Blue Dragon United

Blue Dragon United was launched this morning!

Our new team braved the winter drizzle to don the new uniform and kick off the first ever game of BDU.

A quick look back over the history of soccer at Blue Dragon...

We started in early 2003 with just 3 players! Our uniform was green then, and the team name was Real Betis Vietnam. After the game, we'd have lunch and an English class.





Late in 2004 we switched to a new uniform. By this time we were normally having 30-40 kids come and play each week, and we started running occasional workshops on issues such as HIV/AIDS after the games.





And here we are in 2010! At least 60 kids come every week, and as of today we are known as Blue Dragon United.

As you can see, half the shirts are orange with a little blue; the other half are blue with a little orange. This is because we play against each other in the Sunday games.

This morning was great - the rain cleared to give us perfect playing conditions. A terrific start to the new team!







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United we stand

7 years ago, when I was just starting to work with street kids in Hanoi, my friends and I came up with the idea of starting a soccer team.

We'd been running weekly classes out of a room in my home, but as more and more kids came, we just didn't have the room to teach them. So we figured that we could fit plenty of kids onto the soccer field, offer a meal at the end, and then run classes for those who wanted to study.

That was back before we had even started Blue Dragon Children's Foundation - seems like a lifetime ago!

But 7 years on, Blue Dragon still meets every Sunday morning at 8am for a game of soccer. Just 3 kids came to our first game; these days it's common for 60 to 80 kids to be there.

At the outset, our team was named Real Betis Vietnam. One of the original Blue Dragon team, a Spaniard named Gonzalo Serrano, was a big fan of Real Betis, so we adopted that name. Now, though, we've decided to create a new team with a name that resonates more strongly with our kids:

Blue Dragon United.

The new team kicks off this Sunday morning, but the new shirt is already getting some publicity...







These are all real, I tells ya. Trust me.

We've created a website for the players to keep in touch with the latest news. It's just in Vietnamese at the moment but in coming weeks we'll have English as well. Check it out:

Blue Dragon United

After the launch on Sunday, I'll blog again with some more info, and hopefully some more photos. As I write, the rain is bucketing down outside, so we are all hoping for clearer skies very soon...



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A big ask

With Christmas scarcely behind us, I know this is a bad time to put out a call for funding. And now the world is focused on the terrible emergency in Haiti.

But I need to ask for help for 2 families here in Vietnam.

For each of these families, we're seeking a few hundred dollars - in one case, to repair a home, and in another, to build a new one. For each of these families, this help will make a world of difference.


Thien, who lives with his parents and 4 siblings in Hue province, is one of the trafficked children we rescued in December. Below are some shots taken of their house from the outside as well as the inside.




Thien needs a new house. This current building is way too small, and far too miserable a place for kids to be growing up in. We already have a few hundred dollars for this, but we need another $800 US to build them a whole new home. His parents earn about $40 per month between them; building a decent home is way out of their reach.


Sang is a Grade 8 girl in Bac Ninh province, north of Hanoi. She's pictured below in front of her house with her brothers; and the second shot is taken inside the home.




Blue Dragon is already supporting Sang to go to school; but her living conditions are just atrocious. Sang's family needs to repair her home to keep out the winter, and for that they need about $380 US.


I know there couldn't be a worse time for me to be asking for help like this. But I've got to ask. Two kids and their families need some help.

If you can help out, drop me a line on bluedragon@bdcf.org.


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More from Tet Awards

As promised, a few more photos of Tet Awards at the Sofitel Plaza last Thursday.

These are also on the Blue Dragon Facebook page - along with many more. If you're on Facebook, sign up to see them.

What the photos don't reveal, though, are the incredible stories behind the kids in the photos. Among the images are children who live in shacks... teens who have spent time in prison... kids who were thrown out of home when their parents remarried, so that the 'new' family can have new children.

That's the magic of Tet Awards: it doesn't matter one bit where you've come from, you're still a special, precious human being.

The Big Night

Thursday night was a major event at Blue Dragon: Tet Awards 2010!

