sad that this little guy feels worried enough about his safety that he would ask me to buy him a weapon. That's not the world I want to live in.

My time in Singapore has certainly inspired me, and in a way it's reinvigorated my hope in humanity. But in a few days time I will be back with the Blue Dragon kids, where there is still so much to do - and so much need to bring that hope to children who seem to have so little to hope for.

What I see

Among the many kids Blue Dragon helps (about 1,100 at last count!) are some beautiful teenagers who happen to be hearing impaired. They're good friends, studying, playing, and sharing life's difficulties with each other.

Over some months, we have had a terrific volunteer named Cate Gunn teaching photography to this group of kids. Her project culminated last week in a Pecha Kucha presentation - the first of its kind in Hanoi.

The kids' images, as well as some explanations, are on Cate's Tumblr site, here. Definitely worth a look. And below are just a few shots of the presentation itself.

While the photos by the kids are amazing, the growth in confidence of the 5 teens involved in the project is what's most inspiring.

Hot dog!

After all of the 'heaviness' of events recently, here's something that brought a big smile to my face the other night...

One of the kids we work with in Hanoi is a 15 year old boy who has been living and working at Hoan Kiem Lake in the heart of the Old Quarter. (I'll call him "Thu"). At times, he cooks and sells sausages for tourists.

Thu has been studying English at Blue Dragon, and from his lessons and the slang he has picked up on the streets he knows enough to deal with foreign customers.

But on Sunday he asked me to explain a very strange request he'd recently had...

Thu knows what a "dog" is. And he's heard the phrase "hot girl" and "hot boy" plenty of times - a teenage way of admiring someone beautiful.

So he wanted to know... why on earth would a tourist ask him for a hot dog??

All home

Thank you to all of you who have been following this story and sending comments and messages of support over the last couple of weeks.

I'm happy to say that the 23 trafficked children are all home now - back with their families in Tuan Giao district of Dien Bien province, north west of Hanoi.

Here's how it all came to an end...

To save the 2 day journey from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi by bus or train, Jetstar donated the flights and we were able to fly the kids north on Thursday afternoon. Blue Dragon's Chief Lawyer, Van, flew with them (as he has been working closely with the kids) along with 2 police from Dien Bien province. Their presence has been important because the ultimate goal is to have the trafficker (a woman) and the factory owners (her sons) prosecuted. Their factories have already been shut down and they've each been fined heavily (including some compensation payments to the kids), but we want to see these people in court - and eventually in prison.

Once everyone had landed, I met them at the airport and we hopped on a bus (also donated - this time by Peak Adventure Travel, formerly known as Intrepid) to head to the city of Tuan Giao in the district of Tuan Giao. "City" is an exaggeration, of course... After an 11 hour bus ride through the night, we arrived at a tranquil town where many people still wear their traditional dress, or at least head scarves, and nobody seemed to understand a word I said. (After nearly 10 years in Vietnam, I hope to do better than that!)

Although the police in Ho Chi Minh City had taken statements from the kids already, the Tuan Giao police needed to take them again. They appear to be building their own case against the trafficker, and I can see a possibility that there will be 2 separate sets of charges.

The process was very quick: police and various officials had set up a room where children about 10 children could be interviewed at a time.

By that time, family members had started to arrive from the villages, so there were sporadic reunions over the course of a few hours. During these, the true state of the families started to become clear.

On the bus ride up we had bought a box of bottled water. As soon as no adults were looking, the kids pounced on the box and within seconds all of the bottles were gone.

No problem, we wanted the kids to have them... but it was a bit odd that nobody seemed to be drinking.

Once we were in Tuan Giao and the parents started to arrive, we could see why.

One of the boys, V - among the smallest of the children - had used some of his compensation money to buy some simple gifts for his mother. His father had long since died, and V had gone to Ho Chi Minh City hoping he would somehow be helping his mother. If not for the police demanding that the factory owners pay compensation money, she wouldn't have received much at all.

Among the gifts that V handed over was a bottle of water, taken from the box on the bus. He and his mother live in such poverty that a mere bottle of water was treated as a prize possession, a sign of love from son to mother.

And most telling of all was that V's mother had no idea how to open it. One of the policemen, seeing her try, stepped over to open the bottle. How small and humble I felt at that moment.

The children and their family members wanted nothing more than to get home, so they left around midday on motorbikes arranged by the local government.

Van and I wanted to go out with them to visit each of their homes, but with the threat of a tropical storm looming we could only go as far as the first village, which was about 45 minutes by motorbike. This is the 'richest' of the villages, and it was really disappointing that we couldn't get out further and see more families.

Along the way, I shot some film from my camera to get a sense of the countryside we were in.

And once we reached the village, I was able to capture some images of the homes that the kids lived in. The film below shows a typical house in this village.

Not one of the houses that we entered had electricity or running water. The floors were bare dirt, and the finger-wide gaps in the walls made me shiver with the thought of the coming winter.

I can see why the trafficker chose to come up here to get these children. She assumed that nobody would notice, or care. She believed that even if someone did notice, and did care, that they wouldn't possibly put in the effort required to find the kids way down the other end of the country and bring them home.

It turns out she was wrong on all counts. Quite a few of us noticed, and cared. And we were more than willing to travel the length of the country several times over in order to find, protect, and bring them home.

In coming weeks my challenge is to work out what to do next.

The kids left their villages because someone came along offering them the promise of a better life. But it was a lie, a cheap trick with nothing more in mind than exploitation.

They've been working up to 18 hours a day, every day, for many months; they're exhausted, they have been through hunger and beatings and verbal abuse. Now we've taken them home to their families.

But will life be better now? Somehow, it has to be. We have to find a way, or else we'll have lied to the children, too.

