BTO - Those who hold kindness and loyalty dear

Rarely speak of the people they have helped

For they always remember the old saying

“Do a good deed and never expect to be repaid”

Such is the teacher named Tôn

Who gives to charity, yet always stays humble.

(Excerpt from: Flower of Compassion, an epic poem by Bùi Thiện Toại)

I am an ethnic minority student from Cao Bằng. I come from an illiterate family of five children, and I am the eldest. We lived high in the mountains, where life was hard and we lacked everything. When I was 10, I moved with my parents to three different places in search of a living, yet life was still one of toil and poverty. At 11, I was lucky enough to join a literacy class and then went straight into grade 3. From then on, I always longed to continue my journey in pursuit of learning, and in the end I became a university student and went down to Thái Nguyên to study, while my four younger siblings are all illiterate and already married.

After I became a student, some kind friends who saw how hard my situation was suggested that I write a letter asking for charitable support to help cover my living and study costs. At first it sounded strange and I could hardly believe my ears, because I always thought the village way: even when one family's buffalo or cows ate a few stalks of rice or a few ears of corn belonging to another, compensation had to be paid according to village custom. Apart from meals that relatives and friends invited each other to, which were no problem, I had never heard of anyone giving someone hundreds of thousands, let alone millions, of dong.

But life was so hard. Other students received money from their parents every month for food and school. Those whose homes were in Thái Nguyên or nearby provinces such as Bắc Giang and Bắc Ninh… could have their parents send up rice and food to last a week or a month whenever they did not go home for the weekend. My parents, on the other hand, farmed hillside fields, and our meals were mostly coarse corn ground in a stone mill, with vegetable soup. Even when there was rice, our house was far from the road, and a motorbike taxi from the commune to the district town was quite expensive. Going home for the occasional holiday was hard enough, let alone having food and money sent from home. It would take my parents several months to scrape together a few hundred thousand dong from selling pumpkins, soybeans and firewood, or borrowing from relatives, to send to me, so I lived mostly on credit. Every time I received some money from my parents, before I had paid off my old debts I had to run up new ones: at the food stall, for rent, for electricity and water. Just thinking about it made me sigh… So I decided to ask again about the charitable person my friends had mentioned, and learned that she was teacher Tôn Thị Thu Nguyệt, born in 1954, an English lecturer at the University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. She founded a program to support poor students striving to overcome hardship, and ethnic minority students from remote areas in especially difficult circumstances. Founded in 1997, her program has drawn contributions from many individuals and groups in Vietnam and abroad, helping  so many generations of students across the country rise above adversity.

Mother of a thousand children

To ask for help, you have a student in the group whom she already trusts and supports write a letter of introduction, together with a letter describing your circumstances, and send them to her for consideration so that she can find you a sponsor. She herself already supports many people, so if no sponsor can be found yet, she adds money from her own pocket and asks the students already receiving help to share part of theirs, putting together a share for the newcomer.

She sends the allowance regularly, five to six hundred thousand VND per month, to an ATM account. The group leader's job is to withdraw the money and hand it out to the members, and to collect their thank-you letters to send to Ms. Nguyệt, who passes them on to the sponsors. If a sponsor is a foreigner, she has to translate the letters into their language. This is no simple task: the students write a great many letters, so it is very demanding work for her. She also makes the group leader responsible for following each member's studies and their conduct, good or bad, and reporting back to her. Ms. Nguyệt not only teaches her students to strive to rise up, she also teaches us to share love in life: to look down and see that there are many people in harder, more disadvantaged situations than our own, so that we learn to “share our rice and our clothes”. Besides caring about our meals and our sleep, she cares about every aspect of how her students learn to live, as the saying goes, “learn how to eat, how to speak, how to wrap and how to unwrap”. Sometimes I think that many people believe “Go all over the world, and no one is as good as your mother…”, but for me there is also a wonderful second mother: our Mother Nguyệt.

Most of the members of the group are ethnic minority students who, because they lived far from school, started late or faced other hardships, are older than their classmates. When we write thank-you letters to our sponsors, we know only their names, not their jobs or ages, so we usually call ourselves their nieces and nephews and address them as “Auntie” or “Uncle”. One day I was watching a music show on TV and was startled to see a singer in a famous young Korean pop group named Jessica, because that was the same name as a sponsor who had helped many of us in the Thái Nguyên student group, and whom, every time we wrote thank-you letters,

Ms. Nguyệt and her student Nguyễn Sơn Lâm (Photo: Vietnamnet)

 we had always called “Auntie”. If it really was that singer, so young and pretty, dancing so playfully, she might not even be as old as we are… Then we told each other that even if it really was her and we called her “Auntie”, when Mother Nguyệt translated it into English it would all become YOU anyway, so what did it matter? Our Mother Nguyệt is still the best. And we had another hearty laugh.

Although we have never met our sponsors in person to thank them, or known much about them, in our hearts we know that the person leading all this work is our teacher, the mother of a thousand children:  Tôn Thị Thu Nguyệt.

Her example and her compassionate heart will shine forever in the sky of love for humanity, the sky of sharing and caring for one another in life.

Bàn Hữu Tài