My two years of work in GTV were marked by the difficulties and concerns related to the spread of Covid-19 both in Vietnam and in Italy and, as a consequence, also the suppression of all international trips and missions held by our association . For two years I have made a lot of skype calls, read many reports and got to know the places where we operate through photographs and videos. But none of this could replace direct knowledge, being physically in Xin Man, finally among the mountains and the people I have worked with for all these months.

My international mission lasted two weeks, of which ten days spent in the villages of the district of Xin Man, an area as beautiful as difficult to access. The villages that GTV has been helping since 2019 are wooden houses, inhabited by ethnic minorities who proudly wear their colorful traditional clothes and headdresses. Men and women are always seen busy in a thousand daily operations, with bamboo baskets or children held on their backs, while they collect fodder for the animals, carry the day's crops on bumpy and muddy roads or hardly work the earth torn from the steep slopes.

The challenges that this area must face are many and, thanks to the many informal and institutional meetings of those days, I too was able to have more awareness of their scope and how the administrations are trying to address them.

Access to water, stable and safe throughout the year, is a primary and crucial issue that can make a difference in increasing agricultural production, and therefore economic development and the fight against malnutrition of all families in Xin. Man. If there is no lack of water in the rainy season, in the rest of the months families also see their cisterns empty, which are connected to high-altitude water courses. Another crucial element for agricultural development are investments in canalization of these water resources, which currently cannot reach a large part of the land destined for cultivation, which thus depends only on rainfall.

Access to water is also the basis of the possibility for families to implement correct hygiene practices in their homes. It was with great satisfaction that I was able to visit the cisterns and the water system built by GTV in 2019 in the municipality of Coc Pai: over 170 families now have the opportunity to collect water in their own cisterns, placed in the courtyards of their homes, without having to spend hours every day collecting them in other villages. Finally, I was able to monitor the construction (completed or in progress) of the many toilets and washbasins that the association has undertaken to build in over 20 schools, schools and 23 families over the years, thanks to the strong conviction and close collaboration with local authorities, who see the improvement of general hygienic conditions as a challenge as important for the health and development of the area as it is complex and time-consuming, given the hard-to-modify traditions of many local families.

Another issue that I became aware of was the fundamental importance of quality education. In the most remote villages in the mountains, the kindergarten is often the only community structure with functioning toilets, the only place where the Vietnamese language is spoken and where teachers work (and sometimes even sleep there). They come from other parts of the country. Even more impressive for me was to understand where children, once they reach 5 years of age, move to continue elementary school: mountain paths, muddy and steep, with even small streams to cross, these are the roads that many children they have to travel daily, in plastic slippers, to reach the nearest elementary school. In some cases there is the availability for them to access the dormitories of elementary and middle schools, a service that larger schools make available to allow children who live further away to attend courses. Many schools also offer safe meals, albeit very basic, which represent a great support for the growth of the children themselves, in a context in which families often have very little to do at lunch and dinner.

I have visited many schools in recent weeks, and the pride of seeing the new materials, kitchens and bathrooms built with GTV projects has been a lot. Teachers, representatives of the municipal authorities and many children welcomed me and my colleague Vo Thi Nguyet Que with enthusiasm, even though many of these facilities were closed in those days to prevent the spread of Covid