KITSAP SUN ARTICLE - By Rachel Pritchett

|| Full article online (c) 2009 Kitsap Sun

She broke down in the produce section of her grocery store and began sobbing so hard she had to go home.

That was 13 years ago, and Arden Norvold had just returned from a month in Vietnam, where she had taken photos for a humanitarian group.

Staying with peasants in Quang Tri Province, she’d seen concentrations of young people with physical disabilities, from birth defects like shortened limbs, to deafness and blindness. They were victims of Agent Orange spread during the Vietnam War so many years ago, the poison passed to them through their grandparents and parents.

She’d discovered the children weren’t going to school, had no medical care and were facing a bleak future. The stigma of disabilities runs strong in Vietnam; the kids would have trouble getting work, and would be destined to be burdens to their families.

“It was a real eye-opener,” Norvold said in her Bremerton home. “In Vietnam, if you’re not productive, you don’t eat. It’s real simple.”

The province and its small city of Dong Ha were at the demilitarized zone that divided the enemies. The fiercest fighting took place here, and the toxic chemical was used to melt much of the vegetation away.

About a million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange during the war, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths and disabilities among those exposed. Hundreds of thousands more children were born with disabilities.

That moment in the produce section, Norvold knew she could never could live life as she had.

To help the children bearing the horrifying legacy of war, Norvold helped start Kids First Vietnam in 1997 and today is the organization’s president. Helping her with fundraising is Angela Wilkinson of Florida, who splits her time between her Florida home and Bremerton.

Since then, the nonprofit has helped more than 1,000 young people, all of them coming from impoverished backgrounds and most with physical and mental disabilities.

That help first took the form of $50 scholarships for 150 school children. School fees had been the only thing stopping them from getting schooling.

Then, kids who couldn’t walk got wheelchairs.

That was followed by the construction of a Kids First Vietnam Rehabilitation Village in Dong Ha that provides training for challenged young adults so they support themselves.

Young people in their teens and 20s, many of them who cannot hear well, now learn sewing, tailoring and embroidery, then find work in a nearby textile factory.

Others go through a culinary program for work in restaurants and hotels.

Still others learn sign language and computer literacy.

There are 64 young adults in programs at the rehab village, and a dorm for 36 of them was just opened.

The rehab village also offers dental care, where dentists from Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi are brought in twice a year, performing mass procedures. Norvold is looking for some Kitsap dentists to help.

Norvold and Wilkinson also hope to raise their group’s annual budget to $150,000, but giving is down as a result of the recession. The group is non-political, and not aligned with a religious denomination.

Givers have come in all shapes and sizes, including a Vietnam vet businessman from Georgia, who sends $1,000 every month. Norvold and Wilkinson are looking forward to a fundraising dinner and auction Oct. 21 in Seattle.

Meanwhile, Norvold has never again broken down in the produce section. She’s been to Vietnam 20 times, and whenever she goes, children and their families run to greet her.

She did what she had to do, certainly not erasing remnants of war, but at least helping those caught in the tangle get through life a little easier.

“I appreciate every day, everything I have. I have too much,” she said.