Meant to be…………..

This whole ACCV journey has been quite remarkable, we’ve had our ups and downs and we’ve learnt so much along the way.

As well as a sense of achievement, it has really given us a sense of gratitude, not only for the wealth and security that is part of our every day life here in Australia, but for the privilege of knowing the amazing people that ACCV deals with regularly.

Each visit to Hanoi we catch up with Quan, Hong, the members of the Blind Association, the kids of Friendship home and Blue Dragon street kids centre.

Blue Dragon is an amazing organisation that creates new realities for young street kids in desperate need of a hand up. They have always been a great friend to ACCV, offering friendship and support as we find our way. Rose regularly does cooking classes there and we always enjoy visiting, they are inspiring to say the least!

One of the many things I am very grateful for is the people who have joined ACCV and who work with us to try and make a difference. Our newest team member is no different…........ I’d like to introduce you to Toan.

We met Toan on our very first family visit to Blue Dragon a few years back. He’s a great young guy and he welcomed us to Blue Dragon with open arms, we had a lovely chat and he made quite an impression on us all. With each visit to Blue Dragon since, Toan has always greeted Rose and I with one of his special grins and we’ve always enjoyed catching up with him, he loves to practice his English and tell us about his studies.

It is wonderful for us that he is now a member of the ACCV team – lucky us!, we seem to be destined to have fabulous people on board!!

Michael has also mentioned it on the Blue Dragon Blog… http://vietnamstreets.blogspot.com/

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It goes around and it comes around……………..

We are really busy at ACCV at the moment, preparing for the English language course for blind people. Our pilot course will begin in the first week of May, it’s very exciting for us all and should be a real life changing experience for the blind students, it will really open up a whole new world for them. We have had a wonderful response from both the blind community (we are already talking to other centers that would like us to run the course with them) and also from voluntary teaching staff. We had a meeting with the teachers and teaching assistants yesterday and it was a pleasure to be in such great company. An enormous amount of thanks goes to Juliette, she has worked tirelessly and passionately to get this course off the ground, she’s doing a great job for ACCV. We are really indebted to her, she is one amazing lady. So, with Brian, Anh & Dat also working away for us, we are building a great team

The language course is shaping up to be a fabulous programme, full of interesting, interactive learning materials. While researching and planning the syllabus I came across a terrific English language website called http://www.dreamenglish.com/ We are incorporating songs into the programme so it was a wonderful find. I was even more delighted when I discovered that the songs could be downloaded for free, (which I promptly did!) I then emailed the website creator ‘Matt’ and told him what we were doing and thanked him for the use of his songs.!

Matt then had a read of our website, wrote about us on his dream English blog http://dreaminenglish.wordpress.com/ and followed up with a lovely email, that included a donation of the Dream English songs package to ACCV!! The package includes a number of other songs, all of them designed to be really useful in the English language classroom. We have now incorporated them into our programme and the lyrics are being brailled as we speak.

If you are at interested in English language songs as a fun way to teach letters, numbers, days of the week etc. have a look at this website, it’s fabulous. Thanks Matt!

I hope everyone is keeping well, I will send another news update soon. Once again a big thank you, none of this is possible without your support.

Kind regards
Alison & Rose