One organisation gives street children a brighter future with guidance on everything from jobs to hairstyles.

Students create their own CD album covers in the IT lab of the graphic design class at Reach.

Stimulated by the exercise set by their teacher, the 40-odd boys and girls, stand up, walk about and start questioning each other about how often they eat fish or their other daily activities.

The discourse is part of an English-language class for hospitality students at the Ray of Everlasting and Continuous Hope, or Reach, vocational training and employment centre for underprivileged youth in Ha Noi.

Next door, marketing and sales students are at a beauty class: Make-up for the girls and hair styling for the boys.

“You have to learn how to present yourself if you hope to sell anything to customers,” advises their teacher.

The graphic design students plan CD covers. “I’m designing a cover for my favourite singer’s new album, if only it were true,” sighs student Truong Thi Sau wistfully.

Reach out

The teaching began in 2004, when Plan Viet Nam opened the first centre, named Livelihood Advancement Business, or LABs, in Ha Noi.

Over the next two years, centres followed in Hue city and Da Nang. Last year, with support from Plan Viet Nam and AusAid, LABs received official recognition as a Vietnamese Non Government Organisation and was renamed Reach.

“Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs figures show the rate of unemployment among urban young people aged 15-24 was 21 per cent in 2003, says Plan Viet Nam LABs project manager Nguyen Viet Dung.

“LABs’s aim is to provide poor and less privileged young people, aged 18-25 with an opportunity to be trained, free of charge, in a new occupation that can help with their lives.”

The underprivileged are drawn from street and migrant youth, school dropouts, and untrained and unemployed high-school graduates from poor or broken families and resettled communities.

The centres provide three courses a year.

Each is for three months with classes in hospitality, sales and marketing and graphic design and English-language classes for all students.

“We take more than 100 students for each course through tests and interviews, with about 20 more on the waiting list,” says Dung.

“About 10 per cent drop out during the first month because they are unable to cope or find a a better opportunity.”

The three occupational courses were carefully researched to guarantee their practicability and chance of employment.

Acting director Nguyen Thanh Huyen says: “We designed the most practical course possible with only 20 per cent spent on theory and 80 per cent on practice.

“It’s very intensive and goes throughout the day – twice as long as the usual vocational training course,” she says.

Reach higher

The acting director says more than 80 per cent of the centre’s gruaduates find work through a network of more than 100 business and enterprises created from its own connections.

“We keep in touch with and monitor the students for six months after graduation,” she says.

“We would also seek feedback from former students and their years.”

Pham Bich Hien, 23, was invited to return to the centre as a guest lecturer.

A student at its second course four years ago, she started work as a sales assistant at an electronic shop during the second month of her course.

“I was in the middle of so many almost impossible choices of colleges after high school when a friend introduced me to this centre,” she says.

The young woman won a place at the Economics College but instead chose to study sales and marketing at the centre.

“I wanted to start working rather than spending years studying in school and living on the meagre earnings of my parents,” she explains.

Now she is an assistant supervisor at the electronic store.

Australian marketing and communication volunteer Claire Palmer says “I think what is great about this course is the combination of how much training the students receive in a short time and how quickly they find employment.” Truong Thi Sau, whose disability prevents her from any work that requires standing, is from a poor family in central Nghe An Province.

“I found hope when I heard about Reach on the radio,” she says.

“I rang the director the next day and got in.

“I didn’t know how to work a computer when I arrived but I’m trying very hard in the graphic design class and want to earn my own living.”

VietNamNet/VNS