18 people working for the mushroom farm of Tan My co-op in Phong My Commune, Phong Dien District, Thua Thien – Hue Province, lead lives with different hardships. Some are crippled, others even suffer myasthenia gravis and mental illness, and the rest are in poor and lonely plights. The very hardship of life has brought them together, relying on one another to overcome their unlucky fates.

Tran Thi Chien, a lonely women in Luu Hien Hoa Commune, who has been moving with wooden legs since her young ages, has really struggled for survival. Being legless, she could not work on her small farm but hires other farmers to work on it. In fact, the input costs and pay for the workers take away most of the farm benefits.

With many difficulties in life, she often asked to her self: “What to do to live on?” One day, I heard that our commune was funded to set up an  oyster mushroom farm for local poor and disabled. It was such a golden opportunity, and she applied to work and was offered a job there.

“Now, I have found a suitable job which does not require me to move much but brings me a stable income. Such a good luck has finally come to me”, she happily said.

At the age of nearly 70, Nguyen Thien, a one-armed man from Tan Lap Commune, is still agile and active in his job at the mushroom farm. “I have worked here since the very first days of the farm establishment. Farming mushrooms is light work and is suitable for disabled people as me. Working there, I feel much better now. I hate being a burden for my children”, he said. Le Thi Ut, a 51-year-old-woman of the ethnic minority group of Pa-Hi in Ha Long Village, Phong My Commune, confided that, “Being trapped in poverty, I did not know how to earn enough money to pay for schooling fees and food for my seven children. Today, my financial difficulties have been eased as I have a good job at the farm.”

“In addition to a good income, the workers here live in harmonious and helpful relationships, ready to share things with each other,” she said.

Do Khang, the manager of the farm said, “Our workers are either physically or mentally disabled and suffer lots of difficulties in their lives. But in this farm, they are assigned to appropriate work and can get stable incomes. At present, the average salary ranges from 800,000 to 1.2 million VND per month, depending on their working abilities. We are planning to expand our production in the forthcoming time with the aim to help more unlucky fates in and around our locality.”

Phong My is a commune that has a severe impact of dioxin, known as agent orange. Many local people here are the victims of the poison.

Tan My mushroom farm was founded in July 2009 with a cost of VND 1.6 billion funded by the Czech Government. This is also part of a project to reintegrate disadvantaged people which Jiri Kocourek Applied Sociology (JKAS), in collaboration with local authorities, implements in Vietnam.

Source: TP

Translated by Le Trang-Thu Nguyen