VietNamNet Bridge – Do Ha Cu and Nguyen Minh Luan may be overlooked by many due to their disabilities, but they still manage to bring a lot to their communities.

Do Ha Cu (sitting on wheel chair) received certificate of merit from the Vietnam Central Youth Union in the national volunteer festival last year. — Photo tienphong.vn

Cu, 35, opened a community library named Hy vọng (Hope) and it has become popular among book lovers in Thai Binh City in the northern province of the same name.

The library has more than 4,000 books featuring various genres from children’s literature to historical novels.

Cu was born with impairments due to exposure to Agent Orange, a mixture of herbicides that US military forces sprayed in Vietnam from 1962 to 1971. He has been paralysed since he was small.

Cu’s family members must support him with every activity in life.

As Cu could not go to school, his mother patiently taught him, and by the age of 15, he got familiar with letters.

Nguyen Thi Kim Son, Cu’s mother, said, “After he knew letters, I taught him one line of poetry per day. He gradually could read stories from short to long in different fields including literature, history and geography.”

The more Cu read, the more he loved books.

To help Cu better communicate, his family bought him a computer.

Via the internet, Cu successfully petitioned several organisations and individuals to donate him books.

Cu founded the Hy vọng library in July 2015 with 300 books in his living room.

Cu said, “I opened the library with hope of sharing knowledge and love of books to everybody. It’s also a chance for me to meet different people.

“When I was small, I must stay at home alone with my parents going to work. I was very sad and must imagine a friend to talk to me. Now with the library, I believe that I would not have to do that anymore.”

More and more people go to Cu’s library to read and discuss books.

He has also helped set up three other libraries in Thai Binh and Hai Duong provinces.

Not only interested in books, Cu also writes poems, with more than 100 dictated to his mother so far.

He and his mother are completing his autobiography, in which Cu tells his journey to overcome adversity and set up his library.

Aspiring to affirm himself

Nguyen Minh Luan, 20, a student of the Studencheskaya Ulitsa University in Moscow, Russia was one of 200 attendees of the Vietnamese Young Intellectual Forum, the first of its kind, held last year by the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union Central Committee.

Nguyen Minh Luan, a student of the Studencheskaya Ulitsa University in Moscow, Russia, desires to support disabled people. — Photo tienphong.vn

In the forum, Luan discussed supportive policies for people living with disabilities.

“Disabled people often have feelings of inferiority and lack hope, but they themselves are the most patient ones. Vietnam has eight million disabled people making up 7.8 per cent of human resources, thus we should mention their contribution to the economy,” said Luan.

Luan cares about disabled people’s affairs because he had an accident when he was small and suffered a brain injury.

His parents took him to school anyway and Luan has exceeded all expectations, performing well academically and he graduated from Nguyen Hue High School for Gifted Students in the central city of Hue.

Luan also takes part in different creative activities.

Luan and his friends won first prize in a national creation competition for adolescents last year and a silver medal in the International Exhibition for Young Inventors held in Japan in 2017 for their integrated celestial positioning and knowledge system for astronomy.

Now Luan is studying marketing and market analysis at the Studencheskaya Ulitsa University in Russia.

For him, studying abroad is an opportunity to have new experiences. 

Source: VNS