By Sara Stevens Nerone | Founder
It’s the end of July and I’m writing to you from my hotel room in Hue City, Vietnam where the weather currently reads “105F, but feels like 133F”!! As the founder of Rock-Paper-Scissors I come to Vietnam once a year for a month to bring young musicians, artists and teachers from the U.S. to volunteer to help us run our ethnic minority camps, work with our staff here and teach our students attending our three small music and art schools. At the same time our volunteers also participate in giving bikes to girls at local schools. Over the last three weeks we have given 40 bicycles, making the total number for this year so far, 240 girls receiving new bikes.
This summer a volunteer videographer from the U.S. has also traveled with us and he is documenting how we give bikes and how we use your donations. He has been working hard to interview some of the girls at their homes with their parents. This young nine year old and her family in the photos were very patient with us, allowing him to film and interview them in and out of their house. She told us how excited she was to have the bike because now she could carry two of her siblings on the back of it to school. All together the family was very excited to receive such a beautiful gift and requested that we please thank the people in the United States who so kindly gave the money to buy the bike.
During the interview we learned that she was one of five children. Her mother and father are working very hard to keep the children in school, but her father told us that sometimes there is only a little bit of work to even keep him busy. He hoped that he would be able to provide the schooling that the kids need, but felt that he could not make any promises and had to “see what the future brought to his family”.
The following week during our second bike giving I met an 84 year old grandmother who personally wished to say hello and thank me for giving the bikes. She had been taking care of her granddaughter alone for a number of years. While she was telling me how excited she and her granddaughter were for being chosen to receive a bike, she became overwhelmed with emotion and began to cry. She told me that it would have been very hard for her to afford to buy a bike on her own for her granddaughter.
These are just two stories from the many girls and families that you have supported over the past few years. I wish that each of you, or donors, could meet and visit with these girls like I have to be able to see firsthand the difference you are making. I thank each of you again for donating to these beautiful kids.
Sara
PS-Please email me at sara@rockpaperscissorschildrensfund.org if you would like to learn more about volunteering or helping us in any way.
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