Heading home

Some quick (and good!) news today... the 23 trafficked kids are heading home.

As I write, they are in Ho Chi Minh City on the way to the airport. Jetstar has donated free flights for them, saving us well over $1000 and a 2 day bus trip. My staff and some police are flying with them. I can only imagine how they'll all be feeling... these kids have never seen an airplane before, let alone flown in one!

In a couple of hours I will meet them at Hanoi's airport and then head back to their villages with them. It's a 12 hour bus ride, but again one of our friends here in Vietnam has offered to help. Peak Adventure Travel is providing the bus for free, once again saving us a small fortune.

The really good news in all of that is we can now use the donations you have sent us for the direct care of the children and their families.

Once the kids are home we will start planning out a map of how to help them for the longer term. We need to address the issues that lead them to being trafficked in the first place.

But that's all for tomorrow. For today - the kids are going home!

Discovery

Here's an article about Blue Dragon that has recently appeared in Vietnam Discovery magazine. They don't have this online, so I'm posting as images... just click the 2 images to make them bigger!

Preparing for the journey home

A quick update tonight about the 23 (yes it's gone up!) young people Blue Dragon has been helping over the past week.

In the next few days, we need to get them home. They are all still in Ho Chi Minh City, staying in shelters which are looking after them very well... but now the kids just want to get out of there and see their families again. Having worked as slaves in garment factories - some for 7 months, some for 2 years - they can't wait to get out of the city and return to their villages.

The map below gives an indication of what lies ahead. I hope to have some good news very soon about how we're getting the kids home. For now, you'll just have to withstand the incredible suspense!!



View 23 trafficked kids in a larger map


I know that for me and my staff, this rescue operation has been both rewarding (there's NOTHING like seeing the smiles on children's faces when they are told they are free to see their families again), and also very draining at times. There have been setbacks and fears, and just by looking over my posts here and on Facebook you can see how often the information has changed - 32? 19? 22? 23!

And meanwhile, all the rest of Blue Dragon's important work has been continuing at a frantic pace. My writing lately has focused on this case, but plenty has been happening in other areas too. I hope that soon I'll be able to 'fill in some of the gaps' of what else has been going on!

I will be posting again when the kids are headed home - hopefully soon, and hopefully quickly!

22 smiles

What a week of twists and turns this has been!

It's ending well, although with much more yet to happen. So a brief update.

I'm writing tonight from Ho Chi Minh City. It's great to be here, and while I was frustrated earlier in the week at being so far from all the action I can see that the kids we've rescued have been in very good hands.

On Tuesday, Blue Dragon staff worked with various police departments to locate and rescue 15 children from Dien Bien province who were trafficked to work in garment factories. (If you're not familiar with Vietnam's geography, Dien Bien and Ho Chi Minh City are opposite ends of a very long country).

On Thursday, another 3 children were found. These 18 children, along with another 4 who had run away from their factory last Friday, have been through some terrible times but they know that their ordeal is over now.

Of the 22, only one of the kids speaks fluent Vietnamese. Most speak a little, but they are from an ethnic minority which speaks a different language and has its own customs and culture.

Being slaves in garment factories is not a part of that culture.

I am yet to find out very much from the children; this morning I spent some time with them and didn't want to start questioning them, as they've all been giving statements to the police. I figured they'd prefer to have a laugh then retell their stories, and I happen to be outstanding at playing the fool so the kids got a few laughs.

What I did gather, though, was that it's no exaggeration to say that the kids have been held as slaves.

One of the boys, about 15 years old, has been in a factory for 7 months.

Since the day he entered the building, he has not stepped outside. Not even once. His skin is pale from being indoors with little sunlight. For 7 months.

Apart from being a fool, I can also be a real wimp. I had tears in my eyes when he told me this. I'm not sad, though; I'm angry. The people who kept that boy locked away, working for a few dollars per month ("if he completed his work satisfactorily"), deserve all the punishment that's headed their way.

One thing that did stand out to me, though, was that the kids have been trafficked and held captive by just a few people: one trafficker and her 2 adult sons. By contrast, there are now dozens of people working together for their welfare: police, Blue Dragon staff, and even some friends around the world who have sent money for the children.

The kids have had an awful time, but what I saw today was 22 smiling, happy young people who just can't wait to get home to their families.

Safe, but not well

The day has ended very differently to what we planned!

As I wrote on Sunday, Blue Dragon staff headed from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City on Monday night to start looking for 34 trafficked children. These kids, aged 10 to 16, were reported as having been taken from 2 remote rural villages in northern Vietnam to work in garment factories in the south.

Frustratingly for me, I had to stay behind in Hanoi. I'll be heading south on Wednesday afternoon, but it was important that I stay out of the way while the police and Blue Dragon staff carried out the surveillance on factories... And OK, I confess that I do kind of stand out, being a big white Australian bloke and all...

Two things developed, however, quite differently to expectations.

First, we found out that there were not 34 kids, but 19. And 4 of them had already escaped from a factory on Friday, so our job was to find 15.

Although it was definitely good news, I was perplexed to hear this. The very significant difference seems to mostly have come from language barriers: the villagers who reported the trafficking don't speak Vietnamese, and with a very low level of education they appear to have reported to us a list of every child and young adult who has left their villages in recent months. This included men and women in their 20s who had gone to work in the city, but were not necessarily trafficked.

Second, today turned out to be much more than just a search for the kids. As has happened with some previous rescue trips, one thing quickly led to another and soon our staff and the police were raiding 3 garment factories and getting all of the children out - in fact, it happened so quickly that we were all taken by surprise.

It was incredibly frustrating for me to be in the office getting text messages and phone updates throughout the day when I really wanted to be there in the thick of things... I needed to get some exercise this evening just to release the tension and use up the adrenalin that's been flowing all day.

