Million USD charity fundraiser

VietNamNet Bridge - In 16 years of doing charity in Vietnam, the Vietnam Assistance for the Handicapped (VNAH), founded by a Vietnamese American, Mr Tran Van Ca, has given over 100,000 artificial limbs and wheelchairs to disabled Vietnamese.

In 2003 alone, Mr Ca raised US$1.7 million to buy artificial limbs and wheelchairs for the disabled, but he always refused to talk about himself, reasoning, “What I have done is just a grain of sand in the ocean.”

Do much, talk little is the character of Mr Tran Van Ca. Though operating for quite a long period of time in Vietnam, not many people know about the quiet job of Mr Ca and his non-governmental charity organisation, VNAH.

Mr Ca travels very often between Vietnam and the US and each time he returns to Vietnam he bring ‘gifts’ to Vietnamese disabled: artificial limbs, wheelchairs or doctors who come to provide free health check-ups for the poor and the disabled.

Most recently, in March 2007, Mr Ca brought a group of volunteer Vietnamese American doctors to Vietnam to examine poor patients and disabled people in some southern provinces of Vietnam. In April 2007 he returned to Vietnam again and came to Thai Binh to present artificial limbs to the disabled there.

So far, the operations of VNAH have reached remote and mountainous areas of Vietnam, from the northern mountainous provinces of Thai Nguyen and Cao Bang to Mekong Delta provinces.

“Our programme is small in scale but it is practical and highly appreciated by the Vietnamese government,” Mr Ca said.

The return
In 2003, the Washington Post had an article praising Tran Van Ca as a benefactor.

Some 30 years after coming to the US, Tran Van Ca is now the owner of a luxurious restaurant on 5ha of land in Great Falls.

After a return trip to Vietnam and a meeting with a war invalid who had lost two legs, he was awakened to the belief that it is too selfish to only help one’s family.

Giving up a business that was developing, he founded the Vietnam Assistance for the Handicapped in Virginia in 1991 with $10,000, which was used to by wheelchairs for the disabled in Vietnam. So far, Mr Ca’s organisation has built two artificial limb producing enterprises in Vietnam.

Reader’s Digest reported that Tran Van Ca left five fast food restaurants named Taco Amigo and a villa with 8 bedrooms worth millions of US dollars to return to Vietnam to do charity.

So far, VNAH has received $5.6 million in funds from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to implement projects supporting the disabled in Vietnam.

In November 2006, the US Congress approved $400,000 for VNAH to build a health rehabilitation centre in the central city of Da Nang.

“Output” for the disabled
Mr Ca says that it is a big waste to only provide vocational training for the disabled without creating ‘output’ for them. Thus, VNAH is carrying out a vocational training - job creation model on a trial basis in Dong Anh District, Hanoi and Da Lat city in the Central Highlands province of Lam Dong.

Under this programme, VNAH staff has to approach companies to ask their assistance in training and recruiting the disabled. In Da Lat, the pilot programme of VNAH has received warm support from a private company named Gia Hung. This company has helped train the disabled and promised to recruit those people after vocational training.

“Over 90% of the participants in this project have gotten stable jobs,” Mr Ca said.

In the past 16 years, VNAH has performed free orthopedic surgeries on thousands of disabled children, helped over 2,000 poor and disabled people to learn vocations and get jobs, helped over 6,000 poor children, street children and orphans to return home, study and get jobs, built 35 schools in rural and mountainous areas, and organised many free health check-up trips and many HIV/AIDS education and prevention projects.

VNAH was the first overseas Vietnamese non-governmental organisation licenced to open a representative office in Hanoi.