This upcoming weekend UCHANU is working as the volunteer group 1 Heartland Vietnam and is taking a whole class weekend-long field trip and volunteer excursion to the province of Nghệ An. The purpose of this visit is to provide all the children in the Nghệ An school with warm winter jackets. We have been fundraising this past week in order to raise ~$2000 for the cause, using multiple methods in order to gain revenue. The most popular and successful methods are the 1 Heartland Café which is situated in front of S Home, as well as donations that have been requested from organizations and family members in other areas of Vietnam and the US. Other methods of fundraising are the UCHANU High-Roller Game night and a 3-day long fundraiser where 10% of revenue at the Diém Vọng Café is donated to 1 Heartland Vietnam.
I actually do not know much about the province of Nghệ An except for a few key facts, which make our purpose obvious. Nghệ An is located in the North of Vietnam in a mountainous area that gets very cold during the winter. The school is not heated so during the winter it can get to such temperatures that parents do not want to send their kids to school because of the intense temperature. We are providing new, warm jackets for these kids so that nothing, not even the coldest Nghệ An days, can prevent these children from getting the education they deserve.
I helped organize the Diém Vọng Café fundraiser, and though the idea was very nice, trying to bring more of the community to our cause and build relationships with nearby establishments, it is not quite as successful as I imagined. What Lan and I forgot while being inspired by the idea and past experiences with this method in America, is that the cost of food and drinks in a school (university and secondary school) area, as well as in Vietnam in comparison to America, is reasonably less. Therefore our return from this fundraiser will probably not be very much money at all, hopefully enough for a couple jackets priced at 150,000VND. We did help spread the word and, hopefully, bring more customers into the café but it is not as successful as the 1Heartland Café, which has so far earned quite a few million VND.
The UCHANU High-Roller game night was SO successful and a ridiculous amount of fun!! A much better turn-out than I had originally expected a full of friends from around HANU and Hanoi. It was basically thrown together in a day, but everything worked! We got lights, tables, drinks, music, guests, and a lot of funds for the kids in basically a few hours. Buy in was 20,000 and many people donated so much more. It was really a beautiful night with dancing and laughing and just hella fun. I think what this project has definitely done, besides brings warm jackets to Nghệ An kids, is to bring UCHANU closer together. We UC kids got to go on 2 very long trips which our HANU friends could not attend and some of us grew a little apart from our friends and buddies. It feels good to work together again, let’s get these kids some jackets!
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