I am hugely relieved, though, to know that the kids are safe. They're together in a shelter being well looked after tonight, but they are not in good health. It's evident that they are malnourished and have been locked up in factories for some months, with no free time or opportunities to get outside into the sunlight.

They are not well, and are going to need some care. But caring for kids is something Blue Dragon happens to specialise in!

I won't have many updates for the next 24-36 hours. The police now need to gather evidence and statements and work out how to proceed from the legal point of view. Vietnam introduced a new law on trafficking back in March, so the authorities haven't had much chance to test how it applies to cases like this.

Because it's now a legal matter, I can't say too much... But it's safe to say that thing aren't looking too good for the traffickers...

Once the police have done their work, we've got to figure out how to get the kids home. It's a long way from Ho Chi Minh City to Dien Bien province, and the kids are in a pretty fragile state.

So now that they're free, we'll just take one thing at a time.

And a quick P.S... We've really appreciated all the kind comments and messages of support that have appeared on our Facebook page today. Thank you! These are noticed and valued!

It's on

Friday saw an unexpected development in our search for the 34 trafficked children.

High up in the mountainous village where the kids come from, a parent received a phone call from a child care worker in a province near Ho Chi Minh City in the south.

4 of the 34 had somehow escaped their traffickers and were picked up either by a friendly local or perhaps by a police officer and taken to a shelter. The first thing they wanted to do, naturally, was ring their mothers.

We have no idea yet how they escaped or how they ended up in the shelter. We've held off questioning them over the phone because we don't want to scare them. We are complete strangers, after all.

On Monday night our operation will kick off. Thanks to this escape, we're now in a (presumably) better position to find the remaining 30... assuming that these 4 can lead us back to their trafficker, and that the trafficker is still there.

We're expecting that it will still take some days of work; there is still a lot to do, and we want to be sure that the trafficker is caught and punished. We're still not certain what sort of work the kids are doing.

But we're going ahead. It's on.

THANK YOU to those people who have already sent donations for this. Whether it's $10 or a few hundred, it will help.

We are still in urgent need of more funds to arrange this rescue, and I invite our friends around the world to help out with this. You can donate here or drop me a line if you want to ask more: bluedragon@bdcf.org.

I'm excited and nervous about what's to come. Here's to hoping we can get these kids home.

Where are our children?

Ngoc was just 13 years old when we rescued him from the streets of Ho Chi Minh City.

Worn to exhaustion, he walked the streets throughout the night, selling roses to drunk partygoers in the city's tourist district. Every dollar he made went straight into the hands of the traffickers, who sat down the road watching the children they had brought in from the countryside.

That was back in 2005. He was the first child we rescued from traffickers. We've rescued 109 now, and Ngoc is a role model of a young man working in a restaurant here in Hanoi.

But the trafficking continues. Since lifting Ngoc out of his slavery, we've rescued girls from brothels and helped scores of kids get out of garment factories. Last year we undertook a rescue operation to find 3 girls who had escaped a brothel in China and were hiding in fear of their lives, over a thousand miles from their homes in a foreign land.

We've had some success so far, as well as some setbacks and disappointments.

Today we're facing a new challenge - something on a scale we haven't dealt with before.

About a week ago, the Vietnamese police contacted us to get involved in a case of children being trafficked from remote villages. When our staff arrived, they found 2 extremely poor communities in the mountains which had been approached by a single trafficker, a woman, offering to give the children a 'better life'.

These villages are remote and very, very poor.

Altogether, she took 35 children, saying they were headed to Ho Chi Minh City for training and jobs. The kids were aged just 10 to 15.

A few weeks ago, one of the children returned to the village: a 15 year old girl. She was pregnant.

The villagers immediately realised that something was wrong and put out a call for help. They are desperate and alarmed, but have no idea where their children really are.

Families coming to register the details of their missing children.

It seems incredible to you and me that anybody could let their children go with a complete stranger. But keep this in mind: in each of the 2 communities, there are just one or two people who are literate. Vietnamese is not the language of these villagers; they belong to a tiny hilltribe group with its own language and customs.

These people know virtually nothing of the world outside of their mountain-top villages.

Now we're in the midst of planning to find the remaining 34 children. We have almost no information to go on, but until now we've been pretty good at tracking down trafficked kids even without any solid leads. I guess I should say we're "cautiously optimistic."

Our main worry is that this trafficker has gone to such unusual lengths to get children for the factories. There are many places in more accessible locations where traffickers can find vulnerable families. Taking the kids from these remote areas was expensive and time consuming... Which makes us think that whatever the motive, there must be considerable profit in the work.

We fear that the children are in serious danger.

Assuming that we can find them, there's a lot involved in the rescue of these children. Their Vietnamese language skills are fairly basic, and they're going to be frightened (and possibly traumatised) - so caring for them in the first days is going to be absolutely critical, and very complex!

And then there's the issue of accommodating 34 children in Ho Chi Minh City for a couple of days, before taking them all home from one end of the country to the other.

These are the sort of things we're thinking about at the moment!

I don't often do this, but I need to ask for donations for this rescue trip. We're estimating that we need about $3400, and so far we have one very generous donation of $400 to kick us off. If you can help, drop me a line - bluedragon@bdcf.org - or head to the Blue Dragon donation page:

http://www.streetkidsinvietnam.com/donations/

It's a lot of money all up, but in fact the cost is just $100 per child, which is pretty small considering the impact this will make on their lives. Every dollar will help!

I do have to emphasise that we're still in the planning stages, so by all means hang on to your money until I am sure we're going ahead. I'll post more in coming days, and you're welcome to email me with your 'pledge' so I can get back to you when we have more information.

There's a lot of uncertainty about this case, but what I do know is this:

34 children are missing, and we've got to find them.

