Family case N°4

Preventive Case Studies: no4

Family of Ms. Le Thi Sam, Thuy An Commune

Thuy An Commune located along the edge of Hue City and is in depression area along An Cuu River Bank. It is easily affected by disaster annually, which is the reason for being chosen as a place to implement DW project in 2003. Because Thuy An is quite a new commune with the project, the work at the beginning was rather difficult – from beneficiary selection to people’s awareness of the project targets and other animation.

However, with the effort of project staff and positive response of People’s Committee of Commune and people as well, the project has been carried out favourably and easily; especially in beneficiary selection.

Ms. Le Thi Sam was one of poor families of the first group being chosen based on project criteria. Covered with iron sheets, her house had an area of 34.8 m2, non-plaster block-cement walls, bamboo purlins, no doors, temporarily composition, and weak roof structure. Therefore, to reinforce Ms. Sam’s house was very pressing.

Her husband has passed away and she lived with 2 little children. With the patience and diligence of Vietnamese woman, she hasn’t remarried and tried her best to bring up her children. The time we came to make the agreement with her is also the time she went to the People’s Committee to make birth certificates for her daughters of about 18 years old. By asking, we knew that her family was too poor to concern these kinds of things. At that time, even her children grew up, they could not save enough money to improve their house.

Being selected, she was very happy and warmly welcomed the project staff to home for work. The estimated budget was too high for the family’s capacity to carry out the work. However, she asked the project to get a loan of 2.5 million dong from the Commune Damage Prevention Committee credit program. On principle, the maximum amount of a credit loan is 2 million dong, but with this special case, we considered and accepted her requirement with the interest of 0.3% /month. All should be refunded within 3 years.

The total cost to reinforce the house is 4,527,000 VND and now it can resist typhoon. Every month, she gives back 142,000 VND to credit officer of Commune on the agreed date