Tuesday, February 16, 2010
“We won’t have Mother with us at Tet this year”
After Ketsana…
Pham Thanh Thao, 14, an 8th grader, has become the mainstay in her family. In late September, Thao’s mother perished during the typhoon that ravaged Quang Ngai province, leaving four children and a sick husband.
The family’s home collapsed during the storm, so Thao and her brothers and sisters have to stay with their grandmother. As the eldest, it has fallen to Thao to take care of her brothers and sisters – Nguyen, 12, Uyen, 6 and Toan, only 2.
Thao’s grandmother told VietNamNet reporters about the family’s tragedy. The night the typhoon came. Thao’s father was lying ill at a hospital in another district. As house flooded and its tin roof threatened to fly apart, Thao’s mother took the children to their grandmother’s house nearby. Then she ran back to move the family’s store of rice onto shelves above the knee-high water.
With a groaning noise, the house shivered and then suddenly collapsed. Thao and her siblings waited anxiously for their mother to return. Alas, that was not to be. The next day, as the flood subsided, neighbors found the 37-year-old woman’s body.
Since then, Thao has taken care of her two brothers, her baby sister and her sick father. In the early days without mother, Thao tried to not cry in front of her brothers and sisters. Even now, if someone unintentionally asks “Where is your mother?” the baby, Toan, will say “Mother is cutting grass in the field”.
The four kids are living with their grandmother at a neighborhood temple. They sleep on straw mats spread on the building’s floor every night.
Thao, 14, said: “I get up at five to cook rice, sweep the house and feed the pigs and chickens. Then I set the table for my brothers and sisters and see that they are properly dressed for school . . . .” Overhearing Thao, one would hardly think she is so young.
Thanks to her big sister’s training, Nguyen can wash his own clothes while Toan can dish up rice himself. Not just taking care of housework, Thao also is trying to study well to be a good example for her brothers and sisters. Before going to bed, she prepares books and pens for the kids.
These children are surviving on the produce of a small garden and a few million dong of Government assistance received after the typhoon that their grandmother husbands to pay school fees.
As the people of Binh Minh village prepared for Tet, Thao’s grandmother didn’t dare talk with the children about the approaching holiday, fearing that they would miss their mother even more. “I’m very worried about their future,” she confided. “I’m growing old, and my poor, sick son can no longer do farm work.”
And what is Thao’s dream? To cover her sadness, the girl looked away, toward the foundation of the family’s ruined home, and said – as tears fell – that she hopes only that her father will regain his health and her brothers and sisters can continue to go to school like other kids. That’s enough – and sadly, even that modest dream may be beyond the strength of this young girl!