Behind the scenes...

Blue Dragon's newsletter, Dragon Tales, has just been released.

This edition explores our Child Rights work, looking behind the scenes at the team responsible for Blue Dragon's advocacy work and rescue operations.

It's a good read (as always!). If you're not on the mailing list, get in touch - info@bdcf.org - and we'll email you a copy.

A long search

Something special happened yesterday morning in the northern city of Hai Phong: a 13 year old boy, who has been out of school for years and living on the streets, started his first day of Grade 2.

A hugely important part of Blue Dragon's work in Hanoi is our Outreach service, which involves looking for street kids and offering them help. Just like our work with rescuing trafficked children, our Outreach brings us into contact with young people in utterly desperate situations.

To really be successful, we need to find the kids within a couple of weeks of them arriving in Hanoi. The sooner, the better.

Over the past few months, though, we have been working with a tiny 13 year old, T, who has been on the streets for over a year - and much to our own surprise, we seem to have achieved a pretty good result.

I've written about T several times on Facebook, but it's only now that we have the full story.

T grew up in a very poor family on the outskirts of Hai Phong city; his parents divorced when he was young (which is a big deal here in Vietnam) leaving T and his older sister with their mother.

Although the mother did her best, she couldn't keep on supporting both children, so in 2007 she sent T to live with his father in Hanoi, and she kept on looking after her daughter at home. Because of her financial difficulties, she moved about from rented room to rented room.

Shortly after T arrived in Hanoi, his father remarried, and as often happens in Vietnam, this meant the children from the 'old marriage' were no longer wanted. T was sent to live in a pagoda, where he stayed for over a year.

The pagoda wasn't a great place for him though. After being bullied and neglected, he finally ran away to live on the streets. His father and step-mother had moved away, so he couldn't find them, and he had no idea how to contact his mother.

T survived by collecting scrap on the streets.

Little did he know, but back in Hai Phong things had gone badly for his mother and sister. His mother one day vanished - she left their home in the morning and simply didn't return. T's grandmother, who brought the sister to live in her own home, believes the mother was trafficked. There's no evidence that she deliberately abandoned her child, as she left all her possessions behind. She just disappeared.

By the time Blue Dragon's Outreach workers met T, he had been living rough for over a year. I could write a novel about the troubles he had living on the streets.

We knew it would be difficult to help him: any child who has lived so long on the streets has great difficulty settling back in to a house with rules and expectations. But T did so remarkably quickly. We provided him with a place to live while our staff, including our Child Rights Advocates, started the search for T's family.

This turned out to involve an awful lot of detective work. We thought we were looking for his mother, of course, and we drove T to Hai Phong to look for the last places he knew she lived. That first trip was futile; he couldn't remember where they had been living, and we were to learn later that she was long gone anyway.

After more than a month of enquiries and searching, we located T's grandmother - a breakthrough! Once we were sure it was her, we bundled T into a car and headed off for the reunion.

It was a beautifully touching moment: the tiny kid seeing his sister and grandmother for the first time in years, but also finding out that his mother was missing and nobody had heard from his father.

How can a 13 year old deserve to get news like that? Some things in life just aren't fair.

When it came to to leave, T was worried. Did he really want to live in Hai Phong again? He'd never lived with his grandmother... would they get along? Would she be too strict? And what of all his friends back in Hanoi?

So we made an agreement: we would leave him with his grandmother for 2 weeks, then come back and talk again.

The 2 weeks passed, and grandma rang to say that T wanted to stay with her. She was thrilled, and deeply appreciated an offer of financial support from Blue Dragon to help look after him. Grandma now had 2 grand children to look after, and no income at all - she was really doing it tough!

And then for the final step: Getting T back to school. Apart from the fact that he has only finished Grade 1 and he's now a teenager, the biggest hurdle was that according to Vietnamese law he didn't meet the criteria to study in a regular school. At first the school accepted him, but then realised they really shouldn't... and so early this week we got the call that his application had been rejected.

But, hey, that's why Blue Dragon employs lawyers!

Yesterday morning one of our Child Rights Advocates headed back to Hai Phong to meet with the school and help them see how they could accept him... and so they did. T had his first day in school, and by all reports everything went well.

I am hesitant to say "case closed" - there's a long long road ahead - but for today, I am happy to say that things have turned out about as well as we could have hoped. I wish we could find T's mother, but for now he is with his grandmother and sister, and he's back in school.

At least now he has a chance of a better life.

The big day - 1000 games!

Today was a big, big day for Blue Dragon...

Our soccer team, Blue Dragon United, has now played its 1000th game!

We organised a tournament through the morning, and although it was very hot the kids had a fantastic time. We were joined by teams from the Hanoi Youth Football League, which has been great to us over the last couple of years so we invited them to join in and make our big day even more exciting.


Staff and kids alike joined in...



We had a warm up...


... but most kids were warm enough and were looking for some shade...


Everyone had a great time...






... and the U13s finished with a penalty shoot out:



(I promise to set up a Flickr account some time this coming week to make it easier to see photos on my blog).

... and here's the radio interview from Thursday, in which Blue Dragon's Outreach Worker Vi and I were interviewed by Howard Sattler on 6PR.




It really was a great morning. More pics to follow soon.

The story of Blue Dragon United

This is a big week at Blue Dragon. We started with the rescue of 8 children from factories, and on Sunday we'll play our 1000th game of soccer with street kids.

1000 games! That's quite an achievement.

Our football started early in 2003, before we even had formed Blue Dragon Children's Foundation. At the time, there were just a few of us, all volunteers, finding ways to help Hanoi's street kids. Spearheading the movement to help the kids were Chung Pham, Gonzalo Serrano, and myself.

