Members of Dorchester’s Vietnamese community just returned from a 10-day charitable mission across Vietnam to deliver bikes to impoverished school children.

Phuong “Phoenix” Bui, who runs The Foundation for the Children of Vietnam, traveled with her husband, District C-11 Police Captain Tim Connolly and 14 other volunteers from Massachusetts, Maryland, and Virginia for the annual mission.

The volunteers, who all pay their own way on the trip, hit 22 locations in Vietnam and distributed about 1,300 bikes, Bui and Connolly said. They returned to Dorchester on the evening of March 16, jet lagged from the half-a-day time difference but thoroughly rewarded.

Each school can select 30-40 children to receive the bikes, Bui said, which are limited to those more than 5 kilometers from school, dependent on someone else for transportation or needing to walk to school, and excelling in class.

One teacher at a school of about 800 students told her “to select 40 kids was one of the hardest decisions he had to make, deciding which student will stay in school, and which kid he felt like he’s condemning to a life of poverty… without a bike, a lot of kids will drop out.”

These bicycles are a lifeline to the children, Bui said. Without them, the students would often pack days worth of food, walk five to seven hours to attend school, and stay until the food ran out before beginning the long trek home.

That is, if they were allowed to go to school at all. When poverty is a day-to-day matter of survival, families need their children to choose between helping at home and leaving for extended spans of time to get a basic education.

The two-seater bicycle with a front basket “becomes the family automobile,” Bui said, reducing travel times to one or two hours and freeing up time for both a day of classes and a return home. Parents could bike their children to school and use it for errands during the day, picking the kids up before heading home.

The charity was started in 1998 by Bui, her mother, and a school teacher. Bui’s mother, who left Vietnam after the war of 1975, was struck upon her return in 1995 by how profound illiteracy was among children who grew up there post-war. “The parents are poor, their kids are poor, and as a teacher she knew education is the only way to break that cycle of poverty,” Bui said.

Bui helped her start the foundation as a 501(c)(3), and after her mother drowned in an accident in 2000, Bui took it on. “It was her dream,” she said, “so I felt compelled to continue it for her and it continues to this day.”

On top of bicycles, they give out 300 tuition scholarships each year, paid directly to the schools each August.

To donate a bicycle to the cause is $50, though the actual cost is closer to $70 and the charity subsidizes the difference with additional fundraising. The foundation has exploded over the past few years, with Boeing donating $20,000 for the 2018 trip and fundraisers bringing in more than $10,000 on top of that.

“One of the kids that gave a talk [at a school that received the bikes], said bicycles are not only giving the means to get to schools, it gives them the hope that someone actually cares,” Bui said. “It’s even more valuable than the gift itself, for them to know that someone out there cares about them, that gives them hope and motivates them to do something better.”

To donate to the Foundation for the Children of Vietnam or for volunteer information, visit childrenvietnam.org.