Building Community in Hanoi

My mother was a teacher for forty-two years. Most of that time she taught at a local primary school near my home. Teaching for that length of time at the same school is extremely beneficial for building relationships within the community. As a child, many older boys in my neighborhood looked out for me because I was "Mrs. Lalor's son". The desire to be a part of the community I live in and to help develop it is something I got from my mother, so thank you, Mam!

The Friday night youth group I teach at Hanoi International Fellowship has become involved in building community in Hanoi. They have teamed up with another organisation I volunteer for called the Australian Charity for the Children of Vietnam. 

ACCV works to help young blind people in Hanoi have a better life through English language programs and building social networks. There is a lot more information about ACCV here where Alison has created a beautiful blog post of the same event. We met at the new HIF Center and began with a time of eating and getting to know each other better.

After lunch, we played Connect Four, Dominoes and cards. It was a real learning experience for us to see how well the blind students could play these games. I thought you needed to be able to see to play such games. After this, some of the HIF youth brought a couple of the ACCV students into the auditorium to play musical instruments.

The highlight of the day for me was all the different organisations present. There were not only members of HIF and ACCV, but also of another organisation that works with the blind called Lift You Up. Members of the Young Adults group at HIF also attended, as did other blind friends from Hanoi. Various international schools were represented including Singapore International School, UNIS and Concordia. I believe this was a very successful day of learning and building community. 

Our next project together will be to expand our game playing into the physical realm. One of the HIF members has sourced a football for blind people and we are working on creating the game pictured above, which is called Swish. It is a version of table tennis that blind people can play. Thanks to everyone who came on to this awesome event!