Over recent years, Da Nang has welcomed a growing number of foreigners who live and work in the city. Many of them have decided to settle down in the city due to their special love for the beautiful seaside city.

Jeremy Smith (3rd left) and his young and energetic baking staff at the Jeremy’s Kitchen

Jeremy Smith from New Mexico from constituent state of the United States of America is a typical example.

At the age of 20, Jeremy left a small town in the State of New Mexico to take a backpacking trip to Southeast Asia. He had stayed in Malaysia and Singapore for 6 years before deciding to live in Da Nang.

During his stay in Da Nang, Jeremy worked as an English teaching assistant, and a marketing supporter for a group of partners whom used to work with as he lived in Singapore.

Not long after that, the foreign young man has started a bakery business. During his early months in Da Nang, Jeremy had a lot of free time. Therefore, he decided to make his own cakes imbued with the taste of his homeland. His first products received high appreciation from his friends and neighbours.

Since then, he has started to sell his handmade cakes to coffee shops and fairs for expats across the city.

Thanks to his great efforts, Jeremy has opened his own bakery ‘Jeremy’s Kitchen’ with over 30 employees on Nguyen Cong Tru in Son Tra District.

Jeremy Smith affirmed “Da Nang is my home”. “The friendliness and hospitality of the local people, the improved living conditions of residents, and the growing number of foreign tourists are enable to make Da Nang become one of the most favourite startup destinations in Viet Nam”, he noted.

Physiotherapist Virginia Mary Lockett devoted her entire life to her job in Da Nang

Unlike Jeremy who chooses Da Nang for his startups, Virginia Mary Lockett has given up her home and career in the USA to realise her dream of helping patients in the city. The American physiotherapist is working as a volunteer at the Da Nang Traditional Medicine Hospital.

First arriving in Viet Nam at the end of the last century, Virginia’s first reason for coming was to adopt a child with her husband, David. It was by chance that the couple’s interpreter at the time learned of Lockett’s profession and invited her to his home in order to recommend some therapeutic exercise for his paralysed father.

Her interpreter’s father had had his femur broken in a traffic accident, but had suffered complications that led to paralysis in his arms and legs, something which was put down to the lack of appropriate training for local doctors at the time.

The couple were haunted by helpless tears of the interpreter who was witnessing his father dying from the shortage of medical equipment and skilled professionals.

It was those very tears that prompted her to go back to Viet Nam 10 years later as a volunteer of Health Volunteers Overseas (HVO), a Washington DC-based non-profit dedicated to improving the availability and quality of healthcare in resource-scarce countries.

In the summer of 2006, Lockett and her husband sold their house and travelled across the ocean to Viet Nam on a travel visa.

Prior to selling their home, Lockett had written a letter to the ambassador of Viet Nam in Washington D.C., asking whether she could work long-term as a medical expert in Viet Nam. The Vietnamese ambassador advised her to go and work for a non-governmental organisation in a bid to realise her dream. As a result, the Steady Footsteps, her own non-governmental organisation, was founded with the goal of providing assistance to the disabled in Viet Nam.

“When I came to Viet Nam, many people told me that they sold their houses to settle in the USA, and I did the opposite. To me, Viet Nam is now my second hometown, my staff are my family members, and patients are my friends” Lockett said.

Over the past 15 years, she could not remember how much she has donated to charity activities, how many patients' faces but just remembering that she and her husband have not returned to their homeland yet.

By TRUONG TRUNG - Translated by MAI DUNG