My Kids
The Importance of Being Consistent
You know, helping kids is a long term committment. It can't be done in a day, or a week, or even a year. You have to be in it for the long haul. That's exactly why I started taking in Foster Kids. But just because kids don't live in your house doesn't mean that you don't have any obligation to help them. Whether it's around the block or around the world, I guarantee that there is a kid somewhere who could use a little guidance, a helping hand, or just the knowledge that somebody's there.
So this page is dedicated to the stories of some of my kids.
Pham Van Hung
The following is an excerpt from my travel journal dated May 23, 1994 5:24 AM - Saigon
"Pham Van Hung was orphaned at an early age in the city of Hai Phong in North Viet Nam. I've never really asked him many details. He gets quiet when I try to bring it up. Perhaps part of the problem is that I need a translator to speak with him. My Vietnamese is rudimentary at best and he has only been studying English for the past year. Unfortunately the translators tend to be educated people with social status and he is painfully shy in the presence of these strangers. He can't help but be aware of his social position as a street kid (the Vietnamese call these children Bui Doi - literally translated as "The dust of Life").
Nobody loves street kids here. When they sleep on the sidewalks ("The Sidewalk Hotel" as they call it) people kick them and spit on them. Everybody assumes that they are common, dirty, stupid thieves. Most cultures have their scapegoats. Everybody expects discrimination in America based on race. In many countries with uniform racial backgrounds it comes down to an issue of culture or religious affiliation. And maybe there is a bit of that kind of cultural unease here in Viet Nam as well. But the discrimination against street kids here is different. It seems to cross all social boundaries. Its victims are children who have done nothing wrong but dare to exist.
There is very little hope for them. In Viet Nam children are born with no social position or contract. Any respect they are accorded is due to the social status of their parents. When a child's parents die or are too poor to provide for them the only recourse left is to join the ranks of the Bui Doi. Once they are on the streets there is virtually no way out.
Hung was one of these children. Orphaned at an early age he was forced to eke out an existence begging on the streets of Hai Phong. There amid the clamor and noise of the largest seaport in the North of Viet Nam, Hung and his older sister, Hang, combed the muddy alleys and the crowded byways trying to find the next compassionate handout. Amid the dirt and noise a bowl of rice or thin soup was considered a good day's fare. An occasional morsel of chicken or fish was a banquet.
The children survived oblivious to the tumultuous changes going on around them. Through the bleak despair of the 1980's when Viet Nam's communist leadership had to concede the failure of their socialist economy and start allowing the first experiments in capitalism. Through the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and then the Soviet Union, Viet Nam's biggest benefactor. Through the withdrawal of Soviet personnel and the gradual trickle of Western visitors which was destined to become a deluge, Hang and Hung begged and scavaged and lived from meal to meal and somehow survived.
Through all this, his sister Hang was all that Hung had. She was his mother and protector, his provider and guide. She was the one to comfort his tears when they had to sleep on the streets with empty stomachs. She was the center of his world.
When Hung was 10 years old (That's 9 years old in the Western way of counting age) the children found themselves in Hanoi and Hung joined an organization of street children named Xa Me (literally "Away from Mother"). This terribly overcrowded three story house packed the kids in on dirty floors, sleeping head to foot. In the day the kids were required to walk the streets and sell newspapers, the proceeds of which went to Xa Me to cover operating expenses. It was survival at its most elementary level. Sell your labor to buy a meal and shelter. But it provided shelter and an alternative to hunger. It also taught the work ethic and the self respect that comes from earning your own way in the world.
NOTE: Xa Me does try teach the kids the work ethic instead of begging. They seem to be effective in getting the message across. I have, as a test, attempted to give money to some of the Xa Me street vendors. They politely refuse and offer a newspaper in exchange for the handout. (I have been able to buy a newspaper and then give it back to them, however - a contingency probably not anticipated in their indoctrination).
When Hang was convinced that Hung had a secure roof over his head and food in his belly, she decided to leave with some other girls and take a job in China. She told Hung that she would go away and earn a lot of money, then come back and get him. And so he waited. And he waited. For a year and a half he waited (a lifetime to a 11 year old). And in the meantime the bleakness of his meager existence bore down on him. There had to come a point where his mounting desperation overpowered his waning hope for Hang's return.
If the truth be told, there is a burgeoning market for young Vietnamese girls in China, but not in the industrial sector as Hang thought. Many girls from the North, especially, are enticed into China only to be forced into prostitution. In fact, many are kidnapped outright and sold into sexual slavery. Of course, nobody told Hang that what she was doing was naive and dangerous. And nobody told Hung that she might never return.
In the meantime, Hung at the ripe age of 11 reached his Rubicon. A life without hope is no kind of life at all, and he could see no future in hanging around Xa Me selling papers until he was too old to be of use to the organization and was dumped, poorly educated, unskilled, and unloved, back onto the streets. So he left. He attempted to survive in Hanoi by begging, but the economy was too depressed and the people too intolerant of the Bui Doi. He decided to set out for Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in the South where the streets are rife with opportunity and fortunes are waiting to be made on every street corner - or so the stories go.
