Ho Chi Minh City and The Wheelchair Factory

January 2018

As part of our duties as Latter Day Saints Charities Country Director in Vietnam, we need to train new senior LDSC missionaries. The McDonald’s are leaving the south area and Elder and Sister Ellsmore are taking their place. We were excited to be able to visit Vietnam’s most southern city, as well as say goodbye to old friends and hello to new ones.

While in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), we visited the factory of our wheelchair provider, Kien Tuong. Tuong, in the last two years has had a stroke and since then his son, Quoc, has taken over the family business. While we were visiting, their family invited us to have lunch with them at their home. 

Before lunch, Quoc took us through a tour of the factory behind their home. They have another factory in the city and employ about 120 people in their operation. The family works hard to deliver a quality product and the business is flourishing. We are excited to do business with them because their manufacturing company directly benefits the Vietnamese people on all fronts. 

Tuong started the wheelchair company after the Vietnam War about 35 years ago. During the Vietnam war, he was a helicopter pilot and artillery expert in Southern Vietnam. When the city fell to the north, he was captured and sent to a re-education camp for two years.

After being released from the camp, he used his knowledge and creativity to start a bicycle business using the metal from the storage containers left by the Americans after the war. He took the metal and rolled it to make tubes, then shaped them into a frame for a bicycle. His bicycle business soon thrived.

  

One day, Tuong was at the entrance of a hospital as an injured man was being released to go home. This man had no legs, as they had been amputated after a war injury, and the doctors had given him all the help they could. Tuong watched them as they wheeled him in a wheelchair out to the front of the hospital to have his family take him home. Wheelchairs were scarce in those days, and the man, realizing that he was going to have to leave the wheelchair at the hospital, said that he would not get out of it. He threatened that he had a grenade and that if he couldn’t take the wheelchair with him, he would blow everyone up. Another man talked to the amputee and convinced him that if he took the wheelchair, others with injuries like his could not get the care he had already received, and that it would be a selfish act to take the wheelchair with him. Softening, he then realized what he was demanding and left without the wheelchair. Quoc’s father, witnessing this incident, was moved, and determined that he could make a wheelchair using the metal parts he had developed in his already thriving business for bicycles, to help men such as this one. This was the starting point for his wheelchair company. He realized all the good that he could do, helping many of his comrades that had suffered during the war. 

We loved our visit to the Kien Tuong family home, they were most gracious, and it was a wonderful opportunity to be their guest. Their spacious home sits in a beautiful tropical surrounding of palms and flowering bushes.

The Church has acquired a property next door to the factory, and is now in the process of fixing it up to be used as a chapel. We took a tour through the house and all agreed that the property is a beautiful setting for a chapel and roomier than most chapels in Vietnam.

In October, 2017, Tuong's son, Quoc helped us do a wheelchair training in Hanoi, and we found him to be very good and personable as an instructor. We invited Quoc to stay in our spare room in our apartment, during the training, and he asked many questions about the “Mormon” church. I asked him if he would like to read the Book of Mormon (Sac Mac Mon). To which he replied that he would. We obtained a copy of the BOM in Vietnamese for him and he read it. At the recent family luncheon, he told us that his father is now reading the Book of Mormon also. Quoc has expressed that he wants his children to be Mormons, but he doesn’t feel that he is quite ready to be baptized himself and struggles with the Word of Wisdom. The missionaries in HCMC are mindful of his progress and are continually working with him. Sharing the Gospel is a great experience. We are taught that it is our duty to be prepared to share our testimony and ask others to look at what the Gospel has to offer them. I love being a missionary and seeing the miracles that take place in the lives of those that embrace the Gospel of Jesus Christ.