“Two buses? Check!
Twelve NGOs? Check!
Water and necessary supplies for a full day in the field?
Check, check!”
This is how Nina Nordrum Vennevold starts her report on the website of the Norwegian Embassy in Hanoi from the annual meeting between the Norwegian Embassy and the different Norwegian NGOs working in Vietnam. Enjoy the rest of her report below:
The sun was barely awake when thirty-five people hit the road Thursday morning on March 18 in Hue. Football activities, field visits to various development projects and project presentations by local stakeholders were part of the agenda for the annual meeting between the Norwegian Embassy and the different Norwegian NGOs working in Vietnam.
First stop – football for development
– The children’s physical health is improved, they are more motivated in class, we see great improvements in knowledge and life skills and most importantly they have big smiles on their faces, said the Headmaster of Kim Long School Mr. Ton That Tri enthusiastically, while the sound of laughing and cheering children poured in from the open windows.
The Norwegian NGO Football for All in Vietnam (FFAV) has built a football pitch for Kim Long School – one of totally 16 – and established Kim Long Football Club with a special focus on disadvantaged children and children with difficult backgrounds.
FFAV is a joint project between the Football Association of Norway (NFF) and Norwegian Church Aid (in Vietnam also known as Nordic Assistance to Vietnam; NAV). Football for all was established in 2003, and focus on developing grassroots football with an integrated life skills component. Learn more about FFAVs visions, values and goals here.
Reaching the most vulnerable
After a brief orientation about Norwegian Church Aids (NCA) work in Vietnam, the afternoon was spent surrounded by the fresh air and the green quilts of never ending rural rice fields. NCA arranged a field visit to the village My On by the Tam Giang Langoon, one of the poorest in the area, where NCA has a community development project. The village is highly affected by storms, floods and other calamites every year – a heavy burden for the 67 men, women and children and their bamboo mix with of mud, iron and nylon sheets houses.
– What have you appreciated the most from the community development project, Egil Hauge from the Norwegian Missions Alliance wondered while looking around on forty something people gathered in the tiny though one and only solid house in the village.
– This house, twenty smiling faces immediately replied, while balancing hens and children crawling around.
– If and when everyone has a house like this, or at least half or a third of us, we do not have to flee from My On village so often when the weather turns bad. We can invest our time in producing enough food for our village instead of constantly repairing our houses, one of the villagers continued.
NAV also arranged field visits projects focusing on gender-based violence in Huong Tra and Quang Dien districts and to NCAs Buddhist and Catholic partners in Hue to learn about their activities on HIV prevention, stigma and discrimination reduction and care for adults and children infected and affected by HIV and AIDS
For further reading about NCAs work press here.