We were teaching English and holding weekly classes in art, maths and yoga, while also providing occasional meals and healthcare. With no money and no space to meet, we could see that we were very limited in the number of street kids we were able to reach out to.

One day, Gonzalo - a Spaniard with a passion for soccer - suggested that we could help a whole lot more kids if we took to the field. That would solve the problem of space, and with football being the unofficial religion of Vietnam we were sure that the kids would be interested.

And so we found a dirt field that we could rent and spent a few days riding around the city on our motorbikes handing out flyers to street kids.

Every kid we spoke to was interested and promised to come. We were off to a huge start! And then, on that first Sunday, we arrived at the field... and just 3 boys turned up.

Regardless, we had a great game and committed to playing again the next week.

Each week, the number of kids coming grew. Within a month, there was a steady core of 15 street kids turning up... and then 30... and then 50. These days, up to 80 kids come along each week to play.

We needed a name for the team, and so Gonzalo suggested we adopt his old team's name: Real Betis. We thus became Real Betis Vietnam, and even received an official letter from the Real Betis Club in Spain allowing us to do so (thankfully!). The picture below featured in the Vietnam News in 2003.


Later, we switched to a blue uniform:


... and today we have an orange / blue uniform, which can be seen on the Blue Dragon United website.

Just a couple of years ago, we decided to change our team name to Blue Dragon United, as the kids didn't have a strong affinity to the Real Betis name any more, and we wanted to relaunch the team to give it a new energy.

Our 1000 games includes tournaments we've joined, such as those at the United Nations school and the Hanoi Youth Football League. Although our kids are much smaller than most of their peers, we've won a few awards over time, and the trophy we won in 2010 has pride of place in the Blue Dragon office.

We've had some special guests turn up at the field...


... and over time, we've watched many kids from football grow up, become young adults, and some have even become Blue Dragon staff.

The soccer is great fun for the kids, but it's also a chance for us to reach out to kids who we otherwise wouldn't know. Some of the kids we meet are worried about coming inside the Blue Dragon centre until they know us well. Nobody's afraid to turn up to a football field, though.

And so this Sunday at 8am we'll be having a very big game, with plenty of food and drinks, a few awards, and a whole lot of fun. I'll post some photos on Monday. Let's just hope for great weather!

8 kids out of the factories

I'm happy to report that we're now finishing up a rescue trip to Ho Chi Minh City with some good results.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Blue Dragon's plan to end the trafficking of children from central to southern Vietnam to work in garment factories. This week's trip was a part of that plan - to keep on getting kids out of factories and back to their homes, where they belong.

Before taking the kids home, we first need the support and permission of their families, who are in Hue province. We do this by talking to them in their communities with representatives of their local government and Red Cross. A typical "meeting" looks like this:



Not all parents agree, unfortunately; and some initially think their children are fine in the factories but change their minds when they see the kids who we rescue and bring home. In the early stages of planning this trip we were hoping to bring home at least 12 kids. But we couldn't get the permission of all of the parents, so had to be satisfied to bring home 8.

Once we have the parents' permission, we head to the south to the industrial areas where children are often put to work in appalling conditions. The images below were taken yesterday on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City.






And so we have enabled 8 children, aged 13 to 15, to leave these factories behind and return home.

Now for the next stage of our work: ensuring the kids can stay with their families, return to school, and live in safety with their communities.

The lost brothers

Last week, one of Vietnam's national newspapers ran a compelling story about a young man in Hai Phong City who begs in public places for money.

The man, "Dinh", was aged 23, but in the photos looked no older than 14 or 15. The article told the shocking story of how Dinh's older sister had introduced him to heroin 9 years previously - when he really was aged 14 - and how he had been separated from his family, reduced to begging from strangers, ever since. By all accounts, he'd had a terribly difficult life.

Shortly after the article was published, Blue Dragon staff received a telephone call... from the journalist who had written the article. She had tracked down one of Dinh's distant uncles, who told her that he knew where Dinh's younger brother was living: The Blue Dragon Shelter.

It turned out that Dinh is the older brother of a 16 year old Blue Dragon boy: an orphan (who I will call "Ton") who we first met living on the streets back in 2006.

Ton had brought himself up on the streets, living with gangs and finding shelter under bridges and in abandoned houses. His parents had died, but he knew little about them - or about himself. When it came time for him to make a birth certificate, he had no idea of his actual date of birth, so he rang me to ask if he could use mine. Every birthday I have had since then has been much more meaningful!

For the first few years that Ton was with Blue Dragon, his behaviour was impulsive and often wild. He could be heard throughout the entire building - sometimes you could hear his booming voice down the street. Learning to live in a house, and follow simple domestic rules, was a massive challenge. There were countless setbacks, as well as tremendous steps forward, but we never knew which direction Ton would take.

To his credit, while almost all of his old friends have ended up in prison, or on heroin, or both, Ton has stayed out of trouble... Or, at least, avoided being caught! School never worked out for him, but he's been learning hairdressing and in the last couple of years has calmed down to the point that nobody could ever guess his troubled past without being told.

But a constant burden for Ton has been the issue of his family.

In 2009, we found an uncle and started unraveling some of the details of Ton's life. He'd been severely neglected as a child, abandoned by just about everyone, and left to fend for himself. There's still so much that we don't know.

Regardless, Ton has longed to find his family members. He has memories of brothers and sisters, but despite our best efforts he's only ever heard rumours of where they might be and what they are doing.

Until this telephone call.

On Sunday, we finally had some concrete information that Ton's brother Dinh has been begging at a particular bus station in Hai Phong, which is a few hours drive out of Hanoi. One of our staff headed straight to Hai Phong with Ton to look, but 6 hours of waiting and asking around yielded nothing. Ton was deeply upset, thinking that perhaps there was no hope after all.

