The community English project named DEC (Daily English Conversation) was established by VnRoyal Institute. We met each other in this project with all the hearts of Vietnamese children who were far away from our hometown and love our hometown community. What we want from the project is that the Vietnamese community will have more opportunities to practice listening and speaking with native speakers, removing language barriers. Only when we consider English as our second language, the distance between the success of the Vietnamese community reaching out to the world will be closer, and the door to the development of Vietnam's education and economy will be more comprehensive in the market. We are people who have studied abroad and have lived abroad, we understand better the importance of English and see more clearly that the conditions are not good enough in our homeland for the community to approach, exchange, and learn English with the natives… So it's been a year since the DEC project was formed and developed, the way has been through facing many difficulties and challenges, and DEC still stands firm and constantly reaches out. Until today, when we look back on the past journey, I think it was just yesterday...
Recalling the time of 2021, it was a very memorable year. Perhaps not only me, everyone who lives in Vietnam in general and, in Ho Chi Minh City particularly will never forget it. It was about the end of May, 2021, when the Covid pandemic broke out extremely strongly. All community activities and businesses had been suspended. Several businesses, including the service, tourism, culinary, and beauty industries had to temporarily suspend operations according to state regulations. Some other businesses had to switch to working online. It was also the time when the unemployment rate in Vietnam was higher than ever. Schools and training centers were also inevitably affected, having to stop all activities and closed completely. At that time, the city stepped into a period of social distancing, everything had become very tough. Every day through the fence in front of the door, what we heard were the sound of ambulance, the cries from someone who had just lost a loved one dying from Covid, and the call echoing in every street from the relief force and the army, civil defense. That scene was so heart-breaking!
Yet somewhere there was a small group of people who connected and quietly worked day and night for a community English project called DEC. But… how would we do when Vietnam had an outbreak everywhere? Everyone was just focusing on avoiding the pandemic, running from the pandemic, and earning food every day. International airports were closed, people and homes were in social isolation, Vietnam - US time and geography is halfway around the world, some native people in the US that we connected with the project were those who were retired and did not use technology software proficiently... countless difficulties were unnamed at that time. However, with all the faith in the community, we believed that the project would be successful. And that it would help a lot of Vietnamese people to better understand life in the US, and the characteristics of each state before immigrating overseas, studying abroad, helping the Vietnamese community practice listening and speaking and communicate more confidently with foreigners. We had focused on working day and night, devoting all our enthusiasm to the success of this project.
Through connecting native speakers of each state in the US to DEC, introducing familiar people to the project, and having small video call on the Zalo to Facebook Messenger, we have connected more states, and the number of members participating has been also bigger. To become more professional and expand the number of participants for the DEC session, we were forced to change the technology application to Google Meet. And you know, every time we changed the app, our personnel had to guide native people in the US to use it, from how to log in to the account, how to receive video calls, how to open the link to Google Meet, open the mic or which button to open the camera and everything had to be guided remotely. We started to gradually expand the project, build an internal team, have a fixed schedule for exchanges, prepare a separate topic calendar for each native speaker, a topic for each month, market communications and project promotion...
Today, when all activities have gradually stabilized, thinking back to the difficulties I have experienced, I am grateful to always have my comrades-in-arms, main speakers, and volunteers whom Dr. Lan (the founder of the project) has spent a lot of time and effort going to each US state to connect. All of them have been with the project since the early days with their hearts for Vietnamese people. They wish to be able to help the Vietnamese community become more confident when communicating in English. The DEC project would not have been realistic without those native people in each state. And it could not have developed like it is today without the participation of the DEC members who believe us to join our session, exchange, practice listening and speaking skills with our native speakers.
A year has passed and I hope that in the coming years, the DEC project will spread and develop further so that many Vietnamese people in 63 provinces and cities can remove all language barriers and reach out to the world. The project will also connect many native speakers in each US state on the journey led by Dr. Lan.
Please accompany us on the next journey of this DEC project and here is the Facebook fan page: DEC-VNROYAL. Let's find out and join us.
200 Nettleton Road Harrogate, Tennessee 37752 USA
+1 423 801 0000
