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Generosity bankrupts
local charity kitchen
Kindness
not enough to feed the massive number of
Thousands of VND2,000 meals are served every
lunch time at Nu Cuoi restaurants in
A local restaurant
providing VND2,000 meals to the poor has just announced it will soon be
closing because it simply gave too much.
There are only 23
days until Nu cuoi 4 (Smile 4) in
“Running out of
money” is the main reason, of course, but not because Le Van Chinh, who
founded the charitable fund Tu thien tinh thuong (Charity of Mercy) last year
to run several charitable projects for the needy including five Nu Cuoi
restaurants in the city, does not know how to balance the budget.
But instead it
looks like the restaurant’s unbounding kindness to its customers – most of
which are lottery ticket sellers, street vendors, construction workers,
homeless people and poor students – is what sunk their coffers. The charity
has given up every last dime it had to serve as many customers as possible.
“There are more
customers than we anticipated,” Chinh, president of Son Ca Media, told Vietweek.
“During the first
week, we only prepared 150 servings everyday, but now we serve over 700 – 800
meals that include main dishes, stir-fry vegetables, soup, rice, and fruit,
because long lines were forming outside our place every day at 10 a.m. even
though we don’t open until 11.”
He says his staff
couldn’t stand to see people waiting long hours in the scorching sun so they
started serving at 10:30 a.m. and the restaurant broke with Nu Cuoi’s
traditional VND2,000 meals when it also began serving instant noodles with
vegetables and pork for only VND1,000 to those who arrived late after the
rice had run out.
So far, apart from
the noodles, the daily 800 meals include 100 to 150 plates made up of food
donated by local company Vissan. In addition, every Thursday, the restaurant
staff coordinates with other volunteer groups to prepare special lunches
featuring traditional Vietnamese cuisine, such aspho, bun thit nuong (grilled pork on rice vermicelli),
and banh canh (pork
noodle), to satisfy “customers’ appetites after a week of eating only rice,”
according to the fund’s vice president Nam Dong.
“These dishes
costs double to thrice the cost of meals on rice,” said Dong, former
editor-in-chief of Phap Luat Thanh pho Ho Chi Minh newspaper, “yet we charge
only VND1,000 so that those who are not satisfied with one bowl can have
another.”
Thus, it takes
more than VND10 million every day to run the restaurant. The project’s
leaders say they are currently only making from one fifth to one seventh of
that on an average day.
Though Nu Cuoi 4
has received generous donations and support from the public, including the
use of a major land lot on
The sum total of all
the help is only “moderate” compared to the needs of the poor, according to
51-year-old Chinh, who made his name known to the public in 2004 after he at
that time as chairman of Vitek VTB spent VND100 million to purchase the
copyrights of the famous poem Mau tim hoa sim(Violet shade of the
Tomentose myrtle) by poet Huu Loan (1916-2010) to promote the company’s
products, home and communications electronics.
“We carry out very
few activities to promote the restaurant to the public,” said the Son Ca
Media chairman, who dreams of opening 100 Nu Cuoi restaurants in the country.
But he said the main reason the District 4 location is about to closing is
that many people in the area are too poor to even afford Nu Cuoi and the
district had yet to develop a strong culture of charity work.
One from many
Le Thi Nu, a scrap
vendor from the central
Nguyen Viet Minh
Thu, a third-year student at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Law and one
of several volunteers at Nu Cuoi, told Vietweek that the food is even tastier than
most of the places she and her friends normally eat, but it’s much cheaper.
From Mondays to
Saturdays, Thu and her college friends prepare and serve food at the
restaurant from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. As unpaid volunteers, they help clean
the place, prepare and serve the food, and then they clean the kitchen and
have lunch together at the restaurant before leaving for afternoon class.
The volunteers and
staff are famous for their respect of the customers as well, often going out
of their way to please.
The comfortable,
well-decorated restaurant is made beautiful partly by paintings on the wall
by local painters and poets who have agreed to contribute half of their sales
to support the fund.
Though no
paintings have been sold, customers can also buy old books and clothes at the
restaurant at the same price of the meals. The books and clothes have been
donated by people around the country.
Can you sell kindness?
“We don’t serve
food for free in order not to hurt people’s pride,” says Chinh. “We give the
customers the feeling that they are buying the food with their earned money,”
says Chinh.
Chinh added that
Nu Cuois never try to distinguish who is really poor and who is not, and
welcome all people no matter how rich they are.
“We want to ‘sell’
and promote kindness among people the most,” said Chinh.
“Though some of
our customers are indeed not poor, our pure purpose and love toward people
might move them to give their hands to others after few meals here, I
believe.”
By
Phuong Anh, Thanh Nien News
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Thứ Hai, 2 tháng 12, 2013
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