The following brief article will give you an impression of what the Fisher Village is : " The Red River is the biggest river in Vietnam. The delta is located in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. The city continues to expand with many people coming from the countryside into the urban area. This however, is an expensive endeavor with the government imposing a tax on people coming from the rural area to prevent a massive influx of people. Some people decide, however, to come despite this financial situation and thus must live in house boats at the river to escape from having to pay. Since they do not technically live in Hanoi they must pay for school which is usually free until the age of 12. The entire family must work hours that most people would consider inhumane. The children wander the streets begging and collecting rubbish. An entire family barely makes 2$ a day."

?People live in boats on Red river come from many poor rural of Viet Nam. All of them are very poor and have no job in their hometown. They come to city with their hopeful to get a job and can earn more money for their life, families and children but in fact that in city everything is expensive and it is not easy to have a job which give them money so they have to try do everything to have money enough a day such as collect rubbish on the street, dumping ground, be carrier in Long Bien market, etc. They do not have enough money to rent a flat or house on the land in city so they made boats on the Red River by rubbish.?? Their boats are short-lived and unreliable but they do not have enough money for food so how they can have money to repair your boats? That is reason for us to organize a special work camp to help them repair their “house”.

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The Youth House School is one of the bigest and oldest project of SJ Vietnam. It 's a small education center for disadvantaged street children managed with the financial support of the French Student organization "Un ETAI pour le Vietnam". The volunteers who work here teach around 10 children everyday. They also have to cook lunch for the children and clean the Youth House together. Remember, the children are not used to rules and structure in their households, so volunteers must try to implement this by setting an example. The Youth House is also a place where young local people and international volunteers come to explore the cultural diversity, by teaching the children together or organizing leisure activities, such as taking the children to the swimming pool.

We combine these activities with projects to help disadvantaged people at Fisher Village who are very poor and live in slum-boats on the Red river. We do this by giving them food, medicine, water filters (for clean drinking water), toothpaste, second-hand warm clothes and free showers in winter, etc.

What do our local and international volunteers do ?

• International volunteers give an English class from 9:00 am to 11:00 am, and one from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm.

• Local volunteers teach the vietnamese primary school program (Math, Vietnamese, History, Geography, etc)

• International and local volunteers prepare free lunch to children.

• We provide emmergency accomodation for children and hot shower in winter.

• We build and maintain water filters for all the village. Our filters have been specially designed by the technology university of Hanoi.

• We build and renovate the boats (thanks to "Coup de Pouce" for the financial help).

• Leisure and cultural activities for children.

• Organizing free medical check-up in collaboration with the professors and students at Medecine university of Hanoi.

Eleven a.m. Volunteers descend from one of Hanoi’s air-conditioned city buses onto the blazing hot street. They pick their way through the labyrinth of narrow alleyways that will eventually lead them to the banks of Vietnam’s Red River. They pass homes whose outside walls and doors are covered with phone numbers of various businesses, teeny grocery stores selling a handful of different foods and warm drinks, and the ubiquitous mopeds that speed through the constricted streets. This area is markedly more impoverished than Hanoi’s Old Quarter and French Quarter, the neighborhoods near the city’s landmark Hoan Kiem Lake. This is a district that the guidebooks neglected to mention – claustrophobic, dingy, and oppressive, even before noon.

The volunteers from the local NGO hail from North America, Korea, Vietnam, and France. Most of them committed to a two-week work camp to assist the villagers. Today, they are joined by the video work camp volunteers who will photograph and videotape these activities and the NGO’s other efforts. Few of them are prepared for what they will see.

The maze of streets ends at an outdoor cooking fire tended to by a woman squatting before the grill, stoking the flames. Unlike all of the volunteers, she is not sweating profusely. Behind her, at the foot of a steep embankment, flows the Red River, so named because it is the color of fresh bricks laid out to dry in the sun. The volunteers’ eyes move quickly to the bridge that spans the river and the quaint train that chugs across it to the other side. Oh, it’s so pretty, they want to say, because that’s what people usually exclaim when they chance upon the banks of a famous river.

Before the words can spill out, they step away from the woman’s cooking fire and a miasma drapes over them. A noxious, putrid, unfathomable smell, like vaporized garbage, hangs in the air. Two of the video crew volunteers begin to sneeze and cough, which will not abate until they leave the village. At their feet are piles of refuse: wrappers, plastic bags, discarded food, some syringes. A quick rain – it is July, the rainy season – will shoot this trash straight into the river.

