Vietnam - Cambodia new destinies

«Thanks to your help, many children and young people in Vietnam and Cambodia can continue their studies and have the opportunity for a better life.
Students receive not only valuable scholarships, but extremely valuable opportunities to overcome their difficult situations; they open up to a new, broader vision.
The love that is given accompanies them and encourages them."
We live the nightmare of an incredible hatred that relentlessly claims victims and sows even more hatred deep down.
Who is it suitable for? Certainly not to the common people, the simple and the poor who only find hope in peace, working hard for it day by day...
All of South Asia is coming back to life after the pandemic. Schools have reopened and so has much of social life.
Trade resumes, essential for countries whose growth is based on the export of labour-intensive production - at competitive costs even compared to Chinese wages - highly appreciated while turning a blind eye or two to issues of human rights or similar.
In the southern hemisphere it is the so-called informal economy that recovers more slowly, and only partially.
Sellers, day workers, small transporters, informal taxis, artisans, small farmers... activities that are the only resource for many millions of people, albeit miserable and precarious.
No welfare that gives protection; lives in emergency, struggling, counting on the ability to offer mutual help: the secret of the poor.

Imagining a future

The project is aimed at the education of girls from very poor families who have no way of making it on their own.
Oppressed not only by unemployment, but by parental illnesses that prevent strenuous work; or by their low remuneration and work discontinuity.
Or the loss of the family itself.
The FMA nuns, in their indomitable presence among families and schools in Vietnam, with their after-school programs, and in their secondary school for village girls in Phnom Penh, promote enthusiasm for learning and support balanced growth for the little ones, and not for forced stages.
Of course, mathematics is difficult even in the East, and it is necessary to come to terms with other subjects too, but school is always the key to unlocking new destinies.
Alongside this, we grow in self-awareness, in our unique and unrepeatable value, in our ability to show solidarity.
In building human development, continuity is rewarded.
Year after year, and still today, hundreds of children and young people have been supported in their school career; many have reached the end: the minimum goal is a diploma, for some even a degree, simply unthinkable in those living conditions.
The little ones have a simple dream: "To have more knowledge, to be a citizen with an honest job."
Feeling welcomed, accompanied with love, is a strength capable of overcoming everything.

Mauro Palombo
NP February 2024