Poor people line up to get lunch boxes from a charitable kitchen. It’s a familiar image on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at Lantern Restaurant, located at 72 Nguyen Thien Thuat Street, Nha Trang...
Poor people line up to get lunch boxes from a charitable kitchen. It’s a familiar image on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at Lantern Restaurant, located at 72 Nguyen Thien Thuat Street, Nha Trang.
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| Lanterns Restaurant’s employees give lunch boxes to poor people. |
° Charitable hearts
Robert Costabile, an Australian officer for Wesley Mission Victoria, a humanitarian organization assisting suffering people, such as orphans, homeless people, older people and people with disabilities. When traveling to Vietnam in 2005, he met Hoang Lam, a Vietnamese woman of charitable activities. Lam took the Australian man to houses of compassion and pagodas rearing orphans in Nha Trang and Cam Ranh. Then, monthly they visited there to cook meals, give books and play with the unlucky children.
Robert and Lam thought about building a new house of compassion to help children more directly. But then, they decided to do business to create a fund for their charitable activities.
° … and charitable kitchen
With great efforts, in April, 2008, they opened a restaurant in Nha Trang named Lanterns with the aim to fund their charitable activities from the profits the restaurant earns. Lam is its manager while Robert spends most of his time in Australia. Activities such as visiting, giving presents to houses of compassion and cooking meals for children still have been done. Additionally, the restaurant teaches cooking for some children in pagodas as a career to earn living. Especially, since October, 2010, the restaurant has started a charitable kitchen for poor people.
The restaurant’s employees, most of whom are students, came to every corner in the city to introduce about the charitable kitchen to vendors and poor people. After two weeks, more than 100 lunch boxes were distributed in 30 minutes. Guests, especially foreign ones, of the restaurants also felt excited and some of them joined this activity.
Now, the restaurant doles out lunches on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays with over 120 servings a day. Each serving includes rice, a braise dish and vegetable, worth about VND12,000. A lot of poor people come here for lunch. “At first, when hearing about the rice-kitchen, I didn’t believe. Recently, I went to the restaurant and immediately was given a lunch box. Rice and dishes here are very clean and nice”, said a 78-year-old poor man from Phu Yen.
Beside this, Lanterns Restaurant encloses information about orphan and houses of compassion to invite donations from its guests. Many overseas Vietnamese and foreign guests have contributed to the rice-kitchen. “The restaurant has been developing well. I hope our rice-kitchen will supply more servings for the poor and all days in a week”, Lam confided.
Meanwhile, being asked about this charitable kitchen, Robert repeatedly said, “Don’t write about me. Give good words to the rice-kitchen makers in Vietnam. They are helping their compatriots, not me. They are very kind and respectable.”
T.T
