The students at Denmark’s Frederiksborg Gymnasium & HF have for the third year in a row raised money to renovate a school in Vietnam, and this year the amount is record high with a total of DKK 383,465, sn.dk writes.
On 2 December, the participating students donated a day of work to the initiative “Give a hand to Hanoi” and got involved in the local community doing various jobs. Some students helped older people with cleaning, others washed cars, and some helped with full cleaning of the high school.
3rd-year student Mads Mørck Christensen was in charge of 30 students, who were responsible for the dissemination and coordination of the collection. He has experienced great support to help the students at Frederiksborg Gymnasium & HF’s friendship school Ban Pho, located in the mountains of Sa Pa in Vietnam.
The money raised goes unappreciated to renovate the school. In 2019, Mads Mørck Christensen was in Vietnam to visit Frederiksborg Gymnasium & HF’s friendship school, which is not the school the students just collected money for.
“When I visited Vietnam, I experienced what a difference it could make to help. We visited a school where the children could not go to school in the winter due to holes in the walls and lack of insulation,” he says.
Last year, the students collected a total of DKK 194,680, while the amount in 2019 was DKK 145,500. The money went to renovate a school in Nam Lang, which is also located in the mountains of Sa Pa. That renovation has now been completed and due to the large amount raised in 2020, the renovation of the school in Ban Pho could begin.
Mads Mørck Christensen expects that the large amount from this year’s collection means that the school in Ban Pho will be completely renovated and that at the same time it will be possible to start another school renovation.
Mads Mørck Christensen is pleased that they can give the students in Ban Pho a helping hand.
“I experienced a big culture shock when I visited the schools in 2019 in relation to the conditions under which the children go to school, which are very different from those we know from Denmark. That is why it is a great pleasure to be part of a project where you can make a difference,” he says.
