Hi, my name is Alice. I am making this GoFundMe on behalf of my friend Le Vang. All the money after whatever GoFundMe cuts out will go to Lee and his project. Here is a little bit about Le. Le Vang is a student in Laos who was recently announced to have a full scholarship to study abroad in Arizona at ASU. He will not start this journey until next year or so. Here is a picture of Le.

In Laos, he teaches English to Hmong students. I have been a guest teacher a few times via webcam to help students communicate. It is tough to teach during the rainy season because the rain is thunderous and cold. It makes it hard to talk and hear over the rain dripping on the ceiling that they have. In the summer, it is way too hot as well. Le reached out to me about this project. He wanted to reach out to see if we can raise money for two classrooms. One for teaching and one for the computer lab. He is there to teach English but would also like to expose students to technology, as many want to apply for scholarships and learn basic computer skills.

Please read his story below.

"Hello, everyone; my name is Le Vang. I was born 24 years ago into a poor family in a small village with Twenty-five families in the northern of Xayaboury province, which is in the countryside of Laos, very close to the border of Thailand. In that part of the country, there was no electricity, no machines or technology at that time and it has not developed much over the years. As small rice farmers, my parents had no education; my father was orphaned when he was two years old, and my mother was the big daughter in her family and had to provide for her family so she never had the opportunity to attend school to be educated. When I was five years old, my father enrolled me in primary school; however, the primary school only accepted students by the age of six years old, but since my father wanted so much that get the chance to be educated due to the fact that he was never given that chance before, he had to lie about my age so that the teachers at the school would welcome me. At school, people used to mock me a lot because of my height, and because I had no brothers to defend me, they considered me the weakest kid around. They would beat me up, hurt me, and do terrible things to me that I would remember all my life. My mother once said, "if you are constantly being hurt by them, then you should stop going to school", but I told her, "if I stop going to school today, I will struggle more in the future", so I never gave up on school. Since I was accepted to school, my parents didn't know how to help me with my lessons when I returned from school, and they didn't know where to get my school textbooks either. They simply assigned me to a school that was no longer in session. At that time, I really wanted someone to teach me, but no one was willing to help me, so I had to learn the hard way all on my own, without any textbooks. When I was in third grade, my father told me about the Secret War (Indochina War), and the many Hmong people who fled to the United States and other countries. Then he taught me a bit about the world out there, and I've started learning English, and I've realized that I'll surely need to know English in the future. Normally, we did not have English as a subject at school during that period, but I managed to purchase some English books, such as Book one and Book two about English-Lao, to study at home. Stepping into grade four, I remembered that I somehow heard in grade five or in the last year of primary school that the teacher would choose one outstanding student from my school to compete against other schools in the city, so I tried everything to be that student. Finally, I was selected as a contestant for my school's subject Mathematic stand, and as a result, I received the city's third award. After completing primary school, I continued to secondary school. At that time, my father told me that because he was an orphan, he would never know how to help me with my education but that I should aim to learn all the things I could learn in life which would be beneficial to me in the future. He could not teach me much but he would always support and encourage me as much as he could. When I was in primary school, I was making plans to be an excellent student, but once I was in secondary school, I switched my main subject to physics, and as a result, I received second prize in the city. During the summers of secondary school, I desperately wanted someone to teach me English or to take me to the city to take some extra classes to improve my English, but my parents could not to afford to provide that to me, and I was left with no one to teach me English for many years. My parents didn't really understand my wishes either, so they told me I wasn't a good son for them until the end of secondary school; my parents realized that they had overreacted to my ideas and finally accepted my decisions when they saw all the positive things that I had achieved and the hard work I put into my small successes. They also realized that what I was capable of doing wasn’t something any other kids in the village could do. From that day on, they always considered my opinion for anything they would be dealing with in the future; They accepted that their son had a different mentality. As there was no high school in our village after I finished secondary school, I moved to the city in order to continue our high school education which was 30 kilometers away from my home. During high school, I lived in the school's dormitory and brought some rice every week to sell to Chinese people in the city in exchange for a small amount of money to pay for my scholarship. Besides that, I was also growing vegetables after class to provide for my own and also for sale. In high school, people mocked me a lot because I didn't have new clothes or a lot of money nor did I look good. Well, the truth was that I have always been very poor, very short and tiny. After some time, my best friend started behaving strangely to me. He and the new friends decided to unfriend me because they claimed that I didn’t have money to offer them beers to drink. My life has been so sad and difficult, but still, I was willing to offer what I could to help one another. Being rejected from people has served as an inspiration for me to reflect on myself and my future. And then, I managed to get a large number of friends who were so diverse and from different backgrounds (big, tiny, wealthy, poor, or average people, men and women). I adored them all and did whatever I could to support them; I taught them English, Physics, and a variety of other subjects. All of my new friends came from different levels at school; some would call me friend and some would call me brother. One of them happened to become my new best friend. He would do anything to help me, a very humble and kind person. We lived together at the dormitory at that time, and he would buy us matching shirts in the same size and colors, which made us look like twins. He was not as poor as me but I was so grateful that we found each other at that time of my life. He was not in my class but studied on the same level as me. Thanks to the love we shared as brothers and the love that my other new friends also shared with me, I studied so hard every day to be the best version of myself so that I could give my knowledge back to all my friends. As a result, in my senior year of high school, I was selected as an excellent student for Physics, just as I had been in secondary school, and received the third award. I've always planned ahead for each educational level. Even if I wasn’t the best, I worked really hard toward success. Last year in high school, my best friend’s class and my class had the same teachers. Some of the guys that rejected me before were in my best friend’s class, and they were doing so badly that one of our professors actually told them: "Oh, you guys just wasted time; you guys didn't