July 16: Into the Countryside

"Everyone should attend a Communist rally once in their life," enthused Rachael. "There’s something so genuine about it." The Communist Youth Union Green Summer Campaign welcome ceremony had just concluded in Ho Chi Minh City, and as we loaded our bus to depart for our assigned hamlet for three weeks of house building and summer camp teaching, the excitement was contagious.

Every summer in Vietnam, the youth from every university head out into the countryside for several weeks of volunteering, working to build houses and bridges, lay paths and roads, teach students, and help train villagers in whatever they are studying. In Ho Chi Minh City alone, 55,000 students are participating this year; in all of Vietnam, nearly 200,000 are involved. There is a long socialist tradition of sending the youth of a country to help the disadvantaged. China offers an extreme example—as part of the Cultural Revolution, a whole generation of educated youth was forced to spend a decade in the countryside farming. Here, though, the program is a yearly highlight for both the youth who travel and work with their friends and the poor villagers being helped. The college volunteers are Vietnam’s brightest potential future leaders; nothing could possibly offer more exposure to who their constituency will be. Eighty percent of Vietnamese still live in rural areas, and the volunteers generally stay with families in the districts that they visit and make lasting connections.

We are incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to participate with our Vietnamese roommates, and we are the only Americans to do so. The Communist Party is as excited about the opportunity as we are, and the past few days have been filled with ceremonies, beginning on Friday with a press conference at the Communist Youth Union headquarters to announce the American participation to the media and issue us our shirts and hats. We got a great book of propaganda, including official youth songs, mottos, and idealistic purpose statements and histories. The gathering had been billed as informal, but speeches from everyone seemed required, and I was called to explain how grateful we were to have the opportunity to live and learn in the Mekong Delta for the next month. Then, we changed into our new uniforms with the State television camera running and photographers snapping away.
Our last few hours in the city went quickly as we made lesson plans for our summer camp, combed the city’s markets for supplies, stocked up on appropriate construction clothing, and caught a few hours of sleep before waking at 5 am on Saturday to check out of the guesthouse and depart.

The opening ceremony for the entire city was a giant pep rally held outside a large stadium, where 6,000 representatives of the city’s youth gathered with huge banners and signs, dressed uniformly in our official blue polo shirts and green expedition hats. Music played, every important official in the city gave some sort of welcome speech, and we received flowers and hand shakes and wishes for good luck. After every line of every speech there was rousing applause. Then a performance began to illustrate the work we would do. I could not have imagined anything more stereotypically communist. To an tyuupbeat Soviet-sounding worker song, troupes of youth representing the volunteers paraded on the stage, dressed as construction workers, road builders, farmers and irrigators, and even a funky crew of brightly colored, shiny suited students carrying laptops to bring technology to the country. Everyone appeared strong and happy, doing great things and making their mark. I never knew that building a road or picking up trash could be quite so exciting! Rousing cheers emanated from the crowd and all 6,000 of us clapped along in time. You can say whatever about Communism, but they organize a heck of a rally!

Immediately following the ceremony, we moved en masse to the busses. Our group was bound for Ben Tre province, deep in the Mekong Delta. Ten minutes into the journey, the bus broke down—an inauspicious beginning. Luckily, half an hour of tinkering seemed to fix the mysterious problem, and we continued down progressively smaller roads and across two ferries into the heart of the Delta, finally arriving in the little town of Mo Cay in Ben Tre province.
We’re staying at a "hotel," run by a local family. It’s supposedly the region’s nicest hotel, but it’s really a family-run guesthouse, run by a family that doesn’t seem to know much about running guesthouses. The structure was designed well—it’s just the upkeep that has failed to come along. We all have rooms with just one big bed, and ours was covered in sand, with cigarette butts in the back and cobwebs above. It took us a few days to get the hot water functioning and the drains appear to struggle mightily even when we brush our teeth. We also seem to share the room with a few more animals than usual, including thousands of ants, but at least they don’t bite! All that said, as easy as it is to complain, the lodging is more than sufficient and is more luxurious than anyone in the town enjoys, so I shouldn’t really complain!

