From the rubble of the storm: hope

DISTANT DREAMS

Thu’s house stood on a flat, narrow clearing halfway down a mountain. Just metres from the front door, the land dipped into a huge valley, split at the bottom by the blue of the Nho Que river. The nearest school is visible on the adjacent slope, a red-roofed speck among tiered rice fields and snaking dirt paths.

Thu dreamed of walking those paths to and from school every day.

Instead, Thu looked after her siblings and cleaned the house while her parents, who grew corn on the steep cliff faces surrounding their home, worked the fields. Like many ethnic H’mong people, farming was their only source of income, and they needed all the hands they could get. Even with Thu’s help, they barely earned enough money to eat – school fees were out of the question.

So every day, waking up at sunrise and helping with the housework until after dark, Thu looked at the school across the valley and imagined what was happening inside – kids like her learning, playing and dreaming of all the things they might do with their lives.

For Thu, the only life she could envision was much the same as her mother’s: scraping a living working from dusk to dawn.

That future seemed to be cemented when her father passed away from illness. On top of their grief, the family’s struggle to survive intensified; Thu’s mother was now the sole breadwinner, and she needed her daughter’s help more than ever.

TYPHOON YAGI

Things would get much worse for Thu before they got better.

In September 2024, dark clouds began to gather over the valley. Typhoon Yagi – northern Vietnam’s most powerful storm in decades – had hit the coast, and the subsequent rains were sweeping through the mountains.

Thu’s family had heard no warning; they don’t own a radio or a television, and there is no loudspeaker for them to receive public service announcements. It was only as the rain hardened that they realised this was no ordinary downpour.

They rushed through the rain to store food at a neighbour’s sturdy house, then hurried back and sheltered in their home as the torrential rains continued.

When the skies finally began to clear, it looked like they had come through unscathed. Then, without warning, there was a deafening crash as the earth – made loose by the rains – cascaded down the mountainside and through the walls of their home.

As they entered the broken house to clean the wreckage, the earth began to shake again, and they fled outside as another landslide crashed through the walls.

They were physically unharmed, but it was another blow to any chance they might have had of escaping the crushing poverty that had already been compounded by the death of Thu’s father.

A NEW LIFE

As Thu and her family were cleaning their wrecked home, Blue Dragon was already delivering emergency food and supplies to people who had lost everything. When someone told us that they had heard of a family whose home had been destroyed by a landslide, we went straight to meet them.

We made sure that Thu and her family had everything they needed to get them through the short-term. But as we surveyed the land around their home, we noticed that there were deep cracks in the earth where the landslide came from, signalling that more heavy rains could trigger another one.

Wasting no time, we began building them a new house on a safe plot of land along the same mountain path. Because Thu’s house is so remote – at the bottom of a winding mountain path too narrow for cars to traverse – constructing a single house can take months. So, while we began the long process of constructing their new home, we continued to provide Thu and her family with food and household supplies.

Thu and her family moved into their new home in January 2025. To make sure they had everything they needed to begin their new life, we provided them with household equipment and everything they needed to start a small farm that will bring them a reliable income well into the future.