But they cannot wince or groan – they must be stoic and maintain poker faces, because floating on the river are several houseboats, a euphemism for makeshift homes constructed from cast-off particleboard, wood, and scraps of plastic.

People live here.

Seven houseboats line the shore of this stretch of river. The volunteers refer to this as Fisherman’s Village #1, which is considered more affluent than the adjacent Fisherman’s Village #2, because it has electricity. But people in both villages bathe in and drink from the river. In both villages, the houses’ roofs usually fail to completely cover the house and always leak, and often have insufficient flotation so the houses can easily sink. Flimsy planks of wood suspended over the water serve as the entryway to the homes. As the volunteers approach, two little girls scamper across the bowing planks into their homes, lithe as gazelles.?

The volunteers teeter across the planks to interview the people who live in each houseboat, hoping the planks will not collapse. One home’s plank is guarded by an impertinent cat that allows himself to be picked up and manhandled by the children but does not budge when visitors try to coax him from his post. They have come to gauge the pressing needs of the residents.

With the limited funds from the NGO, the volunteers hope to buy the villagers some items that will ease their existence. In the abstract, Lao Tzu’s maxim, “Give a man a fish, you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” is a rational modus operandi. But previous work camp volunteers have learned that donations are a tricky business; one cannot buy items that the village’s gamblers and drug addicts would be tempted to resell for quick cash.

Water filters are one viable option. They are too big and bulky to be carried off easily, and they will help clean the river water that residents use for drinking and bathing. Clothes are another option. But overall, choices are limited, as are funds, and not all of the volunteers are comfortable with this effort. To some, it seems a little irresponsible to ask people about their needs if they are unable to fulfill all of them.

The Fisherman’s Village volunteers are also involved in two other efforts. The Campaign is one of these projects; its goal is to teach children who live in the nearby neighborhood about proper garbage disposal and recycling, so that they will refrain from dumping their refuse at the doorstep of someone else’s home. The volunteers are heartened by the fact that the children seem enthusiastic, and hope that this new generation will be more responsible than the last.

Today the villagers are spared from a deluge of rain that could sink their houseboats, and the police who sometimes set their illegal dwellings on fire. The next day, violence will erupt over bets on the World Cup, and children will stand barefoot among the refuse and syringes, watching as the gamblers brandish knives at one another.

This violence is the reason for the volunteers’ third effort, which is to offer the children the volunteer home as a refuge when they need to get away from the living conditions and the frequent fights. The children – some as young as seven – are often the breadwinners in families in which the adults are ill or addicted. They arrive at the house in the morning to eat breakfast with the volunteers, sleep during the day, and then leave in the evening to earn money. Some gather items to recycle. Others fish from the river and sell their catch at the night market. The children earn about a dollar a day. The NGO’s future plans to open a school at the house are filled with good intentions but will be difficult to carry through, given the children’s working schedules.

The next week, the work camp volunteers prepare for a Friday night photo exhibition, to which they have invited reporters and the children from the fisherman’s village. Pictures posted onto foam backing present life on the river. But the absence of the noxious smell, combined with the glossy five-by-eight pictures with artistic white borders, soften the harsh reality. The volunteers position the pictures on the walls and set out a dozen or more plates of cookies, various fruits, and soda in preparation for the crowd.

Only one reporter shows up that evening. But soon Do Thi Phuc, the NGO’s coordinator, returns from her jaunt over to the village. Like The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Phuc leads a small flock of children into the house. At first too reticent to eat, they stop to gaze at the pictures: their homes, their river, their own faces, staring back at them.

Many of the children brighten when they see pictures of themselves. They nudge each other and call out to their friends and siblings. One little girl leans in close to examine two pictures of her and her sister standing on the plank which leads to their home, clutching their saucy cat. She is silent, staring. It is perhaps the first picture she has seen of herself.

Emboldened, the children move past the pictures, and file into the house, swarming around the reporter and the volunteers. They munch on the cookies and fruit and gulp down the drinks, trying to combat the stifling humidity. They giggle and chase each other around the room. A curious little boy pokes around some boxes squeezed into a corner, purposely making noise in hopes that one of the volunteers will see him and shower him with attention. A male volunteer spots him and tickles him until he shrieks with laughter. The older children’s faces, too, melt into grins.