We are working in the Dinh Thuy commune, about a 5 kilometer bike ride from our hotel down a paved small road similar to a nice American bike trail. After arriving and a quick lunch, there was still one more opening ceremony to endure. It opened with a spirited song that everyone knew the lyrics too. I asked a roommate what it meant, and he said it was a traditional war song used to rally the troops during the American War. The translation included all sorts of lines about how to beat the evil invaders. I wasn’t the only American that thought the song choice was a little off, but all of the roommates tried to reassure us that now a whole plethora of such songs were used as general inspiration, and the original meanings were generally ignored. For the remainder of the ceremony, we entertained ourselves by trying to find the differences in the speeches that every low-level representative of every area gave, but there were few to point out. Chris actually gave an amazingly impressive thank-you speech on behalf of the Americans, but he spoke completely in Vietnamese! After six weeks of classes, we were all in awe!

For our three weeks in Ben Tre, we have two primary goals. In the morning we will be building a Compassion House. The idea is just like Habitat for Humanity; the local government chooses the poorest family in a given hamlet and the youth volunteers work with a few local expert craftsmen to erect a small brick house from scratch. Our group donated the cost of the house—about $500 USD (there’s a real bargain for you!).

Our second task is to run a day camp for the local youth. We weren’t given much advanced information about the camp—just that we should expect about 100 middle and high schoolers to teach from 2-4 every afternoon. The local officials do not seem terribly organized or prepared, so it’s unclear how many students will actually show up. We also didn’t get any real direction about what to teach, other than English class, as we are perhaps the only native English-speakers that will even come near the village all year. I’ll be teaching the high schoolers—we were told that our group would probably only have about 10 to 15 students because of other mandatory review classes. We split into teams, so four of us (2 Americans and 2 Viets) are responsible for the high school side of things. We had a fairly sizeable budget for teaching materials from the Robertsons, so in addition to photocopied English textbooks, we purchased all sorts of supplies for games, problem-solving exercises, art projects, and prizes. As I learned earlier, it takes a lot of time to plan even one hour of class, and now with four teachers attempting to work together in the classroom, the amount of coordination necessary is huge, especially since none of us really know what to expect.

For the rest of Saturday afternoon and Sunday we explored as much of the commune as we could. The region is known as the "Garden of Eden," for its incredible fertility and variety of fruit grown, including a large share of Vietnam’s coconut exports. The land is a vast, vast network of canals, connected by paths. Some of these are made of concrete or stone, while others are just packed dirt or mud. No maps have been made of the commune, but there are hundreds of kilometers of trails that wind and twist, usually just wide enough for a single bicycle. (We brought our bikes from Ho Chi Minh City and have no motorized vehicles, so all our transportation is now by bike.) Some of the canals are wide enough for boats to carry loads of ripe coconuts to market, while others are just a short leap across. In addition to farming, many families own a few animals, so there are chickens running everywhere, cows grazing, and pigs snorting as loudly as possible. If it weren’t for the houses and animals, a number of people in our group have noted that the area could be some sort of giant resort. The tall coconut trees sway gently while bunches of bananas and loads of other colorful fruit dangle from the trees. The wide fronds from the coconut palm trees often form sort of a tunnel overhead and all of the little bridges and paths lend the feeling of a tropical, super-muddy version of Monet’s gardens.
However, when we remember that this is not some kind of garden, but actually people’s permanent homes, we are quickly brought back to reality. The houses themselves vary widely, from flimsy straw shacks that appear to struggle in the slightest of breezes to poured concrete, shiny tiled houses that seem fairly nice. A few odd really nice houses stand out, but these are supposedly built with money sent from overseas Vietnamese. Nearly all of the houses have power, brought by lines haphazardly strewn between hamlets, held up by concrete posts or just bamboo sticks. This power is not nearly as new an innovation as the Highlands region where just a few years ago electricity did not exist. Where there is power, there is television, as I mentioned in my post about the Highlands, although at times people cannot afford to operate their televisions with the high cost of electricity. For this reason, enterprising individuals have set up sort of television watching cafes, replete with 1970s style lounge chairs and a small fuzzy monitor that people gather around with their tea or coffee.

There is certainly development happening, and its happening fast. Our group coordinator and a Vietnamese roommate here last year are always pointing out little changes. By themselves, they are not big changes: a dirt path paved, a restaurant or little store opened, animals added to farms, an ATM installed in town, and numerous new Internet facilities. The center of the rural commune has a sort of video game café with several televisions and some sort of gaming system that is a huge hit with the local youngsters, and there are two small Internet "cafes" (connection speed unknown). The general themes seem to be diversifying income from fruit farming to include more agricultural variety and much more attention to the service sector of the economy, and expanding communication networks.

