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Linh Nong, a diminutive Rotary Peace Fellow, was our guest speaker at our penultimate meeting for the year and despite her seeming youth, humbled us with the story of her career to date. She was born, she explained, in a small town near to Vietnam’s border with China. Growing up, she developed what she described as an energetic commitment to human rights, especially of women, children and the vulnerable.  She had to think pragmatically and so her first degree was in economics at the Foreign Trade University in Hanoi and her first job was with a medical import and export company. It was not long though before her heart led her to Vietnam’s Center for Studies and Applied Sciences in Gender – Family-Women Adolescents (CSAGA), a non-profit organisation dedicated to the rights of women and children subject to violence in Vietnam, where Linh worked for four years. Her roles included administration, communication, fundraising and project development. After four years, Linh moved to USA to take up an internship in Advocacy with the NFP Global Ties for five months before returning to Vietnam to a senior position in Thrive Networks, an international NGO pioneering evidence-based programs in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and education for underserved populations in Southeast Asia. Linh worked in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and told us that it is here she wants to focus her future efforts. However she felt the need for further education and so went back to the US in 2018 on a Fulbright Scholarship and a United Nations Graduate Fellowship to do her Masters in International Development. Linh provided links to free courses/programs provided by the Institutes for Economics and Peace (IEP): With this completed, Linh applied for and won one of the fifty Rotary Foundation’s Peace Fellowships to undertake a Masters of Arts degree in Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution. She is spending her summer doing ‘fieldwork’ in Lindfield and was introduced to our Club by DGE Lindsay May. It was very evident that this unassuming and gentle young woman was an outstanding recipient of a Rotary Peace Fellowship and that she will use the training and experience it gives her to become a powerful advocate and leader for vulnerable women and for the rights of all in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos experiencing gender-based discrimination. Helen, PDG John, President Janelle, Linh Nong (Rotary Peace Fellow) and Rev Manas Ghosh |
Great celebration.