Frustrated, one volunteer grumbles about the lack of reporters. But he is cheered by a fellow volunteer who agrees that it is not the exhibition they had anticipated. But it is a party, a chance for the children to be children.

It is hope, reflected in the smiling eyes of children who are allowed some time to shed their oppressive reality.

This particular workcamp was from July 1, 2006 to July 15, 2006.

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The organization Solidarités Jeunesses Vietnam (SJ Vietnam) is a non-profit international youth volunteering organization in Hanoi, Vietnam. It is a small organization, set up for, and by young volunteers. In december 2007, 3207 young vietnamese volunters were official members of SJ Vietnam.Our volunteers are active in the organization as work camp leaders, project managers or as volunteer on our local projects.

The goals of SJ Vietnam are:
• Work towards a society of justice, peace and solidarity.
• Break cultural misunderstanding between peoples and nations.
• Improve local and global environment, provide non-formal education, reduce poverty and establish human rights.
• Encourage young people to participate actively in the society in which they live.

SJ Vietnam organizes mainly 4 kind of activities: local activities during all the year (mainly for local volunteers living in Hanoi), international workcamp (hosting and sending volunteers), long term voluntary projects (hosting and sending long term volunteers) and promotion of International Volunteerism .All these activities are the specific tools of our organization to reach our goals about youth education, peace, tolerance, and solidarity.
All our activities are open to everybody: to join our activities, you need only to buy your annual member card or to be sent by a voluntary organization partner of SJV.

Two short video presentations of SJV can be downloaded at http://vietnam.solidaritesjeunesses.org/video/sjvpresentation/sjvnetchua.mpg (in vietnamese) and at http://vietnam.solidaritesjeunesses.org/video/sjvpresentation/sjvpresentation.mpg (in english)

SJ Vietnam is proudly a non-professional youth organization ;except our secretary staff, all the organization is completely managed by everyday youth themselves from Vietnam and around the world. All the local and international activities are imagined and realized collectively by the members. SJ Vietnam is a youth organization FOR young people BY the young people.

All SJ volunteers (national and international) are non-paid. We donate our time for free because we believe in the goals of our projects and they are most important for us.
During the year, SJ Vietnam organizes local activities open to everybody: visit to museums with poor children, lessons for street children, environmental activities, autumn festival for child victims of the Orange Agent, free lunch for poor children, cultural and leisure activities, etc.

Each week at least one activity is organized, contact the secretary to get our calendar.

Feel free to join us, you are welcome!!

SJ Vietnam organizes and promotes international workcamps throughout the year and trains workcamp leaders to run them. The over 40 international camps in vietnam aim to promote:
1. Volunteerism, friendship and solidarity among young people.
2. Awareness of local, national and international issues.    
3. Improvement on quality of life. (Water filters for people living on Red river, free medicine for those with TB, information about HIV and sexual health, leisure and cultural activities, environmental projects, etc…)
4. Cultural exchange by living together.

Each year, SJ Vietnam uses to host around 300 international short and long term international volunteers coming from different voluntary organization around the world. If you live outside Vietnam and you want to join one of our workcamp, contact your national voluntary organization (check the section "partners" on this web site). You can see our list of workcamps in vietnam in the section "workcamp" on this web site.

But SJ Vietnam is also a sending organization : SJ Vietnam trough an international network of partners offers to Vietnamese volunteers the opportunity to join international workcamp abroad as volunteer. At this time around 30 countries are accessible to Vietnamese Volunteers (France, UK, Mexico, Germany, Thailand, Korea, Japan, China; Mongolia, etc). And each year more that one thousand projects are available…

In parrallele, to assure high quality workcamps, SJ Vietnam organizes week-end workshop to train workcamp leaders.

To know more about workcamp, see the section "workcamps & LTV " on this web site

A long term project is a little bit like a workcamp but longer (between 1 and 6 month). More motivation is required from the volunteer but it also provides more rewards. Long Term Volunteerism with SJ Vietnam gives the opportunity to foreign volunteers to join our long term projects in Vietnam .

SJ Vietnam through this network also offers long term opportunities to Vietnamese volunteers to be volunteer abroad.

To know more about LTV, see the section "workcamps & LTV " on this web site

SJ Vietnam is also actif on the internal stage to promote the philisophy of workcamps and international solidarity between youth people. In this frame, SJ Vietnam is an active member of NDVA and CCIVS.