A Hand to Hold: The Embassy of Ireland in the Hills of Quang Tri

A two-day field visit reinforces a decade-long partnership for victim assistance and explosive ordnance risk education.

Ms. Edel Cribbin walks hand in hand with a young boy along a dirt path near a stilt house, a woman beside them. — Ms. Edel Cribbin walks hand in hand with the grandson of Mr. Ho Van My’s family on the way back from checking the breeding cow provided by RENEW, with Ms. Ho Thi Tran alongside, in Phu An Village, Huong Hiep Commune.

On 28 and 29 May 2026, a delegation from the Embassy of Ireland in Viet Nam, led by Ms. Edel Cribbin, Head of Development Cooperation, visited the RENEW Center for Rehabilitation and Disability Support in Quang Tri Province. After first meeting the RENEW team over a Zoom call in March 2026, Ms. Cribbin was now able to step onto the ground in Quang Tri and see the work for herself. The two-day visit was an opportunity for the Embassy to observe activities of the Victim Assistance, Disability Support, and Explosive Ordnance Risk Education project that it has funded for the past decade, and to meet directly with families whose lives have been shaped by the long shadow of war and the steady work of recovery.

In Khe Sanh: thirteen years on

Embassy of Ireland delegation and RENEW staff stand with a family outside their stilt house in Khe Sanh. — Ms. Edel Cribbin and Embassy of Ireland colleagues, together with RENEW staff, meet Mr. Ho Van Y and his family outside their stilt house in Ruong Village, Khe Sanh.

In Ruong Village, Khe Sanh Commune, the delegation visited the family of Mr. Ho Van Y. At the age of seventeen, Mr. Y was tilling a coffee farm near the former Ta Con Airbase when he struck an unexploded bomb in the soil. He lost his right leg in the accident. Thirteen years on, he has received three successive prostheses from the RENEW Center, raises four breeding cows on the surrounding hillside, and lives in a stilt house with his wife and three young sons.

The delegation sat with the family inside the house, listened to Mr. Y describe the rhythm of his days, and handed over essential household equipment: a water filter, an electric fan, a food cabinet, and a rice cooker. A small fire pit in the corner of the home, with a kettle resting on a three-legged trivet, spoke of the modest scale on which a family in this mountainous commune still builds a life.

A man and woman tend their cattle on a hillside in 2021. — Mr. Y and his wife tend their cattle in 2021, when they were raising their first son. Today the family keeps four breeding cows and three young boys.

In Huong Hiep: a life rebuilt

In Phu An Village, Huong Hiep Commune, the delegation met Mr. Ho Van My and his wife, Ms. Ho Thi Tran. Mr. My was blinded in a landmine accident at the age of seventeen, while working the soil near his family’s home. Ms. Tran was born with congenital leg atrophy. The two married in 2022 and have three children together. Their youngest daughter is currently studying Japanese in Hanoi, with the hope of one day working abroad.

Last month, after a needs assessment by RENEW staff, the family received a breeding cow. The animal now grazes near the house. For a couple who have lived most of their lives with disability and very limited means, the cow is more than livestock. It is a quiet symbol of a life being rebuilt, one season at a time.

At the Visitor Center: education that prevents tragedy

On the morning of 29 May, the delegation visited the Mine Action Visitor Center, where four Explosive Ordnance Risk Education (EORE) activity groups were running simultaneously: outdoor mine-risk games and safety marking, a general orientation on the causes of accidents and safe behavior, an immersive experience using the RENEW AR augmented reality application, and a peer education model in which students role-play to understand and walk alongside persons with disabilities.

The activities, designed for school-aged children, brought to life the kind of patient, hands-on risk education that helps prevent the next generation of tragedies, of the kind that the families in Khe Sanh and Huong Hiep have lived through.

Ho Van Lai speaks with the visiting delegation during a peer education activity with students. — Hồ Văn Lai, a cluster munition survivor and risk education collaborator with RENEW, explains the peer education activity to the delegation, joined by students role-playing to understand and walk alongside persons with disabilities.

Looking ahead together

RENEW staff present to the Irish delegation in a meeting room. — In the Center’s meeting room, the delegation follows a briefing on the progress of the two project components.

In the Center’s meeting room, the leadership of the RENEW Center and the program managers of the two project components briefed Ms. Cribbin and her colleagues on activity progress and looked ahead to the next phase of work. The conversation also touched on the scope of project activities across the communes of Cua Tung, Gio Linh, Hieu Giang, Trieu Phong, Trieu Binh, and Vinh Dinh, and the encouraging fact that no UXO accidents have been recorded in the project areas during the current reporting period.

A decade of accompaniment

Project RENEW expresses its sincere gratitude to the Government of Ireland, through the Embassy of Ireland in Viet Nam, for its enduring partnership: funding Explosive Ordnance Risk Education since 2015, and Victim Assistance and Disability Support since 2016.

A decade of accompaniment has translated, in homes from Khe Sanh to Huong Hiep, into prostheses and breeding cows, into water filters and rice cookers, and above all into the quiet certainty that the most vulnerable are not being left behind.

Go raibh maith agaibh.