Educating the street children of Vietnam.

• Author: Nguyen, Chi
• Position: Voices

My parents, who had been studying in Japan when Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975, moved to the U.S. in 1983, and I was born in California five years later. All I knew about Vietnam, my parents' homeland, was that the people there were poor, and that we shared a language.

But I didn't understand the extent of the contrast between my world in America and Vietnam. I just knew that somehow things weren't fair, and I had to try to even out the playing field. I had so many things: so much food I didn't necessarily want to eat, toys I didn't need, clothes I couldn't wear, and I knew that the people in Vietnam didn't have any of that.

So when I was 10, my sister and I decided to sell my collection of Beanie Babies and our homemade almond toffee to raise money for Vietnam. We raised $1,048, and donated it to a nonprofit organization called VNHELP (Viet Nam Health Education and Literature Projects) for a small library.

The following summer, I went to Vietnam with my family for the first time. We visited the tiny village of Giai Xuan, where our donation had furnished a new library with books, shelves, tables, and chairs.

A few days later, we visited another VNHELP project, a streetchildren's shelter in the nearby city of Can Tho. I met children ages 7 to 17 who had been neglected and abandoned by their families. They are picked up off the streets and brought to the shelter, where they're fed, clothed, and sent to school or given...