By Sara Stevens Nerone | Founder and President
Dear Friends,
We wanted to provide you with another update on how your support and funding has changed the lives of our kids in Vietnam. Thank you for believing in our programs and providing the donations needed to help our kids.
Last fall, I submitted a grant and the granting agency wanted me to provide numbers and data on the impact of our programs in Vietnam. They wanted to know how many kids we are supporting with music and art lessons and how many bicycles we’ve given away. Although I agree, we have to provide this sort of data I believe that the numbers will and can never truly capture the outcome or results of our programs. We now have 83 students receiving weekly care and mentoring through our music and art classes. We know each student and their families, and we know the different challenges each of them face. We support them in many ways outside of our programs, by supplying them with school materials and paying their government school fees, in order to make sure that they can stay in their academic schools.
Recently our program manager, who is also a teacher in the local high school, told me about one of our students who plays the cello, and how he never spoke up in school, was so incredibly shy, and unhappy in school, until he started with us. She wanted to write a letter to the granting agency to tell them about each student and their individual success story. For Thien, he has become a confident young man, and even recently took part in the school’s music competition, getting up in front of the entire school to perform on his own, something she said, he would have never done before joining our program. This sort of outcome is what I dreamed this program would achieve; build confident, self-motivated learners and leaders.
As part of this report I wanted to also introduce you to Trang, one of our newest violin students. We hope that our program will support and provide encouragement to Trang in the same way it has for Thien. Trang is 11 years old and a 5th grader, and the youngest child in a family of five. Her mother works in the seafood packing industry, making very little money, and her father works in the wedding business, also making very little income. Unfortunately, both of Trang’s older siblings had to give up high school because the family was so poor, and move away from home in order to find work to help support the family. They send money home to help to keep Trang in school. Trang is very smart and she is the pride of her whole family, they all dream of her going to college and getting a good job, and are willing to sacrifice their education and lives for this. We are very excited that Trang has joined our program and that we have this opportunity to support her and her family. She has been practicing and working very hard to learn the violin, and is incredibly happy to be part of the classes.
Thank you all for providing this sort of experience and nurturing for our students. Please help to spread the word about our programs if you can, share this report or email it to a friend who might consider supporting us as well. Thank you again, we could not run these programs without you.
Best to all of you and thank you for reading this report,
Sara Nerone
Please email me if you have any questions, or just want to chat or learn more about our programs: sara@rockpaperscissorschildrensfund.org
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