Nhat Anh & Thuy Phan/Nguoi Viet
Nguyen Quang Thach is on a mission to bring books to the Vietnamese countryside, and he’s doing it one village at a time from Hanoi to Saigon. Nguyen is walking over 1000km in hopes of bringing awareness and education to his project. He began walking on the lunar new year, also known as Tet, and is currently in Ninh Thuan district. He has roughly two more weeks to go before he reaches his final destination.
Nguyen Quang Thach poses with a marker to show how far he’s come in his walk across Vietnam. (Photo Nguyen Quang Thach facebook)
On his way walking from north Vietnam to the south, Nguyen stops by schools, and asks locals about their reading habits. What he found was that no one reads because they don’t have books available to them.
Thach is a champion of what he calls “parent-libraries” in rural schools. The way it works is this: Thach helps build libraries in up to four classes, shelves filled with books, and then others replicate the model in the community. Parents hand over $3 each for the first year to sustain the libraries and in subsequent years, their contribution is $1. So far, he has been able to collect over 3800 parent-libraries and has distributed books to over 200,000 people in Vietnam. And he’s just getting started.
Thach poses with a book and local on his journey through Vietnam to raise awareness.
Kind of.
Thach said he has been advocating for books for underprivileged children for the past 18 years. He comes from a long line of educators – his dad taught math for free to poor children for 20 years in Ha Tinh and his uncle is famed writer Nguyen Quang Than. His grandfather’s brother also built schools for children. To Thach, the desire to give back and do good is something he grew up with and he hopes the children learn to give back in this way as well.
Although the walk from north to south is arduous and hard, Thach says it brings him joy to be able to connect with people in different parts of the country and spread the gospel of education and knowledge. He is blind in one eye so walking can be difficult and dangerous. However, he doesn’t know how mcuh longer he can do this, so while he can, he continues to walk on.
The purpose of walking is to ask more than 500,000 people to donate roughly $11 U.S. dollars for a year to build the bookcases across Vietnam.
And, when all is said in done, Thach hopes to take his campaign and walk to India and help the children there as well.
