I know this is a very long shot, but it there any chance of locating someone that lived in South Vietnam in the early 1970s? My parents “sponsored a child” until the sponsorship agency was ejected from the country in the fall of the South. I have her name, date of birth, and the village where she attended school (but not her home village). My understanding is that it’s hard to reasearch Vietnamese names because there are so many people with any one name, and I don’t believe keeping records was a big priority then and a lot of them probably got destroyed.
In most sponsor a child programs, funds are pooled and invested in larger community development projects, such as a well or a school.
It sounds sleazy, and they do get a lot of flack for it, but when you think about it, giving handouts to families with photogenic kids isn’t actually a particularly effective way to decrease poverty. Supplying clean water to a village or vaccinating all the kids is going to do a lot more than handing money to a few select families when their kids get sick, for example. Hiring a new village teacher is going to be a lot more effective than paying for ten kids to attend the school the next village over.
The problem is, nobody wants to hear that their donation is .0001% of a huge vaccination project, no matter how revolutionary it might be and how many lives it saves. On a psychological level, people tend to need personal stories and personal connections to care. So organizations gather names and photos from schools and other community sources and use these in their marketing. It’s a bit deceitful, but in the alternative is that these very-much needed projects get less funding, and that cute kid misses out anyway.
So in short, the person involved probably doesn’t have huge memories of the person who sponsored them. They may be aware that they were part of a special program, and they may have had some correspondence. But it’s generally not a “that’s my other family in the US who put me in school and changed my life” kind of feeling. It’s more like “I remember when I was a kid I was in the free lunch program. I think we had to write some kind of thank-you letter at some point.”
Of course, YMMV. Different programs run differently. But in most cases I wouldn’t expect to much.
I think this is pretty much it. My church sponsored an orphanage in a 3rd world country. We did have a big binder of photos and brief biographies of the children and we were allowed to “pick” the one we wanted, but it was made clear to us that the money would be pooled for the benefit of all of the children there rather than given to “our” child. We got a name, picture, and bio to feel warm and fuzzy about.
Where did she attend school? I know quite a few people in Viet Nam, so I might know someone from the area. It’s true there aren’t a lot of different surnames in Viet Nam, especially in the south, but the full name would give a fair amount of variety. It would be helpful if you knew the diacriticals as well as the letters. For example, Thủy is a common girl’s name, but Thúy, Thụy, and Thùy are also possible.