On Monday lunchtime, though, the journalist called back: she was with Dinh, on a bus, heading to Hanoi.

Ton and Dinh have not seen each other for 9 years. So much has happened in those intervening years that cannot be said in any words. Ton is elated at having finally found a brother he loves and has worried about endlessly; but also confused and frightened at the burden of his brother's heroin addiction. He just doesn't know what to make of it.

Added to this is the news that their own sister introduced Dinh to heroin. Ton has no idea how to feel about that. He's been desperately hoping to find his sister, now in her mid 20s, since I first met him - so what is he to think of her now?

Ton has been with Blue Dragon for so long that Monday's reunion has impacted all of us. The staff share Ton's confusion and sorrow, as well as his joy.

In the next few days, we will work out what to do next. Dinh seems like a lovely young guy, and in talking to him in the afternoon it was instantly clear that he's never had people care for him before. Will he want to enter a rehab program? Will we be able to get him in to one? (He has absolutely no personal registration papers, which are essential). And how will Dinh's sudden appearance impact on Ton's own dream of finishing a hairdressing course and getting a job?

There are many questions now, but no answers just yet.

Sometimes we spend our lives for searching in vain for something that appears out of nowhere, long after we have given up hope. Ton and Dinh cannot believe they've found each other; but after so long apart, they're each now wondering what their future will hold.

Now for the good news

I came across this info recently on another blog - see here for more info.

Amidst all the bad news we see every day, here is a list of what's getting better in our world.



Let's hope their 2020 projections hold true!

Caught in the net

If you're on Blue Dragon's mailing list, you'll have received a message this morning with some very good news.

In short, we've been involved in helping 2 teenage girls who were trafficked from Vietnam to China and sold to brothels. Our support has enabled them to return to their homes and start getting on with their lives... and we've also been able to bring most of the trafficking ring to justice. The one remaining person involved appears to have fled the country, so is now on an Interpol watchlist.

We're really pleased to have been able to achieve all this, and it's tremendously satisfying to see the girls starting to resume a normal life.

A fascinating 'sideline' to this story is the role of the internet in human trafficking.

Most cases we have dealt with involving the trafficking of girls to China has involved the internet in some way or another. Typically, the traffickers are meeting girls online and becoming their 'friends' via chat rooms. They then arrange to meet in person, show some generosity, and eventually take them on a holiday or shopping trip near the Chinese border. The final step is to say "Let's go shopping over the border," or "I have a really good friend who lives just on the other side of the border," and the girl is kidnapped.

In this most recent case, though, the internet also played a role in the escape of the 2 girls. After they had broken out of the brothel, they found themselves in a Chinese city over 1000km from Vietnam. Just as a chat room had been the start of their troubles, the same chat room was their best chance to reconnect with their families back home and call for help.

Each trafficking case that we get involved with teaches us new lessons - and no matter what we see or hear, each case reminds us that we have so much more to learn.

We only hope that each new case we work with can prepare us better to help the girls who are being targeted by traffickers, and find new ways to counter the trafficking before it even takes place.

Under the wing

Blue Dragon was featured in yesterday's Relax magazine of the Sunday Canberra Times... Click on the images to see the larger file sizes.

Student accommodation

With the new school year starting in Vietnam, Blue Dragon's residential programs are preparing for new children who need a home in order to go to school.

In both Hanoi and Hoi An, we have homes where kids can live while they study, attend training, and start jobs. These homes are important not just as accommodation, but as social programs too. They give kids a safe place to live and grow until they don't need our help any more.

Recently a Blue Dragon staff member was traveling through a rural region and came across the makeshift huts pictured below:





He was shocked to learn that these huts were 'student accommodation' for kids who lived far from town and couldn't afford to travel each day, or to pay for room and board.

And it gets worse - not only did the kids live here, but they lived here unsupervised and unsupported. The oldest was just 16 years old; the youngest was 7.

What a powerful reminder that the Blue Dragon homes are so important... and that we need to offer our help to more children around Vietnam!

Some new houses

Some good news to start the week!

We're very proud to have finished building 2 new houses for families in Hue (Central Vietnam). Each house cost about $2000, and both families have been victims of child traffickers in the past.

The "Before and After" shots tell quite a story!

This is the house of a teenage girl who was trafficked to a garment factory...


Before...

After...


... and this house is where a 15 year old boy who was trafficked lives. It's one of the worst houses we've come across in recent times - far worse than the photo suggests!

Before...

After...

We don't put the Blue Dragon logo on the houses we build, because we see the homes as belonging entirely to the families, but during the week we'll have a small celebration with the families, their communities and the local Red Cross.

I think that a small party is well and truly in order!

Hope and disappointment

This blog has been a bit quiet in recent weeks, largely because there's been so much happening.

At the moment, the Blue Dragon kids are starting to go back to school. Last weekend, over 650 children in rural Bac Ninh province received their text books, school bags, and other school gear, all paid for by sponsors from around the world. (See a few photos here).


Among the many happy stories, Blue Dragon staff have been working with some teen girls who escaped sex traffickers in China earlier this year and returned to Vietnam. One of those girls started back at school on Wednesday, and she's so excited to be studying again that she can't contain herself.

Just a few months ago, she never thought she'd ever have a 'normal' day again in her life. None of the students or teachers at her new school have any idea of what she's been through, so she really has managed to blend back in with the crowd and is getting on with her life.

We've had some scary moments, too: one of the kids who frequents our centre went missing for a few days, and the only other children who had information about where he might be are profoundly deaf and hearing impaired. Some of the Blue Dragon staff are quite proficient in Vietnamese Sign Language, and it was fascinating watching them talk to the kids and gather information, sorting out 'imagination' from 'actuality' - not an easy task! Fortunately the boy returned after several nights, rather embarrassed about the stir he'd caused, but completely unharmed. Phew!

