Mekong Youth Initiative

My name is Amphone Soukchaleun - my friends and students call me Coach Amy. I was born and raised in Luang Prabang, the old royal capital of Laos, a town of golden temples and quiet mornings where the Mekong and the Nam Khan meet. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, but to me it will always simply be home.

My childhood ended quickly. In the years after 1975, my family fled Laos as refugees, carrying almost nothing but a small pot, a photograph, and a bag of sticky rice. We eventually resettled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I learned a new language, a new culture, and the hard arithmetic of poverty. No one in my family had ever written a budget or opened a savings account. I had to learn personal finance the way so many young immigrants do - alone, at the kitchen table, one painful mistake at a time.

There is an old Lao saying, khoy pen khoy pai - “little by little.” It is the way my grandmother taught me to cook, the way she taught me to pray, and the way I eventually came to understand money. Saving a few dollars a week. Reading one chapter a night. Showing up again tomorrow. That is how a life is built.

By God's grace, those years taught me to work. I went on to spend more than thirty years in the technology industry in Silicon Valley, raising a family and quietly saving for the day I could give back. That day has come. I recently retired from tech to devote the rest of my working life to the young people of the Mekong - the children of the region I once had to leave.

I want to be the coach I never had. I want every young person I meet to know that their story does not end with their circumstances, that money is a tool and not a master, and that a life of dignity, purpose, and generosity is within their reach. That is why the Mekong Youth Initiative exists.

- Coach Amy