WESTMINSTER : Relief for the Disabled in Vietnam

Traveling through Vietnam recently, Frank Jao was struck by an image of his country’s war-torn past: disabled veterans with missing limbs, left with little means of transporting themselves even on short distances.

Many legless veterans of war “walk” by tying their arms to pieces of board and swinging their bodies in between--”a horrible way of moving around,” Jao says. For them, and for children inflicted with polio, Jao has begun a campaign to send wheelchairs--a scarce commodity in Vietnam--to Vietnam.

“Buying a wheelchair in Vietnam is like buying a Mercedes,” he said. “Imagine a disabled veteran who has nearly no income, who can’t move around, and how life would be. It would be worse than living in a prison. A wheelchair could make a 180-degree change in his life.”

“It’s one good deed I can do, one thing that one human being can do for another,” added Jao, a real estate developer who immigrated to Orange County from Vietnam 17 years ago.

Last week, Jao enlisted the help of the Rev. Mariano Yeo, who works in the Little Saigon Outreach Community Center. Yeo immediately began work on the project.

Yeo and his volunteers have since collected four wheelchairs, and have been promised more by the Salvation Army. Yeo says he hopes to be able to collect one wheelchair a day--60 total--before the mission heads out to Vietnam.

Project Mercy, an aid group out of Seattle that is planning to send medical supplies and other aid to Vietnam at the end of November, has agreed to transport the wheelchairs there.

The wheelchair project is coordinated under the auspices of Missionary Electronics International Inc., a nonprofit agency that can issue tax write-offs to wheelchair donors.

“We are getting the wheelchairs purely by donation, because we can’t afford to buy them,” says Yeo, a Chinese minister from the Philippines who has lived in Westminster for nine years. A new wheelchair can cost between $400 and $1,000.

But, he says, he has been careful not to involve the local Vietnamese community in his efforts.

“The anti-communist Vietnamese here have a grievance against the communist government of Vietnam, and if we have an indirect link or relation one way or the other, they don’t like us,” he says.

“But we are not political, and we are not condoning the Vietnamese communist government,” Yeo says. “We just want to alleviate the suffering of people who have lost legs and limbs, and to show the government that we as Christians care for less fortunate people.”