At a bustling corner in The five-year-old Hoa Anh Dao (Sakura) Café is the brain child of Chisato Esaki, a Japanese woman who has devoted more than a decade to Vietnam’s underprivileged children.
After graduating from Doshisha University in 1998, the 25-year-old Esaki arrived in Vietnam for the first time to start her four-year Master’s thesis on relief activities for Vietnamese disabled children and their families.
The young graduate soon became a regular visitor to a local charity center where she learnt the language and developed an attachment to local disadvantaged and disabled kids.
After three years in the trenches in Vietnam, Esaki realized that all mentally-impaired people here are unemployed.
It led her to the idea of creating a workplace where disabled children interact with people, learn work skills and help change the public’s misconceptions of the mentally-challenged.
To fund her project, Esaki, who is called Sato by the children, moved back to Japan for a couple of years.
With the support from Japanese and Vietnamese philanthropists, the Sakura Café was opened in April 2004 with 14 staff comprising of children suffering from Down Syndrome and several hearing-impaired kids who work as bartenders.
Different from other local coffee shops which are punctuated with flashy design and trendy music, Sakura Café is an open-spaced café with soft music, simple design and highlighted by a number of pottery pieces made by the cafes staff.
The seemingly simple tasks of training the staff became an entirely different animal, proving to be hard work for both Esaki and the kids.
She said it took her an entire month to teach them how to “Thank you” and “Goodbye” to the customers before the opening of the café.
Esaki also thought up a few different approaches to make the job easier
Customers to the venue, at 4, Ton Duc Thang Street, District 1, can call over waiters by ringing a small bell on their table.
Also, each table is not numbered but a small ornament in the shape of a type of fruit or animal is placed on each table to help the kids remember where they have to drop off the orders.
Customers don’t tell waiters their order. Instead they fill out what they want from a pre-prepared form.
Working at Sakura Café has helped the kids, who were often seen as awkward, an opportunity to be more open to the outside world.
A grandfather, whose grandson has been working at the café, said the 18-year-old boy often refused to sleep at night through sheer excitement at the prospect of going back to work the next day.
Sakura Café last week moved to a new, more spacious home at 153, Xo Viet Nghe Tinh Street, Binh Thanh District thanks to the support of a local company, The
The café, whose name has been changed into the Hoa Anh Dao Club, maintains its original design, an open-aired venue surrounded by a natural landscape.
The club members currently include nine mentally-challenged children, one hearing-impaired and three volunteers. The children do shift work for no more than five hours a day.
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