Ha Thi Crick has returned to her native Vietnam to help orphans and poor children live a better life.
Children living in the Vinh Long province orphanage were photographed at a birthday celebration.
Children living in the Vinh Long province orphanage were photographed at a birthday celebration.
Children living in the Vinh Long province orphanage were photographed at a birthday celebration.
Tiny Ha Thi Crick's heart is as big as her dreams
Ha Thi Crick is a tiny woman with delicate wisps of hair escaping from the dark ponytail that trails down her back.
Her eyes are soft. So is her voice, still tinged by the accent of her native Vietnam, which she left nearly 40 years ago to attend college in the United States.
Diminutive Crick may be, but meek she is not.
A firm handshake hints at her strength, but proof of it is in the improved lives she's given to orphans and poor children in Vietnam since returning to the communist country after nearly 25 years in Tulsa.
Crick has been instrumental in ensuring many Vietnamese orphans an education, medical care and clean, comfortable places to live.
Working with Vietnam's Social Protection Center, the 55-year-old also oversees scholarship and vocational programs for poor children, so they can work to help their destitute households.
Restoring adoptions
Crick is involved in various programs, mostly associated with the Vietnamese government, scattered in five areas. This year, her programs will help more than 450 children, many of whom depend completely on the assistance.
This year Crick also will take on a new endeavor. She will assist Americans who wish to adopt Vietnamese orphans, a practice banned for three years because of corruption. But the Socialist Republic of Vietnam recently agreed with the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi to reinstate adoptions.
Crick is the director of the Vietnam program of Dillon International, a Tulsa-based international adoption agency that will be one of about 20 agencies nationwide approved to facilitate adoptions from Vietnam.
"I dream that all my children -- I call them my children -- will have a home ... a loving home that will care for them, because I know that I love them a lot, but I cannot give them the future they need," Crick said during a recent visit to the Dillon offices in Tulsa.
Then she teared up.
"I want more than anything in life for them to have a home, a family, a home so they don't have to grow up in the orphanage because I have seen so many children that are so good, smart, beautiful."
Mixing grief and joy
It breaks your heart, she said, but it wasn't the only heartache Crick has experienced since returning to Vietnam.
Her mother died of breast cancer in November 2002. The terminal illness was a major reason why Crick returned to Vietnam, but she also was inspired to help the many under-served children of Vietnam.
The inspiration was sparked many years ago when Crick, then just a young teenager, occasionally visited an orphanage with instructors from her Vietnamese school.
"I fell in love with all of those children," Crick said. "This was when I was 13 or 14 years old, but my desire was to work with those children."
Then life came along, as it always does.
Crick came to the United States for college, married and had two sons (now 31 and 28 years old and living on their own).
Her family moved to Tulsa in 1976 after her husband got a job with American Airlines.
Crick went to Vietnam in 1995 and 1998, each time visiting an orphanage.
"Again, I had seen so many (orphaned) children, and I fall in love," she said.
But home was Tulsa, where Crick was the executive director of the Asian-American Community Service Association.
Then in 1999, the time was ripe for her inevitable return to Vietnam. Her divorce was just finalized, her children had stable jobs and her mother was critically ill.
And there were the orphans, a cause Crick had not forgotten. She talked with Dillon International, and soon enough had the job in Vietnam along with the agency's financial backing to work alongside the Vietnamese government to help its struggling children.
Committed to change
Crick settled in Vinh Long province and began refurbishing a dilapidated orphanage whose main water source was a nearby river. She recalled ripping off the sheets from cribs where ants swarmed, biting babies from head to toe.
Pictures that Crick carries show the orphanage, now painted in bright colors, filled with smiling children celebrating a birthday.
That original effort in Vinh Long grew into three other provinces as well as Can Tho city. Dillon funds, including donations, pay for programs that send almost 150 poor children to school, underwrite a heart-operation project and support the vocational training program, which has served more than 700 children, Crick said.
Vietnam is one of several countries in which Dillon has humanitarian aid programs working for orphaned and poor children.
Dillon gives to the Vietnamese programs about $200,000 a year, said Deniese Dillon, Dillon's co-founder and executive director.
"We're sticking with those children, and that's our commitment," she said. "It's very hard to do, but we are committed. We're not just about adoption. We're not about taking children of that country altogether. We're trying to keep them there. We're trying to help very poor families educate their children, and we're doing that at the request of the government."
Initial dealings with the communist Vietnamese government were not easy, but Dillon said Crick's diplomacy has won them over.
"It's absolutely amazing: her work and the way she has built a relationship with the government," Dillon said. "Ha decided, and we agree, that it was better to work with the government than to try to go in and build from scratch. What we're finding is that the government really, really wants better things for its children."
Crick said life in Vietnam is not easy. She is lonely and misses her sons, but she plans to stay and fight for the children there.
"Then when I retire, I would like to come back to this country and start taking care of my grandchildren," she said emphatically and hopefully, still waiting on her first grandbaby.
Leigh Woosley 581-8465
Shooting for the moon
Dillon International, a Tulsa-based international adoption agency, needs financial help for the many programs it operates in Vietnam to help poor and orphaned children.
The agency is pinning plenty of hope on its annual fundraiser, the Lunar New Year celebration, Jan. 29 at the Doubletree Hotel Downtown. Ticket sales and proceeds from a silent auction will go primarily to fund Dillon's efforts in Vietnam, said Susanna Will, the agency's director of development.
"We just have so much going on there, and there is just no way we have the money," Will said. "We are just going on faith and hope and some caring donors."
Dillon runs programs for under-served children in several foreign countries, but she said money is mostly needed in Vietnam, where the agency has several different projects, including scholarship programs and vocational training for poor children, as well as orphanages.