Hanoi (VNS/VNA) - A retired teacherliving on Hanoi’s Kham Thien street, Dao Ngoc Huan has become well known amongher community for helping disadvantaged children.

For the past two years, every afternoon at 4pm,Huan picks up an autistic boy from school and teach him how to read and writeat her house.

From not being able to write a single letter,thanks to the old teacher’s help, he is now able to write neatly.

He is one of many autistic students taught byteacher Huan for free. All of them call her “mother”. She calls them “special angels”.

“I have not been through any training to teachchildren with special needs. I have collected knowledge through books and realexperience,” she told Tien Phong (Vanguard) newspaper.

“The class is free. Parents give me smallamounts of money to pay for petrol or xe om (motorbike taxis)to pick up children at school,” she said.

The 70-year-old woman taught at primary schoolsin suburban Hanoi for more than 20 years and has many students who foundsuccess but some of them still struggle.

She remembered one night when her drug-addictedstudent could not sleep and suffered from shock.

“I poured cold water on him, dried him and gavehim medicine.”

Huan has so far helped rehabilitate three of herstudents who were addicted to drugs.

Other students came to her house and confessedthat they were addicted and asked for help.

Not only a teacher for autistic children and ahelper of drug addicts, Huan is the adoptive mother of children abandoned bytheir parents.

Knowing Huan’s kindness, a mother brought herbaby and asked Huan to take care of the baby for a while. The mother neverreturned. Huan brought up the baby and named her Hoang Yen.

When the girl was about to go to kindergartenand needed a birth certificate, Huan went to find her father.

Through the mother’s story, Huan knew theaddress of Yen’s father and found him.

It turned out that Yen’s grandparents did notagree with the couple’s marriage. Her mother had to abandon her.

After finding Yen’s father, Huan knew that hewas looking for his daughter too. Now Yen has grown up and got married.

Huan was born in northern Thai Binh province,her father’s hometown and at early age lived without her mother’s care. Herpaternal grandmother was the only care giver.

Huan herself is a single mother and brought uptwo children by herself.

“I care and love miserable people because Imyself suffered from misery too,” Huan said.

Living on humble retirement wage of 3 million VND(127 USD) per month, Huan still saves money for charity. Not long ago, shespent 26 million VND (1,106 USD) from her savings to buy a piano to teachautistic children.

In spite of her age, the kind-hearted teachernever says no to learning new things. Every day she reads online and teachesherself how to play musical instruments, write poems and draw.-VNS/VNA