By Sara Nerone | Founder
Dear Friends,
Thank you so much for your continued support! We wanted to share with you an update on one of our students. In 2015 we wrote about him starting in our program and some of that report is revisited here. Tu was 13 years old when he started with us. He lives with his older brother and his mom; his dad unfortunately left their family and has never returned. His mom has struggled and sacrificed to bring up her two sons alone. She cleans homes and does odd jobs to pull together enough money to support the boys and be able to send them to school.
Since Tu picked up the violin in our program over five years ago, he basically hasn’t put it down. Summer volunteers who traveled to Vietnam to teach the kids for us, always identified Tu and how incredibly talented he was, even for a beginner. Now 17 years old, Tu has surpassed our younger teachers in skill, so during the summer we sent him to Saigon for nine weeks to study with a more advanced teacher. Tu jumped at the chance and was so thrilled at the opportunity. He lived with a relative there and took six hours of lessons weekly, practicing for hours daily.
Tu’s mom always told us, even when he first started playing, that he would start practicing right when he woke up in the morning and that he loved playing more than anything. Tu’s mom says that being a part of our school and learning the violin has made Tu’s life much happier, and that he isn’t such an sad kid any longer about his father leaving them. As so many of us know, music can be an avenue for translating emotion into melody.
As partners in supporting this program, you all should be so proud that you have given a young student like Tu the opportunity to learn and explore his passion in playing the violin. Tu returned home from Saigon in August and has excelled even more than we expected, in fact, recently we asked him to work as an assistant teacher for us. Tu will be applying and hopefully attending college next year, we are sure that his violin is going with him! Although this video is before his summer in Saigon, you can get an idea of his talent!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3wh49dg2l8
Thank you again everyone!
Sara
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