met once a boy who did not know who his parents were. I asked him what would he like to do when he comes of age. "I want to know my real name" was his answer. I did not know how to react.
People accustomed to call him "hoai" (beloved). His father did not teach him why he was born, and he never experienced family life. He just vaguely remembered that, when he was a child, his mother left him alone in the market place. Somebody told him the story.
n another occasion I happened to meet a girls with an innocent expression. She worked as a prostitute and had been accepted by an organization after leaving a reformatory. Her mother had spent all her savings in gambling and sold her daughter to a brothel.
"Do you have any dreams?" I asked her. She answered me back, "Dreams? Do you think that I can have any at all?"
ow are the dreams of children of rural and mountain areas? They want to go to school to learn how to read and write the same as the children in the cities. They want to wear good clothes, and to put on sandals. Some will be happy with having a notebook. As we enter the third millennium, to be able to watch TV and to play computer games are heavenly dreams for children living in remote rural areas without electricity.
hy is it that Vietnamese children have to suffer so much injustice and misery? To me, not only as a Vietnamese but also as a human person, this is difficult to understand. In case I had to face the same realities, how could I react? Confronted with the realities that so many children have to bear, I sometimes want to close my eyes and my ears, deceiving my own heart. I get weary of waiting for the day when the dreams of children bloom and fructify. It would be wonderful if we could make a space in our hearts for these children.
(Edited from CHAO VIETNAM n. 17)
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