understand what I taught you, I taught you this topic so many times but you guys are still doing so bad! Keep your gaze fixed on class One! I only taught Le Vang once, and he was able to grasp the material quickly and looked brilliant, he was regarded as the greatest by all of the students in the class". When my best friend returned to the dormitory after class, he told me how proud he was of me and that the teacher had complimented me so much and was so mad during his class that the other guys (who unfriended me) were ashamed because they couldn't do better than me. In the evening, the same guys came to my dormitory room and brought up the teacher's compliments to ask me about the answers to the lesson they failed, I didn’t really mind giving them copies of my answers, which I gladly accepted to help them. “I believe that if we do good deeds for other people, good deeds will come back to us”. After our high school graduation, my best friend and I were accepted into the General English Major at Souphanouvong University. When we arrived in LPB, I had basically nothing with me, so he rented us a room and purchased school supplies, shoes, and food for us. After three weeks, my friend's pocket was empty and I still had nothing, so we only ate rice with water, salt, and chilies to cope with our hunger. After a week of eating rice with chilies, my friend developed stomach pains due to the excessive number of chilies he ate. On top of that, as my friend had never lived far away from his parents, he was missing so much his home. He decided to return home and I was left alone. After his departure, I ate the same meals during a long period and became very thin; The other students would ask me why I was so thin a question about my eating routine. Eventually, I told them about my meals, so they asked why I wasn't returning home since I had nothing else to eat than just rice and salt. I told them that I came to the university to learn and gain knowledge because I came from a poor family in the countryside and that if I wasn't patient enough with the poor food, I wouldn't be able to study. Many of them said they would have returned home if they were me but I told them that I had never seen people dying from starvation, on the contrary, people would sometimes die from eating too much good food. I asserted that I would not die easily from hunger because hunger has been following me in my whole life. My parents told me at that time that when I was one year old, I was very sick and had fainted away many times, and that at times, they believed I was already dead, but then I would wake up again and cry. No matter what happened to me, I strongly believe that God has always been by my side to protect my soul ever since I was a child. At University, people bullied me because I was thin and poor, but instead of being sad for myself, I used their meanness as a tool to change my life. In the second semester, I accepted a job as a waiter at a restaurant. When I entered my second year of University, my grades were so good that a company came and offered three scholarships to just three outstanding students of Souphanouvong University. Amongst thousands of students, I was lucky to be one of the three students selected to obtain the scholarship, which covered tuition for a year. Following that event, many of my classmates hated me, they didn’t feel that I deserved it because of who I was. To my, it was another victory, the reward for all my hard work and struggles I went through. A few months later, the South Korean Embassy in Vientiane came to visit our University and presented a competition where they wanted to challenge some students into presenting the beautiful island of South Korea in English. I realized that the time was running out, and there was only one night left, so I used that night to prepare for the competition the next day. Meanwhile, I asked one of my cousins with whom I shared a class with participating, but he was super busy so he just wished me to win. Another student from the same class immediately bullied me: “a dumb guy, weak, tiny like you could never win all the competitions! All the competitors have a wide range of knowledge, and you don’t need to compete with them because I already know you wouldn't be able to beat them”. I told him that being in a competition doesn’t mean that you will always win, “sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. If you were the loser, it was a good learning experience for you to train for the next time, but if you were the winner, you would realize how much you can accomplish”. After the competition, I returned to announce to my cousin that I won, he was ecstatic, while that other guy who had always bullied me secretly told me he was happy for me, but his face expressed shame. During this year, I worked part-time at the hotel as a receptionist until the first wave of Covid19 hit Laos. So, all came to a halt, and I was left to learn on my own. In my final year of University, I have made plans for after graduation. I have started a project to teach free English and support underprivileged students from the place I am coming from. I have onboarded into this project my cousin from Sweden, Varna Vang (originally from France) and one of my good friends Chueva Tong Lee from Laos, who shared the same class with me. We were raising funds and starting the project on February 16th, 2021, until today. My teaching experience is not so big but since my first semester at University, I have enjoyed teaching English during my leisure time to all my friends and many other students and also to a few poor children in Luang Prabang; which has brought me a great motivation to continue in that direction. I reflected on my life as a child and studied from primary school to high school. There were fifteen students in my Village who shared the same class as me, but only I was able to persevere and become who I am today. They all struggled because they developed allergies and had to learn the hard way. Getting here today was not an easy journey at all, which is why I can be proud of myself but at the same time, I am very sad for all of my friends who failed. As a result, I do not want underprivileged students to be like my friends, nor do I want them to follow in my footsteps because only a few people are capable of doing it, and they may end up like my friends and fail to realize their dreams. For instance, I have considered three of my sisters who were not given the opportunity to receive an education and are now living in poverty as farmers. I decided to start this project because I believe that most children have their own talents and aspirations, but that many of those dreams die because they don't have a better chance or a good mentor, and that education is the only way to improve and grow their lives for the better. I also believed that the English language could assist millions of people in achieving their goals, which is why I planned to provide free English class to those students. Fortunately, once again, all of my grades were excellent when I graduated university. After graduating from Souphanouvong University, I obtained my bachelor's degree with Second-Class Honors. I then applied for a US scholarship program that focuses on developing leadership qualities, and the outcome was very well welcomed. I was chosen as the first principal to accept a scholarship to study at Arizona State University in the United States, and I'll begin classes there in March 2023. I am currently a teacher, program organizer, and the founder of the Giving a Better Chance Program. Since the program's inception on February 16th, 2021, to the present, we have been able to provide nearly a thousand rural, underprivileged students with school supplies to help them study in school. Currently, we have close to 70 students attending our English classes every day, and we have close to 30 students who can communicate with foreigners and speak English fluently.