Our legal team have been kept on their toes with some cases of kids who have been arrested, or facing court... We seem to have just gone through a month of teenagers going in and out of detention.

We're all very happy to welcome back one boy, T, who was released from reform school last week and has returned to Hanoi with a new vigour. With a little support from our team, we hope that he'll stay on the right track. (He's one of our best soccer players, too, so the timing is great with our 1000th game coming up. T was all smiles when he realised he was home in time for that!)

It's always disheartening for us to see young people (usually boys) we've worked with over a long time getting caught up in crime, and eventually finding themselves in trouble with the police. At times it's like a slow motion car crash - you can see it coming but you can't do anything about it. And the regret that follows is just as inevitable.

A few days ago I received a letter from a young man, "Minh," in prison for drug offenses; Minh was very close to me as a teenager but just couldn't kick his heroin habit and is now serving a 4 year sentence. His letter spoke of 'disappointment and sorrow'; he hardly dares to hope yet for better times ahead.

At Blue Dragon, we see such different worlds every day. There are so many kids, young people, and families who find a way to make it work. With a little bit of help, they do all they can to get out of poverty and better their futures through education or training. But there are also those who just can't seem to make it, or who don't believe that they can ever make it and give up on themselves.

I can't judge them, though; and time after time I am caught surprised by kids 'turning the corner' and making a change when all seemed lost. My job is to keep on trying, and keep on hoping, even when 'disappointment and sorrow' is all that seems to be left.

Towards a goal

It's been an embarrassingly long time since I blogged... there's been so much happening that I haven't known where to start! So: more posts to follow this week (for real) with some stories about what the kids have been up to.

A few weeks ago I wrote that I was working with my staff on a plan to end the trafficking of kids from central Vietnam to the garment factories of Ho Chi Minh City. Since 2005 we've been getting kids out, and putting a stop to trafficking village by village in Hue province, but we want to see now if we can put a stop to this trade in children altogether.

I know that a lot of people who read this blog have supported our anti-trafficking, so I think it's only right that I share what has come out of that meeting, and give an overview of our plan.

First the bad news: we don't believe that we can completely end the trafficking. We can't take it from its current level right down to zero. Why not? Well, for the same reason that Australia, and the US, and every country on earth has human trafficking... People do bad things that we just can't control.

But we do believe that, given a time frame of about 5 years, we should be able to get as close to ending the trafficking as anyone can. If I have to put a target on it, I'd say we aim to reduce the trafficking by at least 80%... but that just raises the question "80% of what?" There isn't much data on how common this problem is. One of our goals is to try to get a more complete picture of how widespread the trafficking is by arranging community meetings where local people can talk with us about how many children from their village have gone to the factories, both now and in the past.

After some lengthy discussion about what impact our work has had so far, what's been working and what's failed, we came up with a set of 5 'conditions.' Our thinking is that the trafficking will come to an end when:

1. Children and their families no longer want or need to go to work in the factories.

This is a big one. To achieve this, we need not only some poverty alleviation work and income-generating training, but also some significant work on the local culture. In many of the villages we work in, we find that families consider it 'normal' to send their children to work in factories. This is not typical of Vietnamese culture, but is a sub culture specific to these areas that have long been targeted by traffickers. We'll need to help the families and communities change their minds by showing them the reality of factory life in Ho Chi Minh City - it ain't pretty.

2. Factory owners no longer want to employ children.

To achieve this, we will need to keep on taking the kids out of the factories - because every child we take home represents a significant expense for the business, and some weeks of lost labour. We also need to work with the police and Vietnam's Chamber of Commerce so that we're not alone in changing the minds of the factory owners.

3. The traffickers are too scared to continue their work.

If we can keep the stories of child abuse in factories alive in the newspapers, and if the police will arrest and prosecute the traffickers, they'll pretty quickly find a new career.

4. The general public considers child labour and trafficking unacceptable.

Again, the media will have a big role to play in this. Already the tide of opinion has started turning against having children in factories.

5. The government actively enforces the law.

Just a few months ago, a new law on trafficking was passed by the National Assembly, and for the first time trafficking within Vietnam is considered a crime. But of course, just because it's a law doesn't mean it's enforced. We'll need to work more closely with the police to enable them to go after the traffickers and shut down factories which use children.


Clearly, this isn't our action plan - just the set of goals we need to reach. We also need to be sure that, in reaching these goals, we don't simply end up with children from central Vietnam being trafficked to other types of work, or the factories filling up with kids from other regions. We really need to solve this problem by coming at it from all angles at the same time.

Even though we don't think it's realistic to achieve 'zero trafficking', we do believe we can change the context so that trafficking is no longer a common, widespread issue, but rather an occasional aberration.

In coming months and years we'll be rescuing more kids from factories, opening more community centres in the villages being targeted by traffickers, working more closely with the government and media, and spending more time getting to know the families who need our help.

It's bound to be a lot of hard work, but if we really can achieve these goals there's no question that it will all be worth while.

The thousands

Every month, my staff collate data on the kids they have helped, and we produce a simple list of our results which gets added to our email signatures. It's just a nice way of letting people know what we're up to.

This month's figures are below, and there are a couple of really exciting developments...

To date, Blue Dragon has:
Sent 2,036 kids back to school and training
Provided accommodation to 109 girls and boys
Served 221,930 meals
Built or repaired 45 homes for families
Distributed 21,475 litres of milk
Handed out 24,714 kilos of rice
Reunited 85 runaway children with their families
Taken 753 kids to a doctor or hospital
Put 5 teens through drug rehab
Obtained legal registration papers for 567 children
Rescued 101 trafficked children
Placed 62 teens in jobs
Played 936 games of soccer!

