By Sara Nerone | Founder and President
This morning the kids arrived one by one, and in small groups, for their music lessons, each of them riding their bikes with their violins swung over their shoulders. It’s quite a wonderful sight to look down this worn out dirt road to see them riding proudly with their violins.
Tuan, our lead music teacher opens the large front doors to the schoolhouse that we rent to let the kids in. Tuan is a wonderful, kind, gentle person. The kids look up to him and love his fun personality.
Last week I asked our teachers to please email me photos of each of them in order to update our website, and I wanted to add Tuan’s photo here. I love the contrast of this photo, Tuan, standing in the middle of this obviously impoverished old road, dressed in his best clothes, holding his violin. This image to me is what we set out to accomplish with this program, to provide a child living in poverty with a place to be creative and to give them their very own instrument. Violins are not common in Vietnam, but a beautiful, universal instrument. By giving our students violins, we feel that it is a simple but powerful way to help them gain confidence, by having them learn something that only the most elite have the opportunity to learn. Music itself also allows them the needed time away from chores, work and school, to be musical, artistic and creative.
In addition to all of these wonderful benefits to the kids, the school has become a place for mentoring, friendship, peer sharing and bonding. All of these things help our kids to stay inspired to continue to learn together as a musical group, and it carries forward into their schoolwork.
During the summers, Rock-Paper-Scissors has started to provide music and art summer camp opportunities to over 250 children in three ethnic minority villages. These children are segregated from the main ethnic group in Vietnam, and have little opportunity to move out of poverty. We hire our older music and art students from Cam Duc to help as counselors, to play their music, sing, and teach the kids from the villages musical games. We hope that the contact with these students will help to inspire the kids from the villages to want to stay in school, and our kids from Cam Duc to bring awareness to the poverty and segregation of the ethnic minorities in Vietnam. Although these villages are within a half hour drive, our students from Cam Duc had never visited them, and some were amazed of the devastating poverty that they see there. Perhaps as friendships grow between the two groups, students will be inspired to work towards change for these kids.
With our 22 students musicians and our 28 art students in our year-round program there is a lot of activity in our small building back in Cam Duc. There is lots of chatter, and small groups of students playing their violins together, morning classes have ended and the students put their violins back in their black cases, swing the strap over their backs, and climb onto their bikes, sometimes two to a bicycle, out the large metal gates of our school they go, and up the dirt road towards town.
Thank you for helping us inspire these kids and for giving them this special place to become strong, confident individuals.
Sara (Rock-Paper-Scissors Children’s Fund Founder)
PS-Please email me at sara@rockpaperscissorschildrensfund.org if you would like to learn more about volunteering, or helping us in any way. Thank you.
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