Once again, I am doing this fundraising to build a better class and a Computer Class for all of my students because our class is not at all conducive to learning, because we only study in the pretty old house with a bad roof, a bad floor, and wood walls. So, when the hot season, it is very hot outside and inside the class. So, all the students are perspiring while they study, also it is very noisy and difficult to communicate and learn during the rainy season, in the cold season, it is very windy and cold. So, very difficult to learn during those times. but all the students put a lot of effort into learning English. So, please help us to have a better class for learning. Furthermore, computer class is very necessary and essential for our students because everything related to scholarships must be applied for online via computers. Some of our students are now fairly proficient in English and they try to apply scholarships abroad, but we do not have enough computers for them, also they lack computer skills. In order to help my students learn English and able to get scholarships abroad So, I am asking you to support my students in learning English by providing a better class and a computer class for them. I would greatly appreciate it if you could help me in any way you are inspired to. Any amount would be greatly appreciated. “I would like to invite you to join me in supporting my project, which will greatly benefit my students who are coming from different backgrounds and want to pursue their dream study abroad for a better brighter future”. “GIVING A BETTER CHANCE” is the name of the project.

THANK YOU FROM THE VERY BOTTOM OF MY HEART!"

In addition to that, do watch Le's video here for more visual content about the current school and students. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgBmsG5h-pU

Next, let me share Le's vision of how the classrooms will look like:

Furthermore, here is the breakdown of the cost of building these classrooms.

We are looking for all the help we can get to start this project. Please help us by donating and sharing to this GoFundMe. If you would like to contribute via another payment method such as Paypal, Venmo, FB pay and Zelle, my info are below.

Paypal: @alicechayang

Venmo: alicechayang

FB pay: facebook.com/alicechayang

Zelle: (please message me for my number)

Thank you, everyone, so much in advance.

-Alice