Sixty students from Lê Thế Hiếu and Cam Nghĩa schools fill RENEW’s Mine Action Visitor Center for Chạm Đến Ước Mơ, an afternoon built around one belief: that the road from Quảng Trị leads to wide horizons.
A talkshow that gave students new belief through stories from their own home ground
On a Monday afternoon, under the heavy summer sun, sixty students from Lê Thế Hiếu School and Cam Nghĩa School (Cam Lộ), together with many other children from Đông Hà, gathered at RENEW’s Mine Action Visitor Center for Chạm Đến Ước Mơ (Touch Your Dreams). The talkshow brought the students closer to role models who grew up on the soil of Quảng Trị and have gone far on their own journeys.
The program is part of the Safe Steps, Safe Life project, funded by the Embassy of Ireland in Vietnam.
Two children of this red soil who grew up here and went far. Pilot Nguyễn Trần Diệu Thuý and saxophonist Phan Lê Hiếu came home to tell the students it can be done.
The two guests took the stage. Nguyễn Trần Diệu Thuý, the first female pilot from Quảng Trị, born in 1989 in the village of Phổ Lại, Cam An, and now a mother of three, told the students she hoped to see them follow her into the sky.
“I hope there will be many young pilots from Quảng Trị. Together, we will fly across the skies of our homeland,” she said. “I still have more than twenty years of flying ahead of me, so I am sure I will meet one of the faces here again.”
Not a lecture but a conversation. The students asked their own questions, and the answers came back as encouragement rather than instruction.
Phan Lê Hiếu, a saxophonist from Đông Hà, born in 1991 into a family with no musical background, urged the students to hold on to their dreams.
“Always keep dreaming,” he said. “Study gives you a foundation of knowledge, but dreams will carry you farther and take you to more places. Every journey has a first step, which is why safety matters so much.”
Beyond the conversation with the two guests, the children also revisited the four safe steps to take when they encounter a bomb, mine, or other explosive, learning them through fun, easy-to-remember movements with the Đông Hà children’s performance group in a lively dance set to the song Safe Steps.
Four safe steps, learned through movement and laughter. The children rehearse what to do when they find a bomb or piece of unexploded ordnance, dancing to Safe Steps with the Đông Hà children’s performance group.
Afterward, the students wrote their own dreams on Dream Cards, a small act that, for many of them, felt like a first step.
A dream, once written down, becomes a first step. Each child set their hope on paper, the smallest and surest beginning of a long journey.
Every child has the right to grow up, to learn, to play, and to chase their dreams. And all of that begins with safe steps.
Chạm Đến Ước Mơ (Touch Your Dreams) is part of the Safe Steps, Safe Life project, a communications campaign on the prevention of cluster bombs and other explosive ordnance accidents, carried out by RENEW with the support of the Embassy of Ireland in Vietnam.
