Hill Tribes

One of the stops on this year's Tour of Peace was a hill tribe village south east of Dalat. Ethnic tribes in Vietnam are still often isolated and experience some discrimination. Even though we have visited many villages in remote areas of the Central highlands, this was the first which Bruce found where their poverty was accentuated by the filthy conditions.

The kids in particular had dirty faces and clothes. They did though have big welcoming smiles and appreciated the gifts of rice, noodles and toys for the kids. The group was having great fun with the kids,until the teacher intervened because the children were getting too excited.

Getting to the village entailed a tractors pulled trailer to navigate the narrow, rutted dirt roads.

Another Tour of Peace

Bruce is off again to Vietnam on May 17th, his fourth tour with Tours of Peace Vietnam Veterans and his second as the deputy tour leader. The tour will be two weeks, during which time the group will return to Dalat, where this picture was taken about a month ago.

On his second tour of duty in Vietnam in 70/71, Bruce made two visits to this mountain top, where there was a US tracking site. On our return there in April we saw some evidence of the American camp, but today the spot is a tourist mecca because of the beautiful views over the valleys and the adventure in getting there by jeep.

One of the tour participants for this upcoming trip also wants to visit the Dalat area, as it was of significance to her father.

A bonus will be doing a humanitarian project at an ethnic minority village in the mountains near Dalat. As mentioned in an earlier blog, these people remain among the poorest in Vietnam and remain marginalized.

While the focus on these Tours of Peace is the participant needs and wants, Bruce will also have a free day in Hoi An to say hello to all our family there.

Safely Home and Grateful for your Support

We are safely home on Salt Spring Island and already missing the warmth of our Vietnamese family and friends.

It has been a most rewarding Journey of the Heart 2009. We have come home with full hearts and many fond memories. Our work was gratifying although sometimes exhausting, sometimes frustrating, and always HOT!!

As in previous years, we feel that we have made a difference in some lives; books for kids, beds for the sick, skills for the disabled, equipment for disabled workers, clean water and good food for elders and pre-schoolers. We've tackled organizational issues for both an NGO and a social business. We've taught English and cooked 1000 hot dogs for school kids.

We could not have accomplished all this without the support from our home team. Your generous donations and constant encouragement have kept us going. Many thanks to you all.

Dalat Delights

When I saw the marble lady at the right of this collage from the tiny deck of our hotel room last night here in Dalat, I thought that she was the Virgin Mary, with her halo of flashing lights, but I see this morning that it is Lady Buddha. Still a curious contrast above the wavering Communist flag. As is the huge roadside signage celebrating the "liberation" of Dalat 35 years ago by the North Vietnamese Army, alongside the flourishing entrepreneurial spirit in the local markets.

From Almond to Milk Chocolate

Within fifty kilometers of the seaside city of Nha Trang, as we head due west for the highlands we see that the Vietnamese faces become more milk chocolate in color than their lowland countrymen,whose skin is an almond tone. These hill tribes are still known as Moutagnards and they represent some of the 53 ethnic minorities of Vietnam. They speak different dialects and follow different customs. Unfortunately, they are also some of the poorest of village people. We hope to travel to a village of Lat people at the foot of Lang Bian Mountain.

On our way up to Dalat, a city at 1500 meters above sea level, we moved from the dusty roads and rice paddies of the plains to forests of pines, small coffee plantations and acres of greenhouses, where fruits and vegetables prosper. Dalat is a great place to eat, but also the produce is shipped all over Vietnam. There is even a flower bulb industry here, owned and operated by the Dutch. Next time I buy tulip bulbs at Foxglove on Salt Spring, I will check their origin.

Time to Say Good Bye "Tam Biet"

As much as we were hopeful that somehow the clock would stop ticking and the days would stretch across forever, they have not and we are saying good bye to our Vietnamese family and friends.

Our hearts and tummies are full!!! So many lunches and dinners, with so many gifts and good wishes. For a people who supposedly do not like to say good bye and prefer "see you later", the Vietnamese that we have come to know and love, sure do want as many opportunities as possible to avoid saying "adieu"!