First, we've now helped more than 2000 children go to school. Woo hoo! (And if we say that we help each child go to school for 4 years, on average, then that means we've helped Vietnam with 8,000 years of schooling... right??)

And second, as I mentioned a couple of months back, we are quite close to playing our 1000th game of soccer. Looks like "the big day" will be in late August, and already the kids are hassling us for details of how we'll celebrate!

Apart from telling our friends around the world about our progress, these numbers are also a good reminder to my team here in Vietnam that we really are getting somewhere and making a difference.

And speaking of making a difference, I have returned to Hanoi after 3 days in Hue of planning and strategising. In coming days I will post again about the direction we will take with our anti-trafficking work.

I am a bit excited about these plans, though I am not sure that they're going to make riveting blogging!

Dreaming of endings

Ngoc was 13 when I met him, late in 2005. He was tiny and exhausted, selling flowers on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. Normally he'd start work around sunset, and walk up and down outside tourist spots and nightclubs until 2 or 3am.

His traffickers, some middle aged women, had brought him from his village in Hue province, in central Vietnam. Every flower he sold was for their benefit; his "payment" was a place to sleep on a concrete floor and some plain rice or noodles a few times per day.

If he didn't sell his quota of flowers each night, he was rewarded with a beating.

Angered by what I saw, and shocked by the compliance of 2 other charitable organisations with this trafficking, I asked one of our volunteers to help me find a way for Ngoc to escape and get back to his family. That volunteer, a uni student named Van, is now Blue Dragon's Chief Lawyer.

We found a way to get Ngoc away from the traffickers, and in doing so learned that his situation was not an isolated case. Dozens more kids just like him had been brought from central Vietnam to the south and put to work as slaves, mostly under the pretense of 'vocational training'. The parents were extremely poor - often living in tin huts or tents on beaches - and were easily convinced that their children were being offered an opportunity to escape from grinding poverty.

And so, in addition to helping street kids, Blue Dragon started helping kids who had been trafficked.

Six years on, we've rescued 92 kids who have been trafficked for slavery within Vietnam. The trafficking rings that took Ngoc and his friends to Ho Chi Minh City to sell flowers are long gone; we interrupted their business so much that they just gave up. We've effectively ended trafficking in 4 communes of Hue province, but there's still a huge trade in children from Hue being taken south to work in the garment industry.

The question for Blue Dragon remains: Can we end this trafficking of children from Hue to the garment factories permanently?

If we could bring down one trafficking ring, can't we bring down some more? And if we could end trafficking from 4 communes in Hue province, then can't we end it in all communes?

These aren't just hypothetical questions... These are the issues that my staff and I will be talking about this Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Van and I are in Hue now, to meet with our staff who are based here. We intend to come up with a strategy that will put a permanent end to the trafficking of children from Hue to the garment factories.

It won't be easy; and we're going to need a few years to really make an impact. But it's time for us to take this dive into the deep end. Our work so far has had some terrific results, and I am proud of what we've achieved. However, I think we can put our knowledge and expertise now to an even more powerful end.

Why is it important?

It's all about the kids. Ngoc is a young man now, and he has done brilliantly for himself. Although he had never been to school when I met him, he has since gone on to study a few years of primary school, and now works in a restaurant in Hanoi. He's an excellent chef, much loved by his employer, and he is one of the most responsible Blue Dragon kids yet. He's a great role model to all those around him.

There are just so many more Ngocs out there. The photo below is of some of the other trafficked kids we've rescued and have gone back to full time study. Last week our staff invited those who achieved excellent school results on an outing to a bookstore. The idea was for each of them to buy whatever reading material they wanted... but they saw some painting activities and decided to have a go at that, too.

These are kids who were working 18 hours a day in garment factories not so long ago. The chance to go to a bookstore, buy whatever they want, and join in some art activities must have seemed like a ridiculous fantasy - but why shouldn't they have the chance? Why should such a simple pleasure be denied them?


Dreams can indeed become reality; and my dream is that kids from Hue don't have to sell their childhood to produce cheap clothes in Vietnam's factories. Over the coming days, my challenge is to figure out how to do this!

We made it!

Back in May, Blue Dragon launched an important funding appeal. We needed to raise money to expand our outreach services for street kids.

For the last year or so we have had one Outreach worker, a young man who once worked as a shoeshine boy himself. His job has been to go out at night to the places where street kids hang around to look for anyone who needs help and make sure the kids know where to come if they have trouble.

In particular, he looks for the little kids and those who have newly arrived in the city, before they get caught up in the gangs and prostitution.

It's difficult and sometimes dangerous work, but I feel pretty strongly that it's also extremely important. And having a single staff member with all of that responsibility really isn't good enough. For every kid we meet, there are many more who we don't have the time to get to.

In Outreach, every case is urgent. Letting kids fall through the cracks can have severe consequences. This means that we need to have Outreach staff on call 24/7... Street kids don't normally stick to the 9-5 routine!

And so we conceived of holding an appeal to raise the money needed for expanding the service. The total goal was about $67,000: enough money to hire 2 new staff for 2 years; provide food, clothing and emergency care for the kids we find; offer a counseling service; and buy a 2nd hand car so that we can drive the kids back to their homes and reunite them with their families. (Nearly all of the kids on the streets of Hanoi have come from the countryside - often way up in mountainous regions).

I am HUGELY PLEASED to say this morning that we've made it. Our friends and sponsors around the world have agreed that this is important work, and sent the funds needed to double the number of street kids we reach every week.

We'll be contacting all of the donors in coming days to let them know. Donations have come in amounts from $5 to $15,000 - and every one of them has been greatly appreciated.

To our donors: Thank you. It's time now for the Blue Dragon team to get working on reaching more street kids and making good use of the support you've shown us.