“She Is a Teacher. She Is a Mother. They Are Two of the Same.”

Ms. Tuyen calls Dat “the little student she loves most.” And Dat once told her: “I think of you as my mother.”

Dat was born into circumstances that even adults struggle to name — deprivation? hardship? — perhaps both, perhaps neither word is enough. His father passed away when he was still young. His mother remarried and moved on. By the age of 14, Dat was entirely on his own. He left his hometown for Saigon, surviving on whatever work he could find — hauling goods at the market, sewing seams at a garment factory. He dropped out of school.

But then, one sentence changed everything: “Only education can lift you out of poverty.”

From that moment, Dat went back. He made his home inside the market itself — by day he sat in a classroom, and in every remaining hour, he worked as a security guard, cleaned restrooms, helped the vendors around him with whatever they needed — doing whatever it took to keep the dream alive: to keep studying, to reach university, to change the future that had once seemed so fixed.

And Dat reached it.

He earned the highest entrance score of his cohort at Can Tho University. In his most recent semester, he achieved a perfect GPA of 4.0. He is, by every measure, an exceptional student driven by extraordinary will. But for Ms. Tuyen, what matters even more is this: he still carries the dream that was almost taken from him. He still holds on to his faith. He still keeps the light burning inside his heart.

The story of Dat and Ms. Tuyen is a testament to the transformative power of education, of accompaniment, and of human compassion. Because teachers like her chose to show up — to become a steady hand for “little students” like Dat — the light of knowledge was never allowed to go out.

As November marks Vietnam’s Teachers’ Day on the 20th, the Be Better Foundation extends its deepest gratitude to every teacher who has been, in the truest sense, a mother and a father to their students — pouring love and patience into generation after generation. It is their devotion that lays the foundation upon which young lives are nurtured, shaped, and sent forward into a brighter future.

Be Better Foundation