VFP Plaque from Vietnam

Description

VFP Logo Wooden Plaque w/hanging hook on back.   Shipped directly from the VFP national office in St. Louis MO.

Made in the Ho Chi Minh City Vocational Center for Handicapped, a vocational training program for handicapped and Agent Orange victims.  A portion of the sale goes to the Center.

“This plaque was made by students at the Ho Chi Minh City Vocational Center for the Handicapped. Each year, the school trains about 150 young people with a range of disabilities. The skills they are taught enable them to earn a living and achieve self-sufficiency.  Many of these youth are Agent Orange victims living with birth defects due to their parent’s exposure to the dioxin contaminant that was in Agent Orange sprayed by the U.S. throughout what was then South Vietnam during the American War.  In addition to woodworking skills, the school teaches sewing, painting, jewelry making, accounting, computer sciences, flower arrangement, and mechanics.  The skills taught are tailored to the capabilities of the student: If the student only has the use of one hand they are taught portraiture and landscape painting. With the use of two hands, jewelry or woodworking. With the use of two hands and one foot, sewing—the most employable skill these days.  Life skills and traditional educational classes are also taught, and the students learn to garden, raising a portion of their own food.  Veterans For Peace purchased these plaques to support the school, which receives no government funds.

The school was started by Madame Dang Hong Nhut, who had been a National Liberation Front fighter during the American war.  Captured in 1968 in Cu Chi, she was kept for five years in the notorious and brutal South Vietnamese prison on Con Son Island, where she became a leader of the women prisoners.  She was freed during the prisoner exchange of 1973 when the US POWs were released.  After the war, she started the vocational school and ran it until slightly before her death from AO-related cancer in 2015.”