Founder's Blog
Blue Dragon's founder, Michael Brosowski, shares the lessons he has learned from the children and young people he meets from day to day.
From Michael’s blog lifeisalongstory.com
A long walk
On Sunday, I took part in a marathon walk. Forty-two kilometers along the Merri Creek in Melbourne, Australia, to raise money for the work of Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation. About 30 people took part, and although many of us had never met before we were united by...
Humanity in development
I’ve given more than a few speeches in my lifetime. I truly enjoy the challenge of gauging an audience and adapting my message to meet their needs and interests; many times I have been standing on the stage before I have made a final decision about what I will say. So far this has always worked for me; but last week I thought that maybe I had pushed it too far. I had been invited to speak to 900 university students from around the world at the UN Centre in…
A 10 year journey
This week marks 10 years since Blue Dragon first went to China to rescue a teenage girl from slavery in a brothel. At the time we had already been rescuing kids from sweatshops within Vietnam for just over a year. We were responding to calls for help from families and found that the skills we had developed working with street kids were useful in investigating missing children. Even still, when that first case in China came up, we knew we were taking on something bigger than we had ever encountered. That…
Ten
Nam’s life has been pretty rough by anybody’s standard – and he’s only 10 years old. Blue Dragon first came across Nam a couple of years ago. He had been hanging out on the street with his mother, who sold drugs around one of Hanoi’s lakes, and most of the time he was completely unsupervised and uncared for. The very first time we noticed Nam, his mother was beating him for some perceived crime, and our social workers helped to calm things down. Nam had never learnt any good habits or…
Freedom calls
Lan was just 16 years old when she was trafficked from Vietnam and sold into a forced marriage deep inside China. Blue Dragon receives calls for help several times a week, and sometimes every day. The young people we’re called to rescue are in all sorts of situations: sometimes caught up in pedophile rings, sometimes trapped in sweatshops, sometimes taken out of the country and sold to brothels or as brides. When the phone rings we just don’t know what the next case will be. For all we’ve seen and heard over…
Chains
Trinh is 14 years old and has been selling sex for 2 years. He has never told us how it started; I don’t know who first abused him or what the circumstances were. Maybe he was desperate for money and reluctantly went along with a pimp who convinced him it would be easy. Or maybe he was deceived by an older friend who promised him a fun night out and didn’t tell him what was going to happen.…
Taking the lead
When Thoat first came to Blue Dragon, she was wild. People often assume that the boys must be harder to work with than the girls. In fact, when we meet homeless girls out on the streets of Hanoi, it’s not unusual that their behaviour is far more out of control than the boys who are in similar situations. Girls tend to grow up under stricter parental and family control; when that control is gone, the girls may not know how to manage their own behaviour. By contrast, boys are always…
A difficult journey
It’s easy to think of working in charity as a glorious and noble mission. Sometimes it is: there are plenty of days I go home beaming, knowing that we’ve achieved something great and changed a life. And sometimes it’s grimy and dangerous and frustrating. There are plenty of days that end with nothing but a question mark about what will come next. This article, written by one of the most meticulous investigative journalists I have come across, was published just last weekend. It explores a case that Blue Dragon faced…
Learning and growing
Nguyen is a pretty special teenage boy. He can be an angel at times, and he has a smile that beams with innocence. His mission in life is to bring joy to everyone; he becomes visibly frustrated and worried when people around him are arguing. Nguyen just wants everyone to be happy. And of course, being a teenager, he can also be a handful of trouble. He likes to hang out on the street late at night and has a habit of shouting at people who harass his friends. Just recently…
Appealing
It’s that time of year again when Blue Dragon is in need of help. Anyone who follows my blog, or keeps up with the Blue Dragon Facebook page, knows of our work. We rescue kids in crisis. Since the start of 2017 alone, we’ve already rescued 64 victims of human trafficking from brothels, forced marriages, and sweatshops. That’s in addition to the homeless children we’ve reunited with their parents, the classes and shelters we run, and all the court cases we’ve been in to represent the victims of crimes. Altogether…
The Graduation
Today I found myself at Van Mieu, Hanoi’s renowned Temple of Literature, for a graduation. But I was there merely as a prop. Vietnam has a long history of valuing formal education in the tradition of Confucianism. Van Mieu stands as the country’s oldest university, dating back to 1070. Presumably, student life was quite different back then! I was called on this morning by Tan, one of the Blue Dragon boys whose girlfriend, Luan, has just completed her Grade 12 exams. I don’t know Luan very well, but she was coming…
Survival mode
Xuan doesn’t know how he came to be in the orphanage. He knows nothing of who his parents are or why they dropped him off at the institution just outside Hanoi. His earliest memories are of being cared for by an elderly orphanage worker in a group home; they were happy days and he always did well at school. A time came that he was adopted by a family; but when the parents split up neither wanted to keep Xuan so he ended up right back where he started. As…