This was our 5th annual Tet (lunar new year) celebration - and without a doubt the best so far.

We invited all of the kids we work with in Hanoi - just over 250 girls and boys - for a huge celebration at the Sofitel Plaza. The children, their parents, and various foreign ambassadors and other special guests took part in a 90 minute party. complete with hip hop dancing, tap dancing, singing, a fashion show, and a dance off between the kids and Blue Dragon staff. I sat on the floor crying with laughter for the first hour.

There was also a serious side to the night: 38 children were invited to the stage to receive award for 10 different categories of achievement or endeavour. But every single one of the kids went home with a bag of presents, and most with a certificate recognising their best qualities.

I must say thanks to the Sofitel Plaza for pulling out all stops to make it a fantastic night. They gave us the room, food, and hot drinks all for free... they even through in an ice sculpture of a dragon!

Just a few pics below, and I will post more in coming days. I'm still gathering together the photos of the even, so just a teaser for now!

Fail?

NGOS (aka "charities") by nature are rarely self reflective organisations. The bigger they get, the more they are driven by the need to advance their own interests. There are notable exceptions, but it takes a very grounded NGO to stay focused on helping people rather than just getting their logo better known.

I've been thinking about this issue since I posted my last blog. In our work in Hue, we believe that one day in the forseeable future, our work will be finished. The end of child trafficking in certain communities in central Vietnam will one day be a thing of the past.

In three villages where dozens of children were being trafficked just 2 years ago, there is now no trafficking at all. The kids we rescued from factories on our last two trips were from a district of Hue province that was completely new to us. In other words, we have put a stop to child trafficking in the district we started in 3 years ago, and have now been able to move on to the next district.

But if you spend some time on google and do a search on the words "child trafficking increase" or "child trafficking on-the-rise", you'll come up with countless NGOs making press releases about how trafficking is getting worse, not better, and how therefore they need more of your money.

To which I can only say: FAIL.

If they are declaring that, despite all the millions of dollars they have so far spent, the problem is getting worse rather than better, do they really have the right to ask you for more donations? How will "more of the same" help if the problem is getting worse?

NGOs have a vested interest in declaring panic and emergency. Don't believe them. If they are spending millions and then saying the situation is deteriorating, they're either lying or failing. Either way, they don't deserve your support.


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Out of the factories

In the final days of 2009, Blue Dragon staff went on a rescue trip to the factories of Ho Chi Minh City to find children who have been trafficked from central Vietnam to work in the south.

Altogether, the trip secured the release of 6 children, aged from 10 to 14, including 5 boys and 1 girl. With lunar new year coming up, the factories are desperate to keep the children in their service, so this was a real struggle - it took a day and a half of work before even the first child could be released!

One of the 6 kids went home immediately, while the other 5 went back as a group. Here's a photo of the 5 who traveled back together, along with a government official from Hue province who accompanied us on this trip:

Securing the release of the children involved an awful lot of negotiation and argument. The 2nd boy from the left (in the green shirt) is a 12 year old named Ty. He was desperate to get away from the factory, and his parents wanted him home, but the factory boss wouldn't let him go. Our staff had to hatch a plan for the boy to literally 'make a run for it' while they waited in a taxi down the street. Ty jumped in the car, they sped off - straight to the local police station to make a report. A bit frightening for the poor kid, but there was no other way to get him out.

The boy and the girl below are 2 of the many kids we were unable to take home on this trip... The boy is 12, the girl is 13.




The train trip back to Hue took about 26 hours: but the kids were thrilled to be reunited with their families.




... and the final step was to get together about 40 government and Red Cross officials from Hue for a debrief. This was on January 1, 2010 - so they were pretty keen to be there! At this point of the operation, our goal is to start 'fire proofing' the village by letting everyone know who the traffickers are, what life is like in the factories, and get the leaders to start thinking about how they can put a stop to this problem.


A great way to start the new year!

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New year roundup

Greetings from Ho Chi Minh City! I've escaped to the warm south for a few days to kick off the new year. Back to the cold, cold north soon.

For now - a quick roundup of Christmas and new year at Blue Dragon.

