[My story]The first

I was born in a upper-middle classs family in Vietnam. Maybe it’s my family’s poor past and their rise to wealth. Maybe it’s my father always pushing me to get a job. But I’ve always felt what I can only describe as guilt – guilt for being rich yet having done nothing. I’ve felt it every time I’m in the gym improving my looks while the janitor outside was working to feed his family. I’ve felt it every time I passed someone selling gum or hair combs on the street while I walked with ease listening to music. I’ve felt it every time I saw a panhandler, feeling like I should help him, yet knowing it would not ever be enough, and there would be thousands more deserved such help, thus it would not solve the root of the problem.

Around September of 2015, when life was easy,  I found out about a charity organization called !@#. They operated like a food bank, only that they delivered abundant food directly from local restaurants to slumdog areas in Hanoi. They helped many families, consist mostly of children and elders in Wednesday and Sunday every week, so their operations’ size was not as big as that of Food bank of NYC or Melbourne. Their main purpose was to save waste food and help ease the hardship of the poor.

Yet there were many problems with this method. I did some research and found some key differences between other food banks and !@#.

Firstly, !@# and many others helped ease the hardship of many people’s lives, and that was important work, but were our methods really what they needed? Most of people we helped were too young, too old, or simply unable to have a job. Our doings couldn’t give people work or any steady source of income for stability. If one day the organization left, the families would still face the same problem as they had done before it came.

Secondly it was their small size that bothers me. I had discussed with a Hanoi Du’s member about the aforementioned deflects, and she told me that they have room for help more people, working people with less than minimum wages, but there is no way to know what their actual income to make sure they really need her help. In New York, the government has their hand in this, so people must state their income to get food stamps. In Vietnam, it’s such a delicate matter, people would rather eat dirty unhealthy food than lose their pride. So they base the effectiveness of their project on the subjects’ attitude response to each donation. Both the !@#’s member and I agreed that it was an absurd method.

Once I’ve seen room for improvement in its system, I decided to find another solution to this problem. I want build a food bank (or upgrade !@# to a food bank) to help working people with barely enough money to feed their families as do Food bank in New York city. Concerned if my idea was just, I asked my boss at my charity I worked for then. She said that she did not think I know the value of hard work and earning one’s own money since I had yet to have a job. I could have regarded her judgment as lack of empathy, yet I believed she was partly true. I am not too arrogant to dismiss my own possible delusion. She said it would only be a nice school project on paper, yet if deployed on a large scale, it would be unfair to other working people. I decided that if it really does help people effectively, it would all be worth it.

So I, with my very enthusiastic new friend, Nga, set out to do a survey on people working on the street (knowing they earn the least of all), to find out how much of their income are spend on food and whether they eat healthily or not. We spend nights talking on the phone working on the survey. I honestly believed we had good intention. We really did want to help people.

So we approached people on the street. People who sell balloons on roadsides. People who has a few chairs and a table that sells coffee and tea. Nga did the talking for a few first times, I was too shy then. Then I realized these people aren’t scary! Some were grumpy, some held back a bit fearing that we might judge, but they were all very kind to us.

We thought that if we disguised it as a school project with no further intent and allowance of anonymity, people would be more open about their income. We were wrong. Out of about 30 people we approach, only about sixteen of whom were willing to state their exact income. We found out that indeed half of their income went to food and accommodation. Most of them were from outside the city, rode on a bus every morning, and left for home in the evening. So surprisingly, most of these people spent a lot of time, which they could have spent with their family, travelling to work and home. Their diet was a mess. All meals include rice and vegetable and barely any meat. They had to cut down on their own meal to save money to send back to their families at home.

We thought that we can help these people have an easier life, or to have more to buy milk for their kids, then it would all be worth it. ‘So it’s a go’, she said. Many problems ensued.

A charity organization that size to be registered must have a capital of at least 50000$, and of course we don’t have that kind of money. So we must find a patron, like CSDS or Oxfam. Thus, we had to prepare our ideas, our research to present to them. We even arranged people and contact them. Many of our work styles and ideology were in conflict with each others’.

I learned that it was again not an absolute solution. Even if I helped the mothers and fathers have more time and food for their children, and thus the children escape the poverty that haunted their parents, someone else would be poor. Someone else would do what the parents did. Someone will always have clean the toilet or mop the floor. And poverty survives.

Many would take advantage of us, selfish lazy men who do not care for others in need. They would spend money they save by eating free meals on wine and gamble, while the same amount of money saved could have been for underfed children. And poverty prevails.

We both are too busy with school works and our jobs. Our schedule was a mess.

But we could have managed all that, if not for the final straw.

(to be continued)