Community Music Program for Vietnamese Youth

Dear Friends,

Happy Lunar New Year! It’s the year of the cat (vs the rabbit in China) in Vietnam. Everyone in Vietnam is on their two-week holiday right now, and our staff and students well deserve the break! I hope that everyone has had a good month of January.

In December we decided to add to our music program by providing a guitar class for girls. Right now, we have five girls who started classes in December. The guitar in Vietnam is not a common instrument played by woman, but we thought, why not have classes for girls, along with our string program! They are all very excited to learn.

This month, we had one of our music teachers leave our organization, so we are currently recruiting for one new full time teacher. Like our art program, we are looking towards past students who now have a college degree and continued in music, as well as trying to recruit a newly graduated music teacher from the larger Universities in Saigon. We hope to introduce a new teacher to you in our next report. In the meantime, one of our previous teachers is going to be filling in on the weekends and evenings, helping out to make sure classes continue for all of our students. We are very excited to have him back in our program!

As some of you may know, two years ago, with grant funding, we started a tutoring program in the ethnic minority village of Son Tan where we work. We are excited to say we have 100 girls in the program now from the village! The girls also take art classes, and our dream is to expand the music program into the tutoring program as well, so that some of the girls who would like to take music, have the opportunity. We’ll keep you all posted on this.

Thank you everyone for your continued support, and we will update you again soon. Happy February!

Sara and the Rock-Paper-Scissors Crew

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