Diệu Tịnh Pagoda, Phú Yên 2026: Wheelchairs and Gifts After the Floods

On 18 March 2026 the Compassionate Hands Foundation visited Diệu Tịnh Pagoda in Phú Yên, giving gifts and wheelchairs to families still recovering from the floods.

On 18 March 2026, the Compassionate Hands Foundation (Hội Từ Thiện Bàn Tay Nhân Ái) stopped at Diệu Tịnh Pagoda in Phú Yên province as part of its 2026 Vietnam charity trip. The team had travelled down from Đắk Lắk, past mountain roads, ripening rice fields and quiet rivers. At the pagoda they met elderly villagers, children with disabilities and families still struggling after the recent storms and floods. Along with gift packages, several people received a wheelchair that day.

Phú Yên after the floods

As the video's narration puts it, central Vietnam is as harsh as it is beautiful. Every year storms and floods return, sweeping away crops, flooding homes and wearing down people who had little to spare. Phú Yên is one of the places that suffers most, which is why the team felt it had to come.

Diệu Tịnh Pagoda and the early years of the foundation

Speaking to the crowd, Venerable Thích Minh Nhựt, the foundation's chairman, said Diệu Tịnh was one of the first pagodas the foundation visited.

This Diệu Tịnh pagoda is one of the first pagodas since the Compassionate Hands Foundation was founded nearly 20 years ago.
Venerable Thích Minh Nhựt, Chairman

He explained that the foundation began by going into remote rural areas to help elderly people who were alone, disabled and without anyone to rely on. Each person received 10 kg of rice a month to get by. Later the foundation added wheelchairs for people with disabilities, scholarships for poor students, and one-off gifts for people in hardship who were not yet receiving monthly rice. After the recent flood, the foundation had also raised funds from donors overseas to ease some of the hardship here.

A wheelchair and hands that steady each other

The pagoda courtyard was full of elderly people whose deep eyes carried years of hard living, and of young children who did not yet understand the difficulties around them. Some received wheelchairs. For them it meant no longer leaning on a crutch for every step, and no longer waiting for someone else to carry them.

The narrator recalls that the moments that stayed were not the gift boxes or the vehicles. They were the hands of the elderly resting on one another's shoulders, holding the hem of a volunteer's white shirt. The younger members walked slowly and kept looking back to see whether the elders could keep up. The monks rolled up their sleeves, some carrying boxes, some supporting old people, some pushing wheelchairs.

A voice from the day: three days of flood relief

The Venerable invited Ms. Mỹ, who represented the foundation on the earlier flood relief trip, to tell what those days in Phú Yên were like. She said the team had gone to four provinces: Phú Yên, Bình Định, Quảng Nam and Huế. Wherever they went, the water rose behind them. In one place, soon after they finished handing out gifts and moved on to the next province, that province flooded too.

She said the team was short of food and clothing, with rain falling constantly. When they reached Phú Yên, local people who were hungry themselves and waiting for relief still shared boxes of rice with them. At the pagoda that night she asked to sleep upstairs, afraid the water might rise in the middle of the night. When they were stuck in Đông Hòa town, the shops had run out of goods. Money in their bank accounts could not be transferred, so everyone on the bus pooled the cash they had, a little each, to buy gifts for residents. Local shopkeepers even let the team buy on credit. That evening they could not find a guesthouse and stayed at a school used as a shelter, with no electricity, no water and no blankets. A local woman invited the team to her home for a meal and a night's rest.

So the kindness of the people of Phú Yên is truly lovely.
Ms. Mỹ, foundation representative

What stays with us

At the end of the video, the narrator thanks the donors who entrusted their generosity to the foundation, and the villagers for giving the team the chance to give.