Tuesday, August 8: Making Lists

As the three weeks in rural Vietnam conclude, I’ve compiled a list of things that used to astonish me or really annoy me, but now don’t strike me as weird at all anymore—maybe annoying, but not weird!
The first would be how everything is always dirty, all of the time. Every evening when I showered, the dust, dirt, and mud caking my body would flood into the bathtub, staining everything a dark brown. The streets are always covered in trash. People think absolutely nothing of littering; when someone is finished with something, they toss it in the street. In fact, the junior high school teachers taught a lesson on the environment and littering, and even our roommates didn’t understand that wrappers and cigarette butts were litter and should be disposed of not in the ground. In the hamlets, the only method of waste management I know of is burning the waste, so horribly smoky fires send non-reusable toxins straight into the atmosphere. In the towns, there are garbage people who walk around with big push-carts every morning to pick up the trash by hand. People simply pile their trash in the intersections to facilitate this pick-up. As a result, walking around at night requires cautiously avoiding mounds of refuse. By day, the only difference is that the refuse isn’t piled up, so everything is covered with a layer of trash.
Why there is so little regard for the environment has been a topic of discussion in our group and on the Robertson discussion forum. Is it a reflection of the Communist ideology that the government should be responsible for keeping things clean? I don’t think so for two reasons: though Communist, Vietnam has never pretended to offer comprehensive social services, and the problem is certainly not exclusive to Communist or formerly Communist countries. It seems, though, that this is a common problem in developing countries. I wonder if it is merely because no time or money has been invested in a campaign to stop the problem.
If there is one real strength of the Communist government, it is the ability to mobilize and educate the population, reaching every citizen very quickly with its extensive tentacles. If someone could convince an upper-echelon government official that better trash and pollution control could have tangible benefits for Vietnam at low costs—perhaps through increased appeal to tourists or better health that would reduce public health expenditures, I think the government could very quickly mount a campaign for proper waste disposal, and it wouldn’t necessarily require increased expense or infrastructure. There already is trash pick-up—people just have to use it neatly. I’m not sure what the impetus for such a campaign would be, but it would seem to be worth investigating.
The second “astonishing thing,” in stark contrast to the incredibly dirty environments, is the incredible fastidiousness with cleanliness that I have observed. Our roommates and the people in the families we have stayed with take incredible care of their personal hygiene, to the point that most Americans would deem excessive. Who showers four times a day regularly? It is incredibly important for most Vietnamese we have met to look clean and presentable. It’s funny, because it’s not that anyone is formal or wearing particularly nice clothes. There’s no particular reason to look at their best; we are usually just working. However, everyone is constantly absolutely incredibly clean so they can promptly begin to sweat again and absorb the dirt and mud and trash that fills the streets. We Americans just shake our heads and smile when the roommates head off for yet another bathing,
For a third item on the list related to cleanliness, we move to a bigger problem that is far less easily remedied: the lack of plumbing and sewage. Outside of the cities, there basically is none—water drains straight to the nearest large body of water, sometimes with a rudimentary filter and often without. Inside the cities, waste water treatment currently consists of little more than primitive septic tanks. The government is currently looking at how they can create a real waste water treatment plant in Ho Chi Minh City, but there is a ways to go.
This would seem to be an après pox time to discuss bathroom facilities in the countryside. Sometimes a well-off family will have a squatter toilet, which really is just a hole with a ceramic border, flushable with buckets of water. There is a variation on this which is a flat cement slab in a little enclosure that has a hole on one side to drain outside. However, since solid waste doesn’t drain, I presume it’s not meant for that, and for women, I’ve heard that aim can be an issue. Wearing shoes in this “restroom” is an absolute essential. Most of the time going to the bathroom entails finding a bush or a tree. In the cities, any wall or street gutter will do just fine. It is not at all unusual to see whole bus groups pulled over peeing alongside the road. If the need is more extensive, you look for a bigger bush or even better, a canal. If your lucky, some sort of squatting platform will be built over the canal with a handhold to minimize your chances of following your waste. To the large populations of fish, waste in a canal simply means food. I must say, though, that the first time I was squatting over the water and schools of fish were jumping to catch their “food” before it hit the water, the feeling was rather awkward. I guess this is one simple way to keep the very same water that will soon be used for cleaning and dishwashing “pure,” although it does make one wonder what’s in the fish they eat for dinner.
That appetizing description brings me nicely back to my initial point: no real sewage or plumbing. I guess sewage is something I’ve always taken for granted. We had lived in Ben Tre for a full week before it occurred to me that our US sewage services are the product of a highly advanced infrastructure and it was highly probable that such infrastructure was not in place in rural Vietnam. I was right. While three weeks obviously does not offer a window on long-term effects, a lack of sanitation and human waste floating in canals used for dishwashing and bathing does not bode well for health and safety.
Number four: inconsistent power. The first time the power went out, I looked outside to see if I had missed some storm or didn’t really understand what was going on. Nope—it just quit! We never went more than a couple of days without a power outage; some were planned (although it wasn’t clear why they were planned), while others were most certainly not planned. I suppose it shouldn’t have been surprising, given that power lines were so often strung precariously to trees or vines. Sometimes the whole town would lose power. Other times, just our hotel or a few buildings would. This, too, was not surprising, as the wires did not enter below ground or through some insulated entrance, but instead we stuck through a crack between the walls and roof in most buildings. We quickly learned to just ignore the outages, although it was always fun to speculate how long each would last. For most of the smaller villages in the Delta and throughout the country, power is a luxury that was only introduced a few years ago. These residents are not inexperienced in living without power. Actually, most cooking seems to be done with gas, so it is still possible to eat and get around in the semi-dark and take a cold shower and that’s just what we learned to do.
The final item on my list (for now) would be the constant noise. When we first arrived in Saigon, I wrote about the noise from the ceaseless honking and frenetic traffic. While traffic volume is down, vehicle noise here is just as proportionately impressive. Further, as I’ve also mentioned, there are the town speakers constantly blasting their garbled music and news and whatever else it is that they play. However, the biggest noise in the countryside is, without question, the animals. I have grown up in the middle of America’s Dairyland, but I had absolutely no idea that animals could be so loud. Feeding a pen of pigs generates a wild braying and screaming and scuffling that even after weeks, every time I heard the noise I would look around to see who was dying. Finally, whoever came up with the myth that roosters only crow at dawn was way, way off base. The chickens crow at nearly all hours of the day and night. The ones that live right outside my window at the guesthouse have a keen propensity to crow at about 4:00 every morning, and I can assure you that this is hours before the sun comes up. Three weeks has led to the conclusion that it is impossible to escape from the noise of Vietnam regardless of how rural the setting may be.