Sun In My Heart are a private non-profit organization working to bring new life and hope to the homeless, orphaned, and poor children of Vietnam.
Even before forming the Vietnam's Orphanage Fund, we have been helping orphans, homeless and impoverished children in Vietnam. Both as individuals and through the help of friends we have brought money, food and clothes, books and school supplies to the needy children of Vietnam.
Vietnam's Orphanage Fund seeks to support each child in as many ways as their age and situation requires. We hope the information from our website will be useful for you to help the poor and orphaned children in Vietnam.
About the founder
Kim McCluskey’s lifetime spiritual commitment is to help others, especially children. His commitment to helping children began in the sixties when he was an 18-year-old Marine stationed in Vietnam. Even though he later received the Purple Heart for his service, he always felt the war was wrong, that the American people had been lied to, and that the people of Vietnam were good, gentle people.
After he came home from the war, he became a hippie with a long blonde pony tail and a Volkswagen bus. He began to meditate as he tried to learn about loving kindness, compassion and God. In his thirties, he raised three children and became a chiropractor. In his fifties, responding to his passion for nature, adventure and paddling, he sold his chiropractic practice and began to guide paddling trips to remote places all over the world. His business is “Worldwide Paddling Adventures,” and the website is www.funtripper.com. In his spiritual practice, he came to believe that we are all one and that we must work constantly to love one another.
When he took groups paddling on the bays of Vietnam, he was reunited with the Vietnamese people, who had seemed so gentle to him as a young Marine. On one of these trips, he discovered three young girls living alone on a plastic raft, abandoned by their father. As a father, he could not tolerate the girls’ predicament. His quest to help the three was the beginning of the “Sun in My Heart” charity. First he was able to build a house for the girls, all of whom are now doing very well. Then, with the money left over, he figured out how to build schools for small children left out of the mainstream schools of Vietnam.
The children in the schools built by “Sun in My Heart” are poor, minority children who do not speak the standard Vietnamese language. These schools are like “Headstart” in the U.S., in which minority children get pre-reading and pre-math skills that level the playing field and allow these minority children to achieve academic and personal success. They also learn music and about science and nature.
Kim now lives with his sweetheart Jeanie in a log home in the remote woods of far northern Minnesota, about 10 miles from the Canadian border. They like paddling the local lakes, taking long hikes, and Kim enjoys drinking cup after cup of good Vietnamese green tea. He travels to Vietnam often and hears often from his Vietnamese friends.
