Boy, this has been and continues to be a busy month. I am involved into too many projects, and this week was the accumulation of all community work deadlines and crunch-times, and I am running low on fuel and resources. DH4 campaign needs to be kick-started and calling up people to follow up on the US fundraising tour is just so time-consuming. I still need to put together a prototype of the bilingual DH4 registration pages by this weekend, and while it looks like I am still somewhat on track, there is so much other work piling up: the upcoming Strive reunion, the complications with the VPS retreat in Seattle, the lack of interest for the VPS Conference 2006 that does start to worry me, the NAVSA IT grand project (which is pretty darn ambitious)…. VPS SoCal is waiting for me to jump on the VPS Gala 2005 bandwagon, but I can’t just yet. I look at my Outlook calendar, and it's so colorful with appointments it looks like a kids' game. To top it all, I am kinda behind with my work at Microsoft as well. Not good.
All that I really want to do community-wise is DH4 and VietACT only, and in my personal time, I really want to watch the many independent movies that I have on my list (Wong Kar Wai’s 2046, Supersize Me, Saving Face, Howl’s Moving Castle, etc…), read the book that Phu Heo wanted me to read before he died, play the piano more…. Yet, I continue to being dragged on to other projects and continue to let my good-friend Thien Tam down, as I promised her three months ago already that I want to commit myself to VietACT. Hm.. sigh….
At any rate, at least Bolinao 52 fundraising event is over now. We didn’t have the high attendance that we were hoping for, but we did successfully fundraise a good amount of money that will hopefully help director Duc Nguyen to finish this ground-breaking documentary over the next months. I had dinner with him after the event, and he told us how next month he will by flying to the Philippines to finish his Vietnamese boat people documentary and also be the media-watchdog over the interviews that will be happening there in regards to the entire issue with the 2000 stateless Vietnamese hoping to be accepted to the United States.
This is yet another big project, led by inspirational award-winning lawyer Hoi Trinh, whom I had the pleasure to invite to the VPS Conference 2004 last year. He’s a very charismatic, energetic and funny-as-hell guy. In a nutshell, after Hoi Trinh’s 7-year lobbying campaign, the United States has finally agreed to send a small team to the Philippines to interview 2000 stateless Vietnamese refugees for potentially resettling them to the United States. However, knowing that this team will be rather ruthless in following strict Patriot-Act-like protocols, Hoi Trinh has been lobbying the US government to apply more internationally-accepted (repeat after me: “more humane”) rules when performing these interviews. This is where you can help out. Please call your congress representative and ask about this issue and urge the delegation to treat these 2000 Vietnamese refugees as people and not as numbers.
More importantly, Hoi Trinh is desperately (and really desperately) looking for volunteer lawyers who can donate their time to go to the Philippines next month to coach these 2000 Vietnamese refugees and also represent them. Gosh, this is probably the only time I wish that I was a lawyer so I can help out. Anyone know any philanthropic lawyers?
Oi…soo many good projects, so little time. Life’s too short.