On January 12th, Saigonchildren was joined with our partnered sponsors to bring together a fun-filled day of activities for over 100 disadvantaged children.
Coordinated by our volunteer university beneficiary students, this event was organised to celebrate Lunar New Year for our primary and high school children and prepare them for another year of school. It was also a great opportunity for all our students to connect, become friends and have a lot of fun together, as well as interact with university students whom hopefully they’ll become one day.
The children were split up into teams organised by the university students where they were tasked to create team flags. In their teams, they also had to come up with a fun performance to showcase in front of everyone, guided by the help of their university student leaders. Throughout the rest of the day, they were all engaged in a lot of fun, team-oriented activities including jump rope, hula hoop games, and more. While these activities were very enjoyable for the children, they were also a fun way of strengthening the children’s problem solving and team-building skills, which are highly important skills for kids to learn.
The highlight of the presentation was hearing the inspiring story of a Saigonchildren beneficiary alumni, (his name). In his heartfelt story, he told us how he struggled with severe financial difficulty growing up. He went from working with his mother as a poor street vendor to make ends meet which made it extremely difficult for him to focus on his education as a child to becoming a highly capable businessman (needs fact-checking) working in a large corporate company and living a stable life; helped by Saigonchildren’s programme throughout the way. His story emotively conveyed Saigonchildren’s key goal in creating better opportunities for disadvantaged children, thus creating better lives for them, which (name) inspiringly shared to the younger students in encouragement for their own respective futures.
The day ended with all the children receiving Tet food and gift hampers which will go towards helping them prepare for the new school year and the new year ahead.