From War Widow to Believer: How One Vietnamese Family Changed Hundreds of Lives

Faith Facts

• A Vietnamese widow whose husband was murdered by soldiers during the Vietnam War was baptized in the same river where he died, after her granddaughter’s life was transformed by American missionaries
• The Connor English School in Can Tho, Vietnam now serves 610 children and has become a bridge for Gospel outreach, with many students and their families coming to faith
• American Christians sponsored Vietnamese students through education programs, creating a ripple effect that has strengthened the Church of Christ in Vietnam for two decades

A chance encounter resulted in her husband’s death. Four decades later, another chance meeting led to her granddaughter’s rebirth — and a chain reaction that would impact hundreds of lives for the better.

Tran Thi Ket lived a simple life along the banks of the Hau River, which flows across the Mekong Delta from Cambodia to the South China Sea. It was 1962, and Can Tho was part of South Vietnam, a fledgling republic locked in a brutal, 19-year war with the communist North.

One day, soldiers forced Ket’s husband to row them up the river. Then they shot him.

He was 44 and left behind seven children, from 6 months to 19 years old. Ket, 37, was devastated, said her granddaughter, Ngan Huynh.

“She put his body in a little boat, and she paddled it for hours to a station where the soldiers were located. She just asked them, ‘Why? Why?'”

The soldiers gave no answer. So Ket went home and buried her husband. Later, soldiers shot and killed one of her sons on suspicion that he had collaborated with the enemy. Ket protested the war and, as a result, endured jail and torture.

In 1975, the war ended, and South Vietnam was no more. Ket’s surviving children and their children, including Ngan, did as they had before the communist takeover, eking out a living on the banks of the river.

“I thought my life was just like the lives of many other people there,” Ngan said. Then her mother and stepfather moved about 100 miles northeast — to the former Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City in honor of the North’s leader — so Ngan could attend high school. To help her family, she took various jobs, including waitressing at a small café.

One day she served a customer named Tom Tune. He’d spent much of his life sailing the waters of the South Pacific as a missionary. He’d come to Vietnam to supervise construction of a medical mission boat bound for the Mekong River in Cambodia. He and a small group of Vietnamese Christians worshiped together, and he was helping some local kids improve their English. Did she want to join them?

Tune met Ngan’s family, including Ket, who had come to despise and distrust Americans. They were reminders of the conflict that took her husband and son.

“But with Tom, it was completely different,” Ngan said. The missionary exuded love and sincerity. He got permission to teach Ngan English using stories from the Bible. She started attending church services.

In 2006, she told Tune that she wanted to be baptized.

“He rented a big bus, and we went straight to the beach,” Ngan said.

Members of Churches of Christ in the U.S. sponsored Ngan through a program called Tom’s Kids. The support allowed her to do something she “could never have dreamed of because my family was so poor,” she said. She moved to Searcy, Ark., and enrolled at Harding University. She graduated in 2011 with a degree in accounting. Then she earned a Master of Business Administration from Oklahoma Christian University.

Rather than search for a job in the U.S., “I felt that I had to do something to give back for the kindness of Tom and all the wonderful people in America,” Ngan said.

“Although I am not their biological family, (they) loved me as they loved God’s children.”

During her time in the U.S., Ngan met Dr. John Bailey and his wife, Rose. Bailey, a longtime Texas dentist, preacher and medical missionary, founded a nonprofit, Body & Soul Ministries, to provide medical services and education for impoverished children around the globe.

The Baileys helped Ngan launch the Connor English School, named after one of their grandchildren, in Can Tho. Since its founding in 2015, the school has grown to two campuses and serves 610 children, ages 4 to 20.

“I can never repay them. I am very happy that the English school can be a place that welcomes children from difficult circumstances — just like I was.”

‘Now I’m an English teacher’

In a brightly lit, immaculate classroom on a Thursday night, a teacher at the Connor English School projected sentences on a whiteboard. Brave volunteers stepped forward to write a verb in the simple present tense in the blank. The teacher gently corrected them when needed — the museum closes, not close, for example — and explained how the noun dictates the verb’s ending.

It was one of nearly a dozen classes, from intro to advanced levels, taught at the school, a pair of side-by-side structures four stories high. Ngan supervises a staff of 42, including 32 English teachers, all licensed by the government.

