NGUOI VIET - In tune with a worthy cause

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In tune with a worthy cause
Thursday, March 03, 2005 By Jami Farkas

Chi Nguyễn has been playing the piano for 13 years, Trúc for 17 years. They have won awards such as the Blew-Culley-LaFollette Prize in the Stanford Music Awards Competition. Photo courtesy of the Nguyễn family.

Their parents raised them to have a social conscience.

Danh and Kim Nguyễn told their young daughters about life in Việt Nam, about friends who were poor and had to send their children to work, instead of to school. They used pictures on television of starving children in Africa to start conversations with their girls about hunger in their own homeland. They told tale after tale of poverty.

Chi Nguyễn, then 10, had a thought.

“If the kids over there have so little and we have so much, then why can’t we just send our stuff over there?” she wondered.

Her mother explained that money was more practical. So Chi and her older sister, Trúc, decided money it would be.

Six years ago, Chi, now 16, and Trúc, now 22, began an odyssey of helping others. It started small — a garage sale brought in $1,000 — but this weekend, the siblings will present their sixth annual children’s benefit concert in Pleasanton, Calif., an event they hope will net $10,000.

“We didn’t know what our first concert would yield,” Trúc Nguyễn, a Stanford University graduate, remembered. “We didn’t know if people would show up, what the reception would be.”

When men, women and children filled the seats to hear the pair play the piano and other local musicians perform, they knew it was a success. They knew they could continue.

But they never could have envisioned in 1998 reaching this spot.

Back then, they thought on a much smaller scale. Their goal was to help children in Việt Nam, and the garage sale, they decided, would be their project for national “Make A Difference Day.”

They advertised the show to their neighbors. Chi volunteered to sell her Beanie Babies collection. (“It was just sitting there,” she said.) They whipped up homemade almond toffee from their aunt’s recipe.

But their work gained momentum. A local newspaper wrote about it. Students at Chi’s school also donated their Beanie toys. By the time they were done, they had surpassed $1,000 in sales.

“I thought $80 would be good,” said Chi, now a senior at California High School in San Ramon, Calif. She will head to Stanford in the fall.

Now, what to do with the money. Their mother told them they should research organizations like VNHELP that helped others in Việt Nam. Doing so, they chose to send funds to a library in a rural village called Giai Xuân.

“I really like to read, and initially I had wanted to do a book drive for people in Việt Nam,” Chi said. “Mom reminded me they couldn’t read English books.”

Their money went far; it bought not only printed materials, but also tables, chairs and fans for the facility. They saw the rewards of their labor on their first visit to their ancestral land in 1999.

“It was a really neat feeling. I just had this huge wave of wow, that’s kind of cool,” Chi said.

But they soon would learn there was so much they could do.

They went to see another VNHELP project, a shelter for street children in Cần Thơ.

“We had so much fun playing with them we actually went back a couple of times over the next two days,” Chi recalled.

Their parents’ words came back to them. These girls were lucky children. They weren’t like the youngsters they just met who were orphans, some abandoned, some whose families couldn’t afford to feed them so they went scrounging for food.

Yet these were their new friends. Bright kids who soaked up what the shelter’s teachers taught them. Chi and Trúc wouldn’t let them down.

So the Cần Thơ group became their passion. But they knew supporting the shelter — which could run on $5,000 a year —needed more than a garage sale.

So the siblings, who had been playing piano almost since they could walk, decided to stage a benefit concert. They had no idea how to go about it at first, but it all came together. Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, where Trúc went to school, donated the use of its theater. Local professional musicians came forward to volunteer their talents. Thus they created an event. With no overhead costs.

About 200 people attended, giving them the motivation to keep going. To date, through five concerts and winters of selling almond toffee, they have raised about $36,000. The Nguyễn sisters are the sole support for the shelter.

Chi plans to study civil and environmental engineering at Stanford and hopes to become an attorney. Trúc wants to return to school to get her MBA and eventually work in the nonprofit field. The children in Việt Nam have worried that as the sisters get older, they will abandon them.

But they are committed for the long haul and hope to make enough money to expand to another project.

“It’s inspirational and it makes me want to do more, Trúc said. “It makes me want to keep doing this as long as I can... being able to raise more money.”

Their mother, Kim, a tutor, said she is glad her daughters took their lessons to heart.

“My husband and I are very proud of them,” she said. “We feel we are very fortunate, even though we taught them and told them stories. This has to be from themselves.

“When they are raised in a country like this, they don’t understand the other world. The trip to Việt Nam and our stories have made a difference.”

SIXTH CHILDREN’S BENEFIT CONCERT
When: 2 p.m. Sunday.
Where: Amador Theater, Pleasanton, Calif.
Cost: $9 admission
Info: (925) 275-9250 or www.vnyouthinterchange.net

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