Reaching Out Foundation

Every year, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day brought to us at ROF a lot of memories including a mixture of sadness and warmth of human love. In these days, our children slowdown what they are doing and devote their time to their mother or father. Happy are those who still have father and mother, because they will be able to spend some quality time with them. However, there are people who do not have that chance because their parents are no longer around, and they can only pray for them; and I am one of them.

In the last 11 years, the volunteer Thanh My band has been playing in five nursing centers in Orange County. Around 2003 when the band was playing at “Helping Hand of Westminster”, it met a young man who lived in this center; he was the sole survivor of his family in the TET Offensive (1968) in Viet Nam, after a rocket hit his family’s home and killed all other family members, leaving him in a tattered, dismembered body. Then he started his orphanage life at the age of 10. Only people who lost their parents in this war can fully understand his loneliness, suffering, and pain.

How happy is the one with parents!

How lonely is the one without parents!

But he is an extraordinary man, he accepted his situation, he understood that no one can escape suffering. His spirit is much higher than ours.

Following the flood of Vietnamese evacuated out of the country in 1975, he arrived to the U.S. via the orphanage sponsorship program. His name is Tran Trong.

He is very talented in music, song writing, piano musician, and loves to sing. At that time, he was still young, energetic, lively, and very strong when rolling his wheel chair, participating with Thanh My band as a keyboard player. A few years later, for some reasons, most of the volunteer bands stopped playing at “Helping Hand of Westminster”, including the Thanh My-ROF band.

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Many years passed since the ROF band stopped playing there, but Tran Trong never forgot it. Sometimes, he called and chatted with Thanh My. Thinking
about the less fortunate than him, still suffering in his native country, he concentrated on writing music, producing CDs in the nursing home, and sold them to acquaintances to help charities, including ROF.

Better time had arrived, Thanh My band returned to the old location now “Mission Palms Health Care Center”, and met Tran Trong there. The band’s return provided Tran Trong another opportunity to play music, his only hobby on wheelchair.

Mother’s Day after Mother’s Day and Father’s Day after Father’s Day, Tran Trong sold CDs to raise fund for charities.

On the last Mother’s Day, May 8^th, 2011, Tran Trong quietly handed ROF $120.00.  Then on the last Father’s Day, he handed ROF another $85.00 and another $75.00.

Tran Trong has an extraordinary life and an extraordinary heart. He is the light for people of today and tomorrow.

ROF

Mother’s Day and Father’s Day 2011, and also the 11^th year Thanh My-ROF band entertained residents in five nursing homes in California, USA.

Many thanks to the volunteers, singers, musicians, and sound specialists who’ve contributing their times, efforts, and talents to the un-ending of ROF charitable activities.

May God bless us and keep us.

Translated by Son Le.