Tam's Villages

Tiny rural villages are often set in the midst of Vietnam's most achingly beautiful landscapes, but the people who live there don't share in the relative prosperity and optimism of the cities.

Tam tries to bring help to the ethnic people of the mountains as well as to poor individuals in the rural parts of Da Nang. Thanks to the generosity of individual visitors like Jane and Jimmy Buffett and Mike Fillinger, Tam has been purchasing young pigs for indigent mountain people to raise in order to generate a cash income. Volunteers from Bridge to a Better Future pooled their money in order to buy a cow for a youth who had lost both his parents and his right arm and had been surviving only through the generosity of his slightly less poor neighbors. David and Virginia Lockett of Steady Footsteps, Inc. funded the purchase of a small flock of chickens and ducks for that same boy and Tam herself bought seeds and is teaching him how to garden.

Visitors traveling with Tam, either by motorbike or van, get a chance to see the "non-touristy" side of Vietnam and Tam provides a way for even the smallest contribution to make real, dramatic changes in people's lives.