All the kids at our shelter in Hanoi had a festive "lau" at Truc Bac lake in the lead up to Christmas. Lau is a food along the lines of hotpot - and it's a real treat for our kids. They went off for karaoke afterwards, but I didn't join them for that!



On Christmas day, I went to the Sofitel Plaza with a couple of staff and a lot of kids for a meal in their Chinese restaurant. This was completely on the house - the Sofitel management went out of their way to give us a good time. A very new experience for our kids!



A rowdy Christmas party at the drop in centre...



At the Hoi An Children's Home, a huge party lead by our wonderful staff...



In the days after Christmas, I traveled north to the mountains with Huong, one of our social workers, to visit a family of orphans. We had some gifts to make their lives a bit easier - including study desks and lamps, and money for them to pay for lunch at school each day.



The next day, Huong and Giang (another of our staff) traveled south of Hanoi to meet up with a family whose son has been living with us for the past 18 months. That trip was not so positive - seems the family have refused to let the boy, who is 15 and tiny, continue at school. He's only in Grade 2, but now he's being sent off to work, probably on the streets of Thanh Hoa city. We have some more work to do on that case.

Meantime our lawyer Van was in Ho Chi Minh City looking for kids who work in garment factories. He and the government representatives from Hue were able to secure the release of 6 kids; they'd been hoping for more, but with Lunar New Year coming up in February the factories are desperate to keep the kids working. A journalist traveled with the rescue team, and we'd been hoping for a write up but so far there's been none. There was this, however, so we can't say that there's nothing important in the newspapers over the holiday period. (Just read the photo caption - that says it all!)

Hopefully I'll have an update within the week of the kids who were rescued from the factories.

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The search

With Christmas barely behind us, the pace continues...

I've often blogged in the past about our work of finding children who have been trafficked from rural areas to factories in Ho Chi Minh City. These kids, sometimes as young as ten, slave away for little or even no pay while their parents believe they are learning a trade. In reality, they're just factory fodder.

Up til now, we've rescued close to 60 kids - both boys and girls - from such situations. And today, Blue Dragon staff are back in the industrial neighbourhoods of HCMC looking for kids whose parents have asked for our help to get their children home.

But a new development: somehow, the traffickers knew we were coming. They've turned off their phones so we have no way of calling or tracking them down. At the end of a whole day of searching, we've managed to secure the release of just one child.

In the next few days, progress is likely to be slow; but it's not all bad. We'd prefer to be able to find the kids and get them out, but there's some value in knowing that the traffickers are so scared. We're making their industry difficult. If we can keep up the pressure, it might just be easier for them to go and - well, get a real job.

This happened to us a couple of year back, when our anti-trafficking work was focused on children who had been forced to sell flowers on the streets. There are still a few kids doing that, but in nothing like the numbers who we first saw in 2005. Eventually, our constant harrassment of the traffickers lead them to simply give up and do something else.

Could we be heading the same way with the factory traffickers?


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Christmas party in Hoi An!

Here are some pics from the Christmas party at the Hoi An Children's Home last night... They even had a visit from multiple Santas!





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Christmas fun, and a cat

Today we've been learning juggling and circus acts - yeeha, and so far no broken bones!





... and... one of our boys found a stray a kitten outside the Blue Dragon centre. The cat - now named Tom - is in pretty shaky health, so after spending a couple of nights at our centre and residence, Tom is now convalescing at a local veterinary hospital. We're hoping that Tom will be back with us, in better shape, very soon.



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I made this!

A pic from the Hoi An Children's Home, where one of the boys has put his artistic talents to a Christmas endeavour...

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It begins: Beardless Santa Strikes

Christmas is coming!

Hanoi is abuzz with Christmas trees, Santa Claus, and fake snow!

The kids at Blue Dragon's Sunday soccer game had a special visit yesterday - Santa himself (aka Binh, Blue Dragon's rather unique tap-dancing, cheer-leading IT teacher) put in an appearance, laden with gifts, much to the delight of the 50 or so boys and girls who turned up.

Happiness all round...





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