Hard Work in the Hot Sun!

We spent Friday through Monday working with the NGO, the Global Community Service Foundation (GCSF), on one of their new projects, a school for the visually and hearing impaired. The school is geared towards preparing young children with visual and hearing impairments for either further education in a mainstream school or for the workforce with vocational training. The GCSF took on this project after the last NGO that ran the school, then called Kids First Village, lost their funding and was unable to continue with the project.

We've been helping the GCSF with preparing the school through landscaping and cleaning. It has been a lot of hard work, with the physical labor even more exhausting in the heat (but apparently the people who live in Đông Hà consider it "cool" weather for this time of year). In addition to our work at the future school, on Saturday morning, four members of our team travelled to the home of a local ethnic minority family and aided them in building the foundation of a new bathroom.

Over the four days we worked at the site of the new school, we planted over 300 trees, cleaned three buildings, cleared four lots of grass and weeds, and truly came together as a group. We hope that our efforts will continue to benefit the school that is scheduled to open in October of this year.