It takes 48 hours to travel from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City by train. The railroad system in Viet Nam is slow with most trains averaging 25 miles per hour due in part to the poor quality of the tracks which were bombed extensively during the war. Many of the Bui Doi make the trip clinging onto the roof of the train. Through rain and tropical sun through hunger and exhaustion they cling tenaciously to their precarious perches. They may attempt to crawl down into a window for a brief respite, but the conductors are strict in enforcing the rules and relentless in their vigilance. The consequences of getting caught involve expulsion from the train as a minimum and quite possibly a sound beating or imprisonment.
Needless to say, on arrival the Bui Doi find that the streets of Saigon are not paved with gold and although it is easier for a street kid to survive here than in Hanoi, it is still survival of the most meager type. Hung, however found yet another obstacle in this, Viet Nam's largest city - his accent. After the communist victory in 1975 a large number of bureaucrats and functionaries descended upon Saigon from the North. In the meantime anybody who served in the South Vietnamese military or worked for the Americans was rounded up and sent off to prison camps euphemistically referred to as "Re-education Centers". People in the South had reason to distrust the government in the North. And anybody with a Northern accent was immediately suspect. Little Hung found that even speaking was enough to draw the immediate wrath of the South Vietnamese street kids and turn him into the object of their violence.
And so he sat on a door step in old Saigon in February of 1992 a couple of months after his arrival in Saigon with a bundle of newspapers in his hand and a look of desperation in his eyes. That's when I happened to walk by."
End of journal excerpt.
As you may recall from the page on this site named "War and it's Aftermath", Hung did very well for himself. He graduated from the Technical University at the top of his class and has been very successful in his career. He is 30 years old now and well established in his career and in his life.
There was one thing I did for him when he was a kid, which I hope provided some guidance to him. At one point when he was living with the family in Long Thanh and going to school he sent me a letter stating that some of the people around him had made a comment that he was just a little beggar boy who lived of the charity of others. This disturbed me greatly. When a kid lives with you it's possible to pull them aside and give them some sage advice. That's not so easy to do if they live halfway around the world and there is a language barrier between the two of you. So I wrote a little book for him. I printed it on parchment paper with borders around each page. I had it bound in green leather and in gold embossed lettering I had this title printed on the front cover - "Hung's Book". Then I had it translated into Vietnamese and on my next trip over there I handed it to him along with the translation.
It was the kind of advice I would have liked to give him if only I could have been there when he was growing up. So the tone of it was sort of father to son. But it was more than that. It was advice from one abused child to another. It was about how I had survived the experience and come through it all basically sound. It was exactly what I wished somebody had told me when I was growing up.
Perhaps you might want to read it. It's called Hung's Book.
Doonie
When I was working with the Omega Boy's Club I knew a lot of kids in Oakland. I mentored them and tried to get them through the minefields of life in the hood. I met Doonie when he was still in diapers. I used to take his older brothers to the Omega meetings in San Francisco, and became sort of an adopted father to Doonie's parents. They had eight kids. Seven of those were boys. Unfortunately the father, despite the fact that he loved his kids, wound up spending most of the time in jail. Doonie's mom was stressed out trying to survive as a single parent with 8 kids living on welfare.
I helped as much as I could. I mentored the kids and made sure that they all got new outfits on their birthdays, sometimes when school was starting, and of course at Christmas time. I had a big van, so I took them all to the movies, on picnics and outings, grocery shopping and sometimes just running errands.
So I met Doonie when he was still in diapers. I used to put him on one knee and his little brother on the other knee and bounce them up and down. They would just laugh and cackle. I loved the whole family as if they were all my own. Perhaps that's why the mom always told folks that I was her father. That turned some heads because of the color difference, but it was close to the truth.
It's rough growing up in the ghetto. There are no job opportunities other than selling drugs. If you try to excel in school you get punked for being "too white". There are a thousand influences that can lead you astray, but only a few that lead to success. I decided early on that I was going to be the consistent voice that urged these kids to succeed. So basically I have mentored Doonie all his life.
He's going to make it! He played High School Football well enough that he was able to get a Football Scholarship in College. He is just finishing his first year with a 3.0 GPA. It looks like he and I may both be getting Associate Degreees at about the same time. In fact his coach thinks that he may some day be NFL material. Perhaps that may be, but Doonie understands that College is really all about the grades, and that's the ball he is keeping his eyes on!
I called him up and asked him how he did it. This is what he had to say:
Glenn: What exactly made you immune to the distractions of the hood?
Doonie: Well I saw everybody else with the cars and the money from the drugs, but still moving from house to house, getting kicked out on the street. Sometimes they didn't know where there were going to sleep or where their next meal was going to come from. They weren't able to be fathers to the babies they made. So they served as negative examples for me. They showed me what I didn't want to be like.
Glenn: How many kids do you know that have been shot and killed?
Doonie: I'd say close to 20. Five of those were blood cousins.
Glenn: But you never let the odds intimidate you.. Why is that?
Doonie: Because I believe that even despite the odds there is always a doorway through them. Even if you can't always see it, you have to have confidence that it's there. You have to have the kind of friends that will help you find it.
Glenn: College has a way of opening new frontiers. Which classes have surprised you in College?
Doonie: What really grabbed my attention was Criminal Justice. I never signed up for the class. My football coach put me in it. I'm actually thinking of taking more classes in that area.
Glenn: And what has college taught you about life?
Doonie: College taught me that sometimes you are put into a predicament and you need to have friends around you that can help you move forward.
Glenn: So you're gonna make it, huh?
Doonie: Yeah.. I'm gonna make it.
