ACCV - the journey so far......: An award winning surprise....

Once again our trip to Hanoi coincides with my birthday. No complaints there, I do very well out of the whole deal, celebrations with the family before I leave Australia and then celebrations when I arrive here. It's not intentional, it just so happens that my birthday falls on the school holidays, which is a good time for us to travel. In fact, it was on my birthday back in 2006 that we made that very first trip to Friendship home.

So here we are, four birthdays later, and again we're in Hanoi. Chau organised a lovely surprise birthday party at the office for staff, students and volunteers, it was so nice to see everyone. Even Dat and his girlfriend Van travelled from Bac Ninh for the occasion.
As you can see my photoshop skills are not brilliant, but you get the idea!

Today we headed off to visit the blind students which is always a real highlight to our trip. The main reason for our visit today was to witness the opening ceremony for the latest IT course which will begin this week. The students are doing so well with the computers, they are really showing how much they have learned. It has really opened up the world to them, the potential is huge. It's great to observe their progress. I think I mentioned the recent emails and skype sessions, they're amazing.

What I didn't expect was another lovely party to celebrate my birthday, complete with cake, flowers and sing-a-longs! We had such a lovely visit and a great catch up on all the happenings at the association and with each of the students. They are all doing very well and really looking forward to the big ACCV event next Saturday night. Brent has come along with us on this trip so they were very focused on catching up on his news. They even managed to get him and Rose to join in their sing-a-long birthday gift to me, a rendition of the Beatles "Hello, Goodbye".

When we got down to the business end of things, we were absolutely floored to be informed that we had been given a medal and award issued by the Peoples Committee to acknowledge our contribution to the blind community in Hanoi.