Help for Street Kids-Irish Woman Care for Vietnam Orphans,
The New Paper, Singapore,
7 August 1996

A little girl lost for six hours created a stir in Singapore. In Vietnam, it would not have raised an eyebrow, said Singapore sociologist, Dr. Thomas Tan, who visits Vietnam regularly.

Dr. Tan told The New Paper that there are 50,000 street children in the country. They live off garbage and are easy prey to the many diseases that make their rounds in the city.

Things have certainly improved in recent years, thanks to the country's economic reforms. There are fewer children begging on the streets. The Vietnamese government has also started to house some of these street children.

Ms. Christina Noble runs an orphanage, Christina's Children Social and Medical Centre. The three-storey brick building houses poor children and runs a day-care centre for poor working people free-of-charge.

Two doctors, seven nurses, two nutritionists and child-care staff man the centre. Two dentists also come in three times a week.

On a recent visit to the orphanage, Dr. Tan, 47, was touched by what he saw: "The children appeared to be very well taken care of. I could not believe that a six-month-old boy I held had been picked up from a gutter a few weeks ago. I was told he was near death from malnutrition and neglect. Half his buttock had been eaten away by animals and he was covered in filth and scabs," said Dr. Tan, who is the managing director of Market Behaviour, a social and marketing research country.

The centre also runs a shelter for street children called the "Sunshine Nest" in another part of the city. At present, it houses 15 children and also provides food, clothes and education to children of poor families.

These days, Ms. Noble devotes much of her time to finding sponsors for the centre. She receives about $126,000 a year from UNESCO and the European Union, but she needs $130,000 more a year to run the centre, and an extension to the centre would cost another $140,000.