Women's Lives: Do Nguyen Thi - SOS mother in Vietnam 

"Everybody from the village came to our house to see me and my children. There I'd been for seventeen years with no children and all of a sudden I had eleven children, including a baby. They were all happy and smiled at me."

Do marries when the Vietnam War is at its worst. Her husband is a soldier and only returns home years after the war has finished. The land reform, carried out by the communist party, means that the two of them are able to build a small house and tend their own fields. In addition, Do works as a kindergarten teacher for the local authorities. She is paid in rice. However, the two of them are not to be granted a future together. Their wish to have a child, which society also expects of them, remains unfulfilled. After being married for seventeen years, Do makes a decision: She finds a second wife for her husband, one who will be able to bear him children, and she becomes an SOS mother. Her long-cherished desire to live with children is at last fulfilled by this new career and new way of life.

"Rice was the salary we earned in our country"

I was born in a district of Hanoi called Soc Son. I am fifty-four years old. My father is dead and my mother is eighty-five years old. We were four brothers and sisters, but one of my brothers was killed in the war. I was able to go to school as a child and when I was older I went to a training college for kindergarten teachers. Before coming to the SOS Children's Village, I worked as a kindergarten teacher for nineteen years. I got married when I was twenty-two and lived with my husband for seventeen years. We didn't have any children and then I heard about SOS Children's Villages, so I left my husband and started working as an SOS mother. I was happy being with the children in my previous job, but I did think it would be better to have a permanent home. I heard that SOS Children's Villages were founding new families and I applied for the job of an SOS mother. I wanted this job, so that I could have children just like all the other women in our society.

Could you describe your parents? What did they live on?

My parents wanted all of us children to have an education. They were farmers and, as you know, people from rural areas don't often have the money to send their children to school. We all went as far as secondary school, except for me. I was confident and committed enough to be able to work and study at the same time. I finished grammar school and then completed the training course for kindergarten teachers. At that time my parents didn't have land of their own. They worked for a landowner. They did all the work and had to pay rent for the land by giving up part of their rice harvest. Thanks to the communist party, they were then given their own piece of land to work. My parents supported me until I married and moved out.

What role did your mother play at home?

My mother was a farmer. When she was young she went out to the fields twice a day. Once we were born she had to work very hard to earn enough rice to feed us all. We didn't have any machines to remove the husks from the rice. My mother had to do it all by hand. She had to get up early in the morning to work in the fields and in the evenings she husked the rice by hand. For a long time she was a member of the women's association in our community. Their aim was to support each other as women and to help the poorer women.
What memories do you have of your father?

Even though he was poor, he loved us a lot. When I was ten years old, I wanted to stay at home to cook for my parents but my father worried that it would be too dangerous. My family was poor and we knew that we only had rice or sweet potatoes to eat. He ate the sweet potatoes, so that we could have the rice.

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.

Motivation for her choice of profession
"I felt good when I imagined being able to live together with my new children."

SOS Children's Villages sent information to my local authorities and the women's committee passed it on to me. The advertisement informed me that, as an SOS mother, I would have a family and would have to look after ten children. That meant that I would be living like a mother and that made me happy. My family tried to stop me from sending off the application forms, because I would have to go so far away to work and they didn't understand what SOS Children's Villages was about either. I told them, "If I mean anything to you, please let me work there. I think it would bring me the right balance in my unlucky life." They were able to understand this and gave me permission. I explained SOS Children's Villages more to them once I had completed the basic training, and they were able to understand it better. My friends were also very understanding and were happy about my new job.

My mother was happy, because it meant she would have more grandchildren and my brother and sister were happy, because it meant that I too would now have children, even if I couldn't have any myself. I had spent a year previously looking for a second wife for my husband. I divorced him in the hope that he would have a happier life with another woman. I asked a younger woman if she wanted to marry my husband, in order to bear him children. And I felt good when I imagined being able to live together with my new children. I thought to myself, "This is my village, this is my family, these are my children. I don't want to live as I did before anymore."

Experiences as an SOS Mother
"I had to change and learn new things, in order to be able to cope with the demands made on me."

I arrived in the village in October 1989. I was given my first children in January 1990. By the end of that year I already had eleven children and we were a family. I had to get up early in the mornings to feed the baby and make the children's breakfast. I didn't have an SOS aunt to help me and so I did all the housework myself. After I had fed the baby, I helped the three-year-old. As soon as I had made the older children's breakfast, I got them ready for school. There wasn't an SOS Kindergarten in the village then and we had to leave the babies and smaller children with another SOS mother if we wanted to go to the market.

When I got back from the market, I prepared lunch. Then I washed the little ones' clothes until the children came home from school. As soon as they came home, I taught them to wash their faces and hands before sitting down to eat. In the afternoons, I would play with the little ones, give them a bath at about half past four and then cook dinner. We all sat down to dinner together and afterwards we would watch the children's programmes on television. During the night I had to feed the youngest one twice and I would keep checking that the children were all lying in the correct position. I don't have a small child at the moment, but at night I still check to see that the children have got all their arms and legs under the mosquito net. That's a day in the life of an SOS mother.

Have you, as a person, changed since you've been in the SOS Children's Village?

When I lived in my village at home and taught, I only had to do a teacher's job. Here in the SOS Children's Village, however, I have to work with the children who live with me all day and every day. I had to change and learn new things, in order to be able to cope with the demands made on me. I also had to change my way of thinking entirely: how could I bring the children up to be useful and helpful citizens? When I was a teacher, I only had to fulfil the duties of a teacher but now I have to be a mother and a teacher at the same time. In addition to that, I have a double role in bringing up the children. I have to be both the mother and the father. When a young boy grows up with a father, he obeys his father. However, in my family there is no father so I have to try to talk to him like a father. They accept that. The boys listen to me and obey me when I'm in my father role. I try to explain to them that they are growing up in the SOS Children's Village, because they don't have any parents and that they have to try hard at school so that they can achieve the same as the other children.

What has been your best experience since you've been in the SOS Children's Village and what has been the worst situation that you have had to deal with?

The best thing has been to have a big family and to feel the harmony within it. The most difficult thing for me was in the early years when all the children were of different ages and all came from different places.

Can you remember a moment when you were particularly happy?

I can remember the day when I first took my children to my village. My mother and my brother and sisters were very happy that we came to visit. Everybody from the village came to our house to see me and my children. There I'd been for seventeen years with no children and all of a sudden I had eleven children, including a baby. They were all happy and smiled at me. You should have heard the driver who took us there! He told our first village director that he had been to my village with me and that it was as if he had been in a foreign country that was full of harmony.

What do you think is the difference between yourself and a single parent outside the SOS Children's Village?

I don't have to worry about earning money to feed my family. I can save my energy for caring for the children and for bringing them up. I base my methods of child-rearing on the theories we learned on the training course - a natural mother can bring up her children however she feels is right. An SOS mother has to be very careful how she treats the children and what she says to them, so that the children don't get the impression that they're not loved. A natural mother can sometimes be cross with her child but that child will never doubt that his mother loves him. However, the children in my family can't depend on being loved, because I'm not their real mother. That means that I have to be very careful.

If you were granted three wishes, what would you wish for?

First of all I'd wish for all the children and SOS mothers to remain in good health. My second wish would be for my children all to become useful and independent citizens - that's my biggest wish in life. My third wish is for my children all to manage to find good jobs and to have regular incomes so that they can lead good lives. I also hope that the emotional tie between us, the children and the village, will last even after I've retired one day. I hope that the ties will last forever.