How my past self inspired my future self

Yen Tran | Vietnam | Co-founder

It has been 4 years since we started Viet Skype and until now, I decided to bring VS to a new life. Stories behind VS such as how VS was founded or what difficulties we met during the progress has been so many. Yet despite of all these difficulties, there is always one thing that encourages me to continue this project. It was something I experienced in the US while pursuing my MA in Linguistics; also the time I decided to temporarily pause the project. In this writing, I would love to tell this story from the perspective of a humble human with limited knowledge of the world. For those who don’t know about VS. VS is a non-profit project connecting Vietnamese students with international volunteers via weekly online Skype conversations in English. There are 2 purposes of VS: first, it helps develop English oral skills of Vietnamese students; something that Vietnamese students always need. Second, it brings Vietnamese culture to the world. The second purpose was my favorite because many people in the world only know about Vietnam through the war. They keep thinking that Vietnamese people are full of hatred with American people. What I wanted to show to my international friends was that Vietnam, although was destroyed by the war, has been a happy country. And young students from Vietnam are the best cultural ambassador for this message. ​ VS was founded by me and Roger Gillespie, a retired journalist in CBC Canada (https://www.cbc.ca/). I met him when I was still on my first days as an English lecturer and was wandering online trying to learn about technology in classroom. He sent me a quick note saying that he was interested in working with Vietnamese students and was experienced teaching some Vietnamese students. We became friends since then and it was not too long that I decided to convince him to run VS with me. At that time, the idea of VS was ridiculously overambitious; just like I was running before I could crawl. On the first days, VS started with a few volunteers who were Roger’s friends and mainly came from Canada. The project kept going on for some generations of students and until now, we have about 200 volunteers from 30 countries in the world! Right now, when I’m looking at these numbers, I still can’t believe in my eyes. ​ I still remember when VS started to expand was also the time more challenges started to emerge. We had the most difficulty in tracking students and volunteers’ participation. We were able to connect volunteers and students but could not get enough information of how long they continued their conversation. The neglect from the students who directly benefited from the project also let me down so much. I wondered “Why did I have to organize a project for the people who don’t even care about it?”. These increasing challenges, they overwhelmed the inspiring purposes that I wanted to achieve in VS at the beginning. There were times I was not sure if the idea of VS was good or not any more.During my 2 years studying in the U.S., I temporarily paused the project to focus on my study. Indeed, there was an important story that helped me to find out the answer to that question. It was in the winter break in 2018, I received an invitation to spend my time with the family of one volunteer in VS. I was treated by him and his wife as if I were their daughter. I still remember he thanked me so much for organizing the project because he always wanted to teach English to students in other countries but he could not go abroad because of his current job in the US. Thanks to VS, he was able to teach Vietnamese students English without having to travel abroad. Thanks to VS, he also had a chance to go to Thai Nguyen and took part in VietTESOL, the biggest conference of English teaching pedagogies in Vietnam. ​ Thanks to VS, he was able to meet his students and travel in Vietnam with the tourist guides who were his own students. He has been their volunteers not only when they were students but accompanied them until when they started working now. He also talked to his friends and family about the project with so much pride. In the spring break 2019, I went to Canada for the first time to see Roger, the man who supported me so much in the project. We did whatever we were supposed to do in Canada: sightseeing in Niagara Falls, watching people made maple syrup, etc. And it was one sudden moment I realized one thing, Roger, me and the international volunteers, we were just strangers from the two sides of the world before VS. With VS, we were connected and became best friends. For some reason, with some mysterious power of the universe brought us, the people who share the same purposes in our life, together. During my trip, I never stopped feeling excited about that thought and it was such a rewarding contemplation for me. Then, I learned that there have been quite a number of students and teachers in Thai Nguyen who applied for exchange programs in the US and the most interesting thing was that they all shared one thing: they were all involved in VS in different ways. During my stay in the US, although I could not continue VS, there has been teachers who were still passionate about the project and continued running it in their schools. VS has spread in larger scale than I ever expected! Eventually, the small seed I planted at the first place gave me the best fruits. Although there were self-doubts in the progress, the project gave me better results than I could even imagine. I’m very proud for VS completed the missions I set at the beginning. Most importantly, I found the answer to the question I asked myself 2 years ago: “Even if VS could help only one person, I will keep going with this project”. ​ Today as I return from the US, I started to summarize the things we had done so far in 4 years. I found myself owe many people: Roger, the man behind the project who always encouraged me to continue it and recruited volunteers for it; international volunteers, the people from far away that I may never meet who spent so much of their time to talk with the students; The students who directly brought the image of Vietnam to the world. And I owe my past self a promise, the promise to keep my head high and continue what I started. I wanted to say thanks to all these people by continuing to run VS and bringing to the people who need it in the future. ​ Who knows what more interesting things we can do with this!