Some of the teachers, including Yen Nguyen and Kim Chau, once were Tom’s Kids.

“I couldn’t even speak English when I met Tom. Now I’m an English teacher.”

Nguyen recalled Tune patiently guiding them through the stories of the Israelites and their wanderings in the wilderness before they reached the Promised Land. Supporters of Tom’s Kids helped her and Chau travel to Singapore and earn degrees from Four Seas College of Bible and Missions, a ministry training school overseen by the Jurong Church of Christ.

Nguyen found the Christian Evidences classes particularly meaningful. She wasn’t used to discussions of faith in an academic setting.

Now, she said, “I’m really, really convinced that there’s a God.”

Government rules restrict Bible teaching at the English school. However, Ngan said, “We have had some students who studied with us, grew up and later joined us in studying the Bible.

“I especially want to help children who are facing truly difficult circumstances, to be a bridge that helps change their lives so they can know that God’s love is always somewhere beside us if we seek for him.”

‘This has greatly strengthened our church’

On his first day in Vietnam, Steve Hawley told one of the English teachers, “You can help me learn Vietnamese.”

Tom Tune quickly corrected him: “You are not here to learn Vietnamese. You are here to help them learn English.”

“He was absolutely right,” said Hawley, a teacher and coach at Westbury Christian School in Houston and member of the Westbury Church of Christ.

Hawley had met Tune more than three decades earlier. Tune’s son, Mike, preached for the Maple Hill Church of Christ in Lebanon, Tenn., which Hawley attended when he taught at nearby Friendship Christian School. The church supported Tom Tune’s mission work in the Cook Islands, and Hawley invited the missionary to speak to his classes at Friendship Christian.

Hawley made his first trip to Can Tho in 2011 at Tom’s request.

“Tom was insistent that the best way for the church to become financially independent was for the young people to learn English so they could get better jobs,” Hawley said. Having an administrator with degrees from the U.S. was helpful, Tune told him, but a visiting educator from the U.S. would be a big draw for potential students.

“People are attracted to Westerners in the sense of wanting to speak and practice English,” Hawley said.

Fifty years after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam has become a popular destination for tourists from Europe, Canada and the U.S. The tourism industry is booming, and as Ngan put it, “Parents want to see that foreigners can understand their child when they speak English.”

Hawley spends about a month per year in Vietnam.

“The best thing I do here is have conversations with the older kids, which is what they need. I really work with pronunciations, which are very poor when you have learned English from people who have never been outside of Vietnam.”

The Connor school charges tuition, but Ngan helps children in need, including those who worship with the Church of Christ in Can Tho, to attend. Her mother, Huynh Hong Hue, known as “Miss Eight,” also is a top-notch recruiter and promoter for the school, Hawley said.

“Almost every person in our church has studied at the English center. This has greatly strengthened our church. We have two precious little girls who are coming now because the grandfather, who is Buddhist, told me last summer, ‘We see how the young people from the church who study at the English Center act. That is how we want our granddaughters to act.'”

“There is no better advertisement.”

God’s gentle miracles

For Ngan — now 41, married and the mother of three girls, ages 7, 5 and 4 — meeting Tom Tune in that café in Ho Chi Minh City two decades ago was not a chance encounter.

“I believe in my heart that God is the Almighty One who has done things that humans could never imagine. God turns the impossible into the possible in such a gentle and wonderful way.”

“When I returned to my old village after studying in America, the neighbors came to congratulate me, my grandmother and my mother. My mother told them the story of how I became a child of God and how God’s people … helped me go to school so that I could gain knowledge to use for my future.”

That story has power, Ngan said, and it’s led to interest in the Gospel. After her return, many of Ngan’s family and friends were baptized.

Then, as the Can Tho Church of Christ worshiped on a Sunday morning in 2010, Ket and 13 other people asked to be immersed. Tune baptized Ket in the Hau River, the same waters where her husband died.

Ket passed away two years later at age 87. Tune, age 83, died a year after that. Mike Tune, now retired and living in Lebanon, Tenn., continues the work, making regular visits to Vietnam to encourage the church.

“It’s thrilling to watch Dad’s dream come alive in so many ways,” Mike Tune said.

As for Ket, “My mother often tells me, ‘God has wiped away her tears.’ God has lifted her burdens, and in God we have greater value.”

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