How the projects are carried out:

The cost of a notebook, textbook for each grade level, pen, pencil, bicycle, a kilogram of rice, and to build the most basic house is very standard and common knowledge. When we initiate a project, we have a number of how many people we will give to and how much that item is, so we just calculate and get a total. We allow some money for transportation of that good to the distribution center, then add them up and send the needed amount to HyVongMoi, our counterpart, in Vietnam. (Hy Vong Moi’s legal paper
is attached and translated)

HyVongMoi is a charity organization in Vietnam, formed by a group of volunteers like us here. They help us in seeking government permission to assemble people for distribution, getting the list of needy people from the school principals and villages, buying the goods, locating contractors to build the houses, and distributing the goods to the villagers and students. They take pictures to validate the process and send them to us.

After a distribution is done, HyVongMoi, will get a receipt from the local government stating the amount of goods received by the people for a rice distribution. For the school projects, HyVongMoi gets the receipts from the principal, stating how many of the goods were received. For the housing project, the pictures of the house from ground breaking to completion is our receipts.

Here are the examples:

Notebook distribution: We will be doing a notebook distribution for 130 poor students in Tan Phong high school in mid January of 2009. Each note book for 12th grader (200 pages) costs 5700 Vietnamese Dongs. Each student needs 10 notebooks for the remaining school year. We will send:

5700 * 10 * 130 = 7,410,000 which is around $470 in US dollars.

The cost to rent a truck to transport the notebooks from BenTre to Tan Phong high school is about $50.
The cost to transfer $440 to Vietnam is $10.
The cost to take pictures and download to us is $10.
The cost to hire laborers for help in this project is $10.
So we will send a total of $550 to HyVongMoi to carry out this project.

Rice distribution:
We just did our annual rice distribution.

We use the same method. We take the cost of rice per kilos times the number of kilos we want to give , then plus the transportation cost, picture taking costs, and money transfer cost, and send the total needed.

Housing project: Each house built costs $750 currently.

This is the itemized cost of each house, the basic house which is 3.5 to 4 meters wide and 7.5 to 8 meters long (each meter is about 3 feet).

Roof made of toles (metal sheets), $150 us dollars, roof last average 25 years
Foundation (bricks, cement, dirt, tile) : $125 us dollars
Pillars (cement outside with steel in the middle), $150 us dollars
Front side of house (made of bricks) : $100 us dollars
Front door, front window, painting: $100 us dollars
Labor cost to build the house (4 workers in 15 days): $125
The other 3 sides of the house will be made of coconut leaves. The owner will get the leaves from the forest. Most of the time they are free or cost little. We will help getting the leaves from the forest for the elderly.

Total: $750