Central Vietnam: Reflections on the Highlands

This trip to Central Vietnam was a truly amazing experience, but for very different reasons then I expected. Perhaps one of the best examples of the way the trip surprised me was my visit to the minority village:

Walk to the village

 The walk into Ko Tu Village was one of the most beautiful experiences ever. After two hours of hiking through farmland over a dam, and past beautiful stilt-houses I could barley contain my sense of excitement. This was heightened by the enthusiastic cheers of the school children when they saw our group walking in. As we approached the beautiful communal house where were going to stay a huge feeling of relief washed across me. I felt like unlike Mai Chau this time I would really experience village life... not a canned tourist version but real village life.

Communal Hose

Yet when I left Ko Tu Village I felt a strange sense of disappointment. I felt like I hadn’t learned much about the actual way people lived in the village. The normal language barrier was intensified because not all of the villagers knew Vietnamese, while feelings of shyness, and intrusion seemed to cause many of my UC friends to freeze up and not ask questions. I felt so frustrated and wished once again that I knew some Vietnamese so that I could bypass the other UC students and just ask questions, regardless of weather or not it felt like intruding. But when I did meet the English speaking guide I was too nervous to ask questions, and felt like I didn’t even have enough knowledge to know how to begin asking questions. I feel like much of this dynamic was left over from our class discussion about the impacts of tourism on minority villages, and I have to question whether that discussion was really productive or simply served to prevent us from truly learning and experiencing things for ourselves. Due to these various issues I left the village not knowing what an average woman did during her day, not knowing anything about village power dynamics, not feeling like I could picture living there.

This perception of not learning colored my view of the experience until I sat down to brainstorm about the trip and suddenly rediscovered the vast wealth of knowledge and questions I gained from those two days we spent in the central highlands. Suddenly it hit me what a truly amazing experience this was. While I still can’t understand what village life is really like, I got a brief snapshot of the political social and economic issues effecting the central highlands that really entice me to learn more about this unique area. Once again Vietnam has shown me that when I go in trying to learn one thing, I invariably come out learning something else. It’s important to truly appreciate the things I wind up learning rather then lamenting the things I thought I’d learn but didn’t.

 I’ll use the rest of this blog post to muse over some of the specific things I learned and the many questions I have.

Logging:

"King" style house

One of the truly interesting experiences in the Highlands was witnessing first hand the effects of illegal logging. I experienced logging in five snapshots which, taken together, help explain the many complicated aspects of the logging industry in Central Vietnam; 1) Clear cut hillsides. 2) Logging trucks rolling past government offices and military outposts in broad daylight. 3)New minority houses being built out of bricks because it’s illegal for them to cut down old growth trees. 4) The minority guide explaining that when villagers wanted to build a new stilt house all they had to do was sell the hardwood beams and they would have more then enough money to build a new house (of course with lesser quality materials).5)Tanks rolling into the minority villages at 7:30 in the morning (no way to hide new stilt houses from the government).

Traditional style house

Logging Truck

While the government enforcement of logging is clearly corrupt and possibly motivated by ethnic tensions it does make sense from an economic standpoint. By allowing illegal logging but preventing the minority groups from harvesting logs for traditional ways of life the government is able to maximize it’s revenue. It can get bribes and kickbacks from the loggers for ignoring the many logging trucks rumbling by while simultaneously extracting fines from any villagers who decided to build hew houses with hard wood. Truly a lucrative situation for the government.

Cash 

Crops/Water Usage:

With the encroachment of King people into the central highlands has come the practice of raising cash crops to make a living. All along the bus ride there were fields of sugarcane, rice, rubber etc. The problem with this type of agriculture is that it is extremely water intensive, something that the central highland doesn’t have much of. Thus the water table has been dropping steadily. While it’s easy to write this off as a “King” problem my experience walking to the village showed that ethnic minority groups were contributing to the problem as well. Along the road to the village there were many traditional small crops but there were also large fields of cash crops owned by minority farmers. One minority house even had a tractor to harvest the cash crops faster. Meanwhile the well in the village was nearly empty… enough so that they had to wait several hours before they could gather enough water to flush the toilets for us tourists (which also calls into question why they built the toilets in the first place). In essence what I’m saying is that the ethnic minority villages faced the same economic pressures to modernize as the king people, despite seeing the very direct consequences of modernization. 

Status Symbols:

            Our guide talked about some of the ways things like rice wine and water buffalos served as status symbols in traditional village life. Fermented jugs of rice wine showed that you could afford to turn the rice into alcohol for a party rather then eating it. This got me thinking about modern status symbols in the minority villages. Have the jugs of rice wine been replaced by the tvs and satellite dishes that were in almost every house. Is the motorbike seen as a status symbol or a necessity? How quickly do things switch from being a status symbol to a necessity?

