Story Photos
 Two young girls wait in anticipation as the Uplift Group members arrive for the dedication ceremony. Courtesy of Judy VanderMaten
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Project Uplift builds on past success with another trip to Vietnam
Sunday, August 17, 2008 12:10 AM PDT
By Tom Paulu
Printable version
E-mail this articleEvery morning for two weeks, the Americans left their air-conditioned hotel and caught a bus ride to work sites in a Vietnamese village. Once they arrived, the students, teachers and business people from Cowlitz County picked up shovels and pitched hard dirt under a searing hot sun.
“It averaged in the high 90s or 100 every day,” said team member Chris Holmes. “The humidity was 100 percent.”
Most of the construction work on the rural primary schools was done by Vietnamese contractors. But members of a 35-member group of mostly local residents who traveled to Vietnam earlier this summer say there’s a deeper value in their work than how many shovelfuls of earth they turned.
“A big part of the reason for doing this is getting people together, not building the schools,” said Holmes, 55, of Cathlamet. Mixing with Vietnamese helps Americans get past thinking of the country only as the site of an unpopular war that claimed 50,000 American lives.
“They see that we care and that we want to do something for them,” said DeNise Thomas of Longview, 45.
“It’s seeing the expressions on the kids’ faces,” said Jerra Jenny, 22, of Bellingham. “They’re so grateful because they have nothing, nothing. It gives me a greater appreciation for what I have.”
This summer’s project was a continuation of Project Uplift, started by Thuy Vo of Longview.
Vo and his wife, Anh Nyugen, fled their native Vietnam separately in 1975. Vo eventually started V.O. Printers in Longview and served on the Longview City Council. He’s currently on the Lower Columbia College board of trustees. Nyugen teaches at Lower Columbia Head Start.
The Vos and old friends in Vietnam first built a school house there in 2001 near Da Nang, where Vo grew up.
In 2005, the Vos lead a dozen volunteers from the Longview area on a school-building trip to Vietnam. Several of those who went in 2005 returned this summer, including Ted Thomas, 45, of Longview.
This time, Thomas was accompanied by his wife, DeNise, their 17-year-old daughter, Amanda, and 15-year-old niece, Jessie Specht of Kelso.
The Vos gathered donations of about $27,000 for construction costs, but everyone who traveled with them paid his or her expenses of around $1,500.
“Most of the Vietnamese don’t understand why we pay the airfare” just to work on building in a faraway country, Vo said. He tries to put the why into words: ”... the feeling that you can change people’s lives. It’s worth every penny of it.”
Holmes and his wife, Judy VanderMaten, 56, were planning to take a vacation to Peru until they heard about Project Uplift.
Holmes said that in Vietnam, the government pays for teachers’ salaries but not the school buildings or supplies, which are the community’s responsibility. “We had boxes and boxes of school supplies” on the flights over, he said.
The group’s tasks included adding a third room at a school built during the previous Project Uplift expedition, and digging a trench for a stone wall at a new school.
“We did the grunt work, because they already had contractors,” VanderMaten said.
The Americans arrived at the school each day around 8:30 a.m. (Vietnamese workers started at 4 a.m. to beat the heat, and took a midday break, Thomas said.)
It was so hot that the Americans had to take a break every 20 minutes and lie in the shade.
“We drank liters and liters and liters of water,” Ted Thomas said.
The Americans worked alongside Vietnamese men and women. “They put us to shame,” Holmes said. “I never saw any of them break a sweat.” Unlike the shorts-and-T-shirts attire of the Americans, Vietnamese residents wore long pants and shirts. “They always have some sort of floppy hats,” Ted Thomas said.
Though Vietnamese might have been incredulous to see the sweaty foreigners hefting shovels, the image of them doing hard work was important, the travelers said.
“I think there’s a little bit of a humbling experience doing that kind of work,” Ted Thomas said.
The trip wasn’t just sweaty labor, however.
In the afternoon, the worn-out workers would return to their $20-per-night beach side hotel and take showers. “We’d go to the beach,” VanderMaten said. In the evenings, many of them volunteered to teach English in a college.
The students could read and write English well, Ted Thomas said, “but their pronunciation was atrocious.” Students were eager to improve their English speaking skills, DeNise Thomas said. “They wanted to suck it up. They wanted to talk and talk and talk.”
Ted Thomas, who’s on the Longview School Board, and others who went on the trip were impressed by Vietnamese young people’s burning desire to learn, and how their elders value education.
“There’s just this thirst to learn,” Thomas said. “I think they see that education is a way they’re going to improve their economy and their place in life.”
“The Vietnamese are very passionate about their communities and their country,” DeNise Thomas said. “That passion takes them quite a ways as they look to new enterprise in business.”
Ted Thomas noticed how much more construction is going on than during his trip to Vietnam three years earlier. “The economy continues to mature and it’s maturing at a very fast rate,” he said. “They have this huge vision of bringing more tourism, which I think is going to change the country.”
After the work project was over, VanderMaten and Holmes traveled on their own to other Vietnam locales, including the memorial at the site of the My Lai massacre, where American troops killed up to 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in 1968, and a temple devastated by American bombing. “We would run into people our age missing a limb or an eye,” VanderMaten said.
If there’s lingering hostility from the war that ended 33 years ago, it didn’t show. “They knew we were Americans and they were pleased to see us,” Holmes said.
VanderMaten, a professional photographer, said parents in this country sometimes shy away from having their children’s photos taken by a stranger. In Vietnam, parents would tell their children to wave at the lens.
“They liked to touch us,” said Specht, a sophomore at Kelso High School. “The little kids liked to touch my braces.”
She and her cousin, Amanda Thomas, learned how to barter in the markets and to appreciate the smelly durian fruit, a delicacy in the country.
The Thomases went to a KFC in Ho Chi Minh City, where the fast food came with real silverware. When they were done, “we didn’t know what to do with it,” whether to leave it on the tray or throw it away, said Amanda Thomas, a Mark Morris senior. (The restaurant workers finally came to get it.)
When the Americans went their separate ways at the end of the two weeks, tears flowed freely at the airport. “They cry like babies,” Vo said.
Already there’s talk of another trip, with Vo’s Lion’s club pledging funding.
He won’t have trouble finding volunteers.
“A lot of my friends want to go back with me in three years,” Amanda Thomas said.
“It’s going to be different every time people go back,” DeNise Thomas said. “The country is continuing to mature.”
Related article:
Hope building -- Longview volunteers construct school in Vietnam (July 14, 2005)
El Gabilon wrote on Aug 17, 2008 5:48 PM:
wrote on Aug 18, 2008 10:55 AM:
The Vo's came to this country and were thankful. They have worked multiple jobs to attain what they have. Each has given back to this city and country more than most. Mr. Vo is active in service organizations, volunteers for boards and foundations, was elected to the City Council, is a member of the Board of Trustees for our Community College and many more. His wife works for Head Start. She also spends her off time working with these same families to make sure their children grow up in a loving atmosphere and have a chance at a productive life.
They give so much and ask for no recognition. They give back to a country that has given them freedom and a chance. The same chance our forefathers were given.
Thuy and Anh have also never forgotten their families and friends in Vietnam. Mr. Vo fought along side the Americans during the war and saw his country being destroyed. They go back to help rebuild; to help the children, who without help, would not able to learn and get those jobs to contribute to their country. The other volunteers go for the same reasons.
Perhaps this person should volunteer for something instead of complaining about those who do. "
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