Do Page Two

The Story of Her Life

Perhaps you could tell us something about your grandparents?
Both my grandparents were farmers. They died when I was quite young. I didn't know them but my father told me quite a bit about them. He told me that they were very poor. They worked as farmers for a landowner and were paid very little. Rice was the salary we were paid in our country. My mother's parents had three children and my father's parents had four.

What do your brothers and sisters do?
They all completed secondary school. My elder brother went into the army in 1961 and served until he fell in 1967. My younger brother got married as soon as he left school. He has got five children and is a farmer. My younger sister is also married and she lives with her husband in the place where we all grew up. She is a farmer and has one son who got married last month. My sister looks just like me and we both take after our mother.

You've already mentioned the war. What did you experience during that time?
I burst into tears on the evening I heard that my brother had fallen in the war. We had a funeral ceremony for him but we didn't know where he had died. We still don't know, because he was never found. One of the soldiers tried to rescue his body and dig him a grave, but the bomb had been so terrible that they couldn't find his body. My brother had always worked hard. He had worked and studied at the same time. A lot of men who were studying had to go to the front in the war. Before he was sent to the south of the country, he sent me a pen, which I value very much. He said I should try to study. My brother's life was so short. If he were alive today, he would be sixty years old. When the war broke out up here in the north I was fifteen. The war reached our community in 1971/72. It was very noisy when the bombs exploded outside the village. The bombs falling killed nobody in our village, but some of the bombs landed in the fields and people were killed later when they were working in the fields. Even though there were a lot of bombs, our house wasn't damaged. I was working as a kindergarten teacher then. We didn't have any tables or chairs and just sat on the floor. When the air-raid warning came, all the children and teachers had to put on straw hats and hide in the underground bunkers.

What did your husband do?
My husband was also a soldier. He was responsible for distributing the weapons. We got married in 1972, when the war was at its worst. His base was just one kilometre away from my home village but he still didn't come home very often because he was always being sent into action a long way from home. The war in Vietnam finished in 1975. However, my husband only came home in 1982. When he returned, the co-operative gave us our own piece of land. We built a house and he worked as a farmer. My mother lives there now and looks after the house. The place where my husband comes from is about a hundred and fifty kilometres away from Hanoi. After we got divorced, he married another woman and lived in my village for a few years. Now he and his second wife have moved back to the province where he came from.

Did you and your husband ever think about adopting?
There was a poor family with eight children who lived about ten kilometres from our village. They really couldn't afford so many children. They didn't have any furniture, no beds and no table. Therefore, all their children had to grow up in other families. My husband and I also adopted a boy who was four years old. When he was nine, his father died and there was no man in the family anymore. This is very important in Vietnam and so the family asked us if we would give them the boy back. Now he's married with two children. He's still in touch with my family and my mother and comes to visit me in the holidays. Sometimes I visit him too. I'm happy that my boy still thinks of me as his "mother". After he went home, I looked after one of my nieces. She lived with me for three years until she was eighteen. Then she married a young man from the same village and now has two children.

Do's Story:
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All these mother's stories come from SOS Children's Village Hermann Gmeiner Academy. Copyright is reserved and no unauthorized use permitted. Use for non-commercial purposes may be requested. The interviews telling about the lives of some SOS Mothers form part of an interesting study on being a replacement Mother to children in need in SOS Children's communities worldwide.