Interestingly, Internet really is one of the first innovations brought to an area. The connection to the outside world is so prized and the desire to get information freely and chat and communicate with anyone anywhere in the world has gripped Vietnam. I am continuously amazed to see Internet connections advertised everywhere, even in the smallest hamlets or along roads where the only real area inhabitants seem to be the chickens and cows wandering about.

At the same time, few of the houses have what we would call running water, but there are large cisterns that collect rain water and feature a tap at the bottom. This is the rainy season, so supplies of water are not at all an issue; apparently this gets difficult in dryer parts of the year.
I have to say that it is difficult to imagine dryness. If there is one constant everywhere we go, it is the mud. Even in Mo Cay town, the streets are covered in mud, and a few minutes walk on any path through a commune leaves my feet and legs covered in a thick molasses. Somehow the mud manages to find its way to every part of my body very quickly, and all my clothes are quickly becoming permanently browned.

When I arrived in Vietnam, the incredibly cheap prices caught me immediately. Dinner for less than a dollar was unfathomable before this trip. Now, the prices are even lower. A coffee shop near where we work has fresh-squeezed limeade for 2,500 dong (fifteen US cents), an hour of Internet is eighteen US cents, and a whole fresh coconut is about twenty-three cents. Talk about stretching the dollar!

We are only three-and-a-half hours outside of Ho Chi Minh City, but it could be a different planet. Someone in our group compared the journey to going from New York City to the Mississippi Delta in a few hours. Whatever physical distance we have from the city, though, the government’s presence can certainly be felt, far more than in America’s rural areas. For the Communist Party and the Vietnamese government, it’s all about organization. As I’ve said before, the biggest strength of the one-party system is it’s power to organize, and there is no energy spared in making sure that the government’s tentacles reach every member of every household in the entire country. So we are in the Mo Cay Rural District of the Ben Tre Province, and we are staying in Moc Cay town, the administrative center of the district. However, we are working in the Dinh Thuy Commune, which has 11,000 people in 11 hamlets. We build a house in one hamlet and teach in the neighboring hamlet. And the house we are building is in a numbered neighborhood of the hamlet. That summary took me three days to iron out! With this distribution though, there is a representative of every neighborhood on the hamlet committee which sends a representative to the rural district committee and so on and so forth all the way up to the national government.
(To add a wrinkle here though, to prevent nepotism, after the first few levels and in the large cities, the representatives are usually not from the neighborhood they represent, so the residents don’t really know their representatives, who may only visit their territory once or twice a year.)

Such organization is especially tight in the Mekong Delta, an area with a rich history of revolution, because with representatives at every level, no family goes unwatched. At least theoretically, information works its way up and down the chain from the national government to every family quite easily. This has helped Vietnam respond to the AIDS, SARS, and Avian Flu epidemics extremely effectively or to get the word out about major messages. The speakers attached to power lines on the roads are back, just like I mentioned in Hanoi. Each hamlet can decide how they use them, but it is rather odd to be in the middle of a muddy canal and have a loudspeaker begin screeching news and propaganda to you.

On the other hand, when it comes to providing social services or organizing district events, we’ve seen that all the organization in the world does not seem to do a whole lot. The district authorities seem completely inept in organizing the day camp, failing to pass the messages even to each other, let alone the students.

At times I think it is difficult for us to grasp the full significance of the project. There are moments when we have felt like objects on display or tools to demonstrate Vietnam’s healthy integration into a globalized world. We laughed through the press conference where at least fifteen photographers clamored to photograph us from every possible angle. No less than four newspaper articles have been published with stories or pictures of our group before we have even begun to work, and our photo was even emblazoned on the front page of Vietnam’s largest newspaper.

At the same time, it would be easy to argue that we are the exploiters, traveling to the heart of the Mekong Delta for a few weeks so that we can come home and make the claim that we understand the "real Vietnam" and maybe even allay a bit of the national guilt for destroying the very areas we have come to develop. (If this is the case, though, the thoughts are internal—certainly no Vietnamese seem to bear any sort of grudge at all, and there is nothing but joy that we are here.)

I wrestled with both sides before concluding that there don’t really seem to be ulterior motives on either side. The Vietnamese are genuinely happy to share their culture. Government officials have instructed our roommates many times that they have a very important duty to introduce us to Vietnam and they must work very hard to build bridges. We are gaining the opportunity to experience a culture from an inside perspective in a way that few other students or travelers are able to do, and at the same time, we are leaving both tangible and intangible results.