Binh Nguyen Rybacki, with some of the Vietnamese girls associated with Children of Peace International.
By Claire Martin | Denver Post
LOVELAND, COLORADO – In 1975, at age 18, Binh Nguyen escaped from Saigon, barely avoiding the approaching North Vietnamese army.
Nearly two decades later, married and the mother of two, returning to serve as a translator for a medical team, she was shocked at the plight of children locally dismissed as buo doi, “dust of life.”
Most of the children were girls. Many had been sold into prostitution or abandoned. They suffered from health problems virtually unknown in North America, eliminated by vaccines, medicine, and preventive care.
In 1996, after years of working with a Vietnamese friend caring for 27 orphaned children, she established Children of Peace International, a nonprofit charity.
With the agreement of her husband, Jack Rybacki, and sons Preston and Spencer, the family moved from their home into more modest quarters, and devoted Binh Rybacki’s salary from Hewlett-Packard to COPI.
“Everything in our organization is simple,” said Binh Rybacki.
“Is it legal? Is it godly? If it’s legal and not godly, I won’t do it. If it’s godly but not legal, I won’t do it. It has to satisfy the law of man and the law of God.”
The Rybackis and COPI volunteers travel four to six times a year between Loveland and Vietnam. Preston Rybacki now lives in Vietnam. He helps coordinate COPI’s medical- and dental-care trips, and sustains COPI’s ties with 14 schools and orphanages serving approximately 6,000 of the bui doi children.
Over the past 15 years, COPI has created scholarships for basic education — tuition at primary schools is $35 per child, and uniforms are required — and vocational training, including micro-loans to single mothers interested in cottage industries. COPI built Ho Chi Minh City’s first pediatric HIV/AIDS hospital, and clean-water wells in rural Vietnam, and established an adoption program.
“One thing we liked about COPI is that Binh has foster families, so the orphanage babies aren’t warehoused — they’re well cared for by a foster mom every night,” Dianne Kersting said. Her son, Sam, was 6 months old when the Kerstings brought him to their Denver home in 1998.
Another COPI supporter: Cherry Creek High School’s Key Club members, who helped the Rocky Mountain Key Club raise more than $50,000 to build a school for 900 students in Phu Tho, in northern Vietnam.
“Once the children can manage to care for one another, then and only then we will have true peace,” Binh Rybacki said.
“None of us could ever imagine the fathers and grandfathers of these children were enemies on the battlefields just 35 years ago. Now the children are picking up the pieces and have begun their mending for peace.”
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