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The taxi driver steered with his left arm — the right just a stub, cut off at the elbow. Rad Kivette looked out the front window as they drove, taking in his first images of Vietnam.

As the driver’s eyes caught his own in the rearview mirror — stern, studying him — it made Kivette nervous.

Vietnam had always been the name of a war, he said, not a country.

But when the driver broke the silence, that changed.

He asked if Kivette had ever been here before. Really, he wanted to know if Kivette was a veteran.

The driver was. That’s how he lost his arm. He had lost family, too.

Kivette wasn’t. As a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, he had protested the war. He told the driver that, thinking it would help.

But it wasn’t needed.

“All of that is behind us,” the man said. “All we have is the future.”

At the time, Kivette couldn’t have known how much that message would change his life.

“You come in with this great burden and it just gets lifted off of you, and it says so much for the people,” he said. “… I knew on that trip that this is where I would spend the rest of my life.”

In 2004, the Greensboro native packed up and permanently relocated to Vietnam. Last week, as the Southeast Asia director of the global community service foundation, he received the Medal for Peace and Friendship Among Nations from the Vietnam government .

It’s an award that is only given out when the Vietnamese government thinks someone is truly deserving.

And Kivette is.

Just 20 years ago, he owned a group of textile mills in North Carolina. He was happy, successful.

But then he let it all go.

“(My dad’s) dream was to go to third-world countries and help,” he said. “I guess I never really forgot that. He’d been gone for years and years but that was sort of lodged in the back of my mind.”

In 1992, he went to work with a humanitarian organization, and in 2001, his job took him on that first visit to Vietnam.

He spent the next three years trying to get back.

“I fell in love with the people. I fell in love with the culture,” he said. “And I just had a deep sense that I wanted to come back here and help.”

When he realized he couldn’t do that in his current position, he made his own work.

Kivette started Hannah’s Promise , a humanitarian organization that gives aid to Southeast Asia in 2004 and moved his life to Hanoi, Vietnam. Last November, he started working with the Global Community Service Foundation.

Today, much of his time is spent creating self-sustaining programs in areas such as education, climate change, health and human trafficking.

“What we’re trying to do now is not just build the schools or build the community centers, but bring in educational and training programs,” Marcia Selva, president of the global community service foundation, said.

For one project, Kivette pairs professional health-care workers with physicians in the rural countryside. Another program focuses on farming, teaching minority groups how to grow pepper.

Last week, he was recognized for those projects by Vu Xuan Hong, president of the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations, who presented Kivette with his award.

Selva was disappointed that she couldn’t make the ceremony, but Kivette, not one to boast, told her that it wasn’t a big deal.

“But it is a big deal!” she said. “ He’s picked his whole life up and moved over there. He has a huge commitment to Vietnam. This is his passion.”

Looking back at that first taxi ride, Kivette just wishes he had gotten the name of the driver, a man who started his love affair with Vietnam.

“The greatest award I have is the great privilege of living here …,” he said. “I am a guest. It’s just a great privilege to live here and be a part of the fabric.”

Contact Tricia L. Nadolny at 373-7028 or tricia.nadolny@news-record.com