Employment

Quilt Making
Poverty is such that it is sometimes very difficult for the members of the Savings-Credit groups to find the money before the weekly meeting, especially in the lean seasons. Agriculture prices are going down, the cost of living is slowly increasing.

Thiện Chí supports 3 groups of more than 10-15 women each, who produce various quilted products like bed covers, hammocs etc. Viêt Nam Plus has opened a workshop in Hồ Chí Minh City to provide further training and a well located outlet to promote sales. The high quality hand made quilts meet a tremendous success.

See the following stories that show how important the handicraft program is:

• Anh is acting so well, and you know why… (09-04-2002, 108 Kb)
  Alcoholism, violences in her family... and the girl is improvising at the theater.
• Madam Phuong’s Christmas gift (26-12-2002, 115 Kb)
  Madam Phuong succeeded thanks to her beautiful craft. Rescue of a family.
• The quilts: selling too well? (26-3-2006, 226 Kb)
  The success of the quilt program in generating jobs & funds for the programs
• Vietnam-quilts: a successful program which produces beautiful quilts and has generated 70 full time jobs. (19-2-2006, video 32 Mb)

Tree plantations
The program supports tree plantations along public roads. Every year about 50.000 trees are planted and over 4000 days of work provided. The program provides the plants, and pays the unemployed poor at 200đ/plant at plantation, and after 6 and 12 months, another 400đ/living tree.

Public works
Quite often underemployment is high, the people face particular hardship and cannot meet their obligations. Especially when there are droughts etc. Thiện Chí helps to improve the infrastructure, in coordination with the commune authorities: road repairs, the building of an embankment against floods, tree plantations etc. The dike of Sùng Nhơn has been completed this year: it protects 300 ha of paddy from the regular floods.

See also our latest video on how we try to reduce unemployment.