surgery-for-400-kids-in-2021 Niko von Glasow Foundation
We help 400 Vietnamese children to get life-changing surgery. You can help the children to live a more independent and happy life. We promise that your donation goes straight to the children and their families. In these difficult times, we support some of the families also with food and learning materials.
What We Do
We send doctors into the jungles and hidden slums of Vietnam to find the children and families who need our vital help. We bring the children to hospitals and arrange for their surgery. The most common surgeries we support are removal of brain tumors, correction of bone malformations of the skull and face, repair of congenital heart disease, and correction of spinal abnormalities and treatment of injuries sustained from major blunt trauma and problems in fetal development of the lungs. We bring their families as well, so the children don’t have to go through it alone. We all remember how terrible it was to be alone as a child in the hospital. Then we bring everyone back home and pay for ongoing after-care, education and training, to give them the chance to earn money and build a secure future for themselves.
To do all this in 2024 we need 200,000 Euros. So please give as much as you can and please spread the word among all your friends. Every cent you donate goes straight to the people. I promise that I will pay all overhead, so every penny you give will go straight to those who need it.
I was invited to a house in Saigon where families with very different disabilities live together and help each other. The blind carry the people who can’t walk, the deaf cook and together they make the best parties ever. Here I met Duyen. She and her two brothers are sitting in wheelchairs. I hired Duyen to find families with disabled children all over Vietnam and help them in a very unbureaucratic way. Duyens tough life made her the most compassionate and reliable specialist for the job.
We don’t only aim to heal the physical wounds or give short-term relief. When the surgery is done, we give long-term support to the whole family; pay for English lessons and training in creative skills, and do all we can to make sure our friends can support themselves and gain the security and happiness they deserve.
About Niko
I was born in 1960 in Cologne, Germany. I’m one of the survivors of Thalidomide, and I’m lucky because I was born into a very caring and accepting family. After graduating from a so-called “normal” high school, I started fulfilling my need to help others by reconciling immigrants with their families in Rwanda. Then I started my work in the filmmaking industry; my first job was carrying beer crates and making coffee for Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I studied Film at New York University and The Film Academy in Lodz, Poland. I went on to produce and direct eight movies; this makes me one of the few film directors with a physical disability on this planet.
My film Nobody’s Perfect, in which victims of Thalidomide discuss their relationship with their bodies while posing for a nude calendar, won the German Film Award. Following this success, a bunch of Thalidomide friends and I launched a campaign for the 2700 German Thalidomide-surviving victims, which resulted in a €2.7 billion payment by the German government. I’ve made other notable films and theatre plays involving actors and crews with a disability. Still, after I experienced how hostile the entertainment industry is to people with disabilities, I ended my career as a director to focus on other ways to make a difference.
My activism has always been directed to people with disabilities who don’t have access to first-world support. I founded a free film school in the Himalayas, helped visually impaired orphans in the Philippines, and freed children with disabilities from prisons in Manila. Now I work with the wonderful team providing urgent surgical care for kids in Vietnam. With your help through donating to and spreading the word about the foundation, I plan to expand its activities to improve the lives and futures of all people living with disabilities in deprived parts of the world. And we really need your help!
Contact Us
The Niko von Glasow Foundation gGmbH
Register number: HRB 219716 B
Schönhauser Allee 10, 10119 Berlin, Germany
© Copyright 2001