Cuchi, a tourist resort about 45-minute bus ride from HCM City, was a region heavily bombarded by the Americans at the end of the American-Vietnam war. It became famous because the Vietcong army had built from there the long HCM trail tunnels going hundreds of km through the jungle heading towards North Vietnam.

Several Catholic religious were forced to live together in Cuchi, from 1978. In all, about 60 persons were organized in a commune to develop a common farm. In May 1990, two Japanese who had gone to Vietnam for totally different purposes met there for the first time. One of them was Mrs. Ishimoto, a photographer, who had traveled to Vietnam with a project financed by UNESCO Japan. The other was Ando who, while teaching and working at Sophia University (Tokyo), had been in Vietnam before for an international meeting and cultural and technical training programs.

Before summer 1990, Ishimoto Akemi visited the Jesuit Social Center (Tokyo) where Ando was working to discuss possibilities of future involvement in Vietnam. As a result, the center organized a public gathering to inform people about the present realities of Vietnam and to show the beautiful photos taken by Ishimoto Akemi during her trip. The meeting was held on 25 November 1990 and about 20 persons attended it. This originated the citizens' group Japa Vietnam. A liaison office was established with volunteer staff and the first newsletter 'Chao Vietnam' was published in April 1991.

In summer 1991, 3 staff members paid a 10-day visit to Vietnam in September and made a documentary video of the first projects financed by Japa Vietnam. They were educational programs for school-age children of a large Hamsen's patients' Colony and several rural projects like, self-supported pigs' raising programs and the digging of wells.

Ishimoto who had remained in Vietnam till the end of 1991 returned to Japan but was immediately hospitalized with malign cancer. She had surgery but could not recover. She died 27 May 1992 at the early age of 51.

The activities of Japa Vietnam began to expand and it was needed to establish a liaison office at the Jesuit social center to take care of an increasing number of projects arriving from Vietnam. The relatives of the deceased Ishimoto Akemi donated us a large sum of money that needed a good administration and we soon felt the need to come to a common consensus on how to handle the many demands for assistance that reached us.

In 1992 we established the "Akimi Fund" to assist health education programs of the pediatric department of Cao Bang public hospital in a northern province of Vietnam bordering China. We started to look for outside funds in Japan as well as in other countries. Since the beginning ILBS came to our rescue to finance programs we could not afford. A story we can never forget was a large donation received by ILBS in 1991 to assist a vocational training in Cuchi that we decided to return because the local Vietnamese government denied its permission to our Vietnamese Catholic counterpart. From time to time we have met in the past such frustrating experiences.

The following are guiding priorities that help us to make decisions for assistance.

• Helping the poor.
• Assisting in community building
• Giving special attention to the forgotten ethnic minorities
• Looking for persons we can trust
• Doing as much as we can

Since 1991, we started yearly visits to Vietnam in small groups to meet personally our Vietnamese partners and to monitor common programs we had, as well as the rapid changes in the situation there. This has not only given us a broad view of the realities going on in Vietnam, but it has also helped to establish deep personal relationships with people there.