With the support of our scholarship, Phuong Vy is now preparing to help other families find hope of their own.
By the time the sun has fully cleared the flat horizon of Tien Giang Province, Vy is already on the road to school, riding the electric motorbike that carried her through heat, rain, and even floodwaters during the rainy season. She brought with her textbooks and a quiet but fierce determination that the road – however hard – was worth staying on.
Every school day for four years, Vy made the same 4.6-mile journey from her family’s home made of brick walls, a tin roof, and a cement floor worn smooth by years of use to the gates of Tan Phuoc High School.
“I just always thought – I had to keep going,” Vy recalls.
Born in 2006, Vy is the eldest of two children in a household sustained by determination and faith. Her father is a seasonal factory worker, earning about $5 a day for roughly twenty working days a month. In a good month, he might bring home around $114. Her mother, whose health has been fragile for years, is unable to work. Every doctor’s visit must be paid out of pocket, without the support of insurance.
By the time Vy reached grade 9, the pressure on her family had grown to the point where continuing her education was genuinely out of the picture.
Their finances were at their most precarious. Even public school fees – largely subsidized by the state – had become a burden they could not carry. There were no relatives to turn to for help, and Vy stood on the brink of dropping out.
When our partner, Saigon Children’s Charity (SCC) learned about her situation and stepped in with a scholarship, they brought not only financial support but also something just as critical: a belief.
In a letter she later wrote to her sponsors, Vy described that moment:
“At the most hopeless time, the scholarship appeared. The support wasn’t only financial. It was an encouragement that I deserve to keep going.”
Vy’s family’s circumstances are not unusual in rural Mekong Delta communities. What is unusual is what she chose to do with them.
She read in the evenings. She helped care for her younger brother so her father can focus on working. She dreamed, with clarity and conviction, of one day working in medicine – of becoming the person who could find the answers that no one had been able to for her mother.
With the support of a $300 annual scholarship, Vy was able to finish grade school and was recognized as an Excellent Student every single year. Each certificate now hangs proudly on the brick walls of her home – a quiet testament to years of persistence shared by both her and her parents.
“I didn’t allow myself to take even one day off,” Vy says.
Her moment of victory came in the summer of 2024: an acceptance letter from Can Tho University of Medicine and Pharmacy – the school she had been quietly aiming for since she first understood what medicine could mean for a family like hers.
“I wanted to go so badly. But I could also see what it would cost.”
Medical school was beyond what her family could afford. But with Saigon Children’s Charity’s $600 annual university scholarship, Vy found another path. She enrolled in Biotechnology at Can Tho University – in the same city, within the same scientific field – a choice that allowed her to continue moving toward medicine while easing the financial burden on her family.
In her letter, she explained her decision with clarity:
“This is not a step backward. It is a realistic choice that still allows me to pursue my dream of caring for people’s health.”
A new destination
Now in her second year, Phương Vy is among the top students in her Biotechnology cohort, though she speaks about it with humility.
She is already planning beyond graduation. Vy hopes to pursue specialized training in IVF (in-vitro fertilization) and eventually work as a reproductive support counselor, helping couples who have struggled to have children.
“After I graduate, I want to give hope to families who are waiting.”
Her plans are detailed and deliberate: she understands the certification pathways, the gaps between her current studies and her future specialization, and the steps required to bridge them.
In her letter, Phương Vy writes to students who are now where she once was in grade 9:
“Hardship can slow our steps, but it cannot stop a heart that wants to rise. Don’t give up on school – it is the shortest path to changing your life and helping your family. Keep going. The world will lend a hand.”
She knows this because, once, someone lent her one.