Farming Techniques:

            In all of the villages we went to there were chickens everywhere. I got to wondering what the ownership system for chickens was. Did each family keep a flock? If so how did they prevent neighbors from stealing some of their chickens? Did the chickens tend to wander freely or would they always return to the same house for food/shelter? Were eggs collected? How closely was breeding monitored/was it monitored at all? Must say I’ve never thought so much about chickens in my life. I have similar questions about rice farming, winter-melons etc. but I’ll not list them all because I don’t have many answers.

Hanoi: 1000 Years

Probably the most interesting thing I did this week was go to the kick off celebration of Hanoi’s 1000 year anniversary. The event was put on by a large number of youth groups including many local youth unions. The tow themes appeared to be the environment and anything to do with the number 1000. I woke up at 6:15 in the morning and arrived at the festivities in time to see 1000 people perform a martial arts drill. I then met up with the group of volunteers to pick up trash and watched more of the festivities. My favorite were the inline skaters performing tricks (one of which was wearing a tee shirt with the American flag at the 100 year anniversary of Hanoi—go figure). While waiting the head of the youth union I was waiting with taught me a song about a crow.

            After nearly two hours of waiting we all donned gloves and trash bags and headed to the park to collect garbage. I was super excited because the entire time I’ve been in Hanoi I’ve wanted to pick up some of the numerous piles of trash that litter the streets. My excitement was added to by the Vietnamese girls asking me “do you ever do volunteer work in the states?” and telling me about some of the volunteer projects they do. Soon all 25 of us were happily picking up trash---for 15 minutes. I couldn’t believe it at first when they said we were done, but when people started asking me if I was tired from all our hard work it started to sink in that we really were done… so much for my dreams of cleaning up Hanoi. I went back to the larger festivities and looked around. All of the booths were run by students and most were selling things to fundraise, however it wasn’t clear what they were fundraising for. There were only one or two booths that actually had boards explaining what they did. There was also a big gigantic blood donation tent and dancing in the streets. However my favorite part was the 1000 pinwheels for the environment. They were attached to a big board by stickers… and everyone threw the sticker paper on the ground. Fun way to honor the environment. Overall it was a very interesting experience…

Linh’s village

I apologize in advance but I will eventually be posting three blog entries this week because I did so many different things this holiday weekend and I really want to remember all of them.

The first place I went this weekend was Linh’s Village. It was probably the favorite part of my weekend. It was a little odd having tons of people point and stare at me Linh told me that in the whole time she lived there she had never seen a foreigner there so I guess it makes sense. The village was beautiful. The open air market made the market near campus look like a tiny hole in the wall. People carried live chickens home for dinner and fish swam in tanks waiting for somebody to pick them. There were tons of vegetables… including one that Linh said she hadn’t seen before (her mom does the shopping, not her). The temple was also beautiful; by far the largest I have seen in Vietnam so far. I guess there is more room for temples outside of the city. I was fascinated by how many things took place at the temple. Linh pointed out several painted lines in one of the temple courtyards where children practiced sports and held competitions in the summer.

At one point a monk showed us into the communal living quarters for the monks in the temple. There was a beautiful garden filled with grapefruits and other fruits. Eventually we reached the temple wall where we could see the surrounding countryside. It was amazing how much change the village had seen in such a short period. There were several large factories nearby that Linh said had been built in the last 5 years. There was a brand new road that cut through sever farmer’s plots of land… I wonder how much they were (or weren’t) compensated for that land.

I was also interested to see how close the graves were to the fields. There were literally morning glories (the food not the flower) growing right on top of some of the graves. Guess they make good fertilizer. Oh… another random thought about food. I had never realized just how much stuff lives in flooded fields. The morning glory field looked like it was shivering because so many frogs kept on breaking the surface of the water.

Another really interesting thing we did at Linh’s Village was interview Linh’s father and her neighbor about their jobs. Linh’s father works as a mechanical repairman fixing things like rice cookers fans and TV’s. While the jod sounds simple it was clear he was incredibly skilled. He had to study at a University in Ho Chi Minh city to learn his craft. I watched him pull out tons of complicated parts tangled together in boxes and explain from memory what each one did. Even though I couldn’t understand Vietnamese it was clear that he was incredibly proud of his job. He kept on putting his hand over his heart while he was talking and there was a certain gleam in his eyes that made it clear that he truly loved his profession. I’ll be interested to learn exactly why he loved his job so much once the interview is translated.