Elaine's English class "graduated" today, with a celebration at the beachside bistro La Plage. We tried to watch the sing-a-long version of Mama Mia, but we had some techinical difficulties and a few rain squals to dampen the party.

Each person in the class presented Elaine, with a carefully scribed letter of thanks, written in English. They took care to highlight a significant learning, whether a selling skill or a language skill. The flowers,hugs and smiles spoke the language of the heart..... we have touched one another across the barriers of language and culture.

Blessings

Our work is winding down here in Hoi An. We have a few more meetings with Binh and Quyen at Reaching Out and some English classes to teach, but basically the next week will be one of good byes. How quickly our two months here have sped by.

We know that we will once again leave with more blessings than we have left behind.

The list below is a report of how we have allocated the very generous financial gifts from our "home team".

Books for Kids in Luang Prabang,Laos $100US

Four Portable Libraries $2000 US
Global Village Foundation-Mobile libraries for village schools, with 250 books in each box

Que Son Hospital $2500 US
Global Village Foundation Project-deliver beds, diagnostic equipment and birthing kits to a remote hospital

Training Scholarships $1000 US
Sponsorship of advanced skills training for disabled workers at Reaching Out

Equipment $1500 US
New weaving looms and high intensity lamps for work stations at Reaching Out

Kindergarten Kitchen $600 US
Water purifier, propane cooker and tank, vent, cabinetry for Hoi An kindergarten

Hospital Food Program $300 US
Subsidy for the food program for the poor in Hoi An Hospital

Association for Victims of Agent Orange $120 US

Duc Son Orphanage, Hue $100 US
Food Program

Hoa Van Leprosy Village $500 US
Food for 70 hungry families and hand knit bandages for those with active leprosy.

School for Children with Autism, Hanoi $100

In addition to these generous gifts from our "home team", we would like to acknowledge the love and hard work so sweetly given by our "in country" team: JoAn and Michel Maurer; Brenda Smith; Andrea Binkle and Stan and Marie Teitge. Their willingness to pitch in and dig deep into their hearts and wallets strengthened the efforts of our Journey of the Heart.

On the home front, Janice Finnemore has contributed her precious time and word processing skills to produce a training manual for Reaching Out sales staff.

Many, many thanks. Many ,many blessings.

Family Vietnamese Style

Traditional family life is a strongly held value in Vietnam, with generations still living under the same roof, sharing child care, gardening and household chores. Elders and ancestors are revered.

Luckily for us, this sense of family includes whomever seems adrift, alone or hungry!!! Our family here has grown and now includes many Vietnamese and Westerners, who are bound mostly by our work. We also have a family at our home stay and amongst its former employees. The two women who run our favourite local restaurants, their sisters,husbands and children are also family.

How gracious they all are. We have been invited to homes, a celebration of the anniversary of a Buddhist master's death, a wedding and another for descendants of Fujian Chinese immigrants.

This morning at dawn we went swimming in the ocean with our extended family of ex-pats and locals, adjourning to the small, not yet officially open, cafe beach side, belonging to another Reaching Out volunteer, Sam Miller and her partner. As we sipped coffee and chatted quietly in the cool morning, Anne summed up my feelings when she said " I am filled with such peace and joy".

The food, like our family was a curious mix of French crepes, strong black coffee, and wonderful vegetarian noodle soup. Vive la difference!

Old Soldiers Remember

The American War and the memories of that conflict are fading here in Vietnam, where half the population is under thirty. But for veterans on both sides, those memories are close to the surface and often old allies and enemies meet. Telling their stories is healing and a miraculous bonding exists almost instantaneously.

As we explored a war memorial on our return from a humanitarian project in Que Son, an old man approached us. He had seen us from a distance, where he was labouring with others behind picks and shovels. He knew that Bruce and Stan were the right vintage and stature and he had something that he knew would be a significant gift.

He had in his possession a US Marine Corps dog tag. The asking price was the princely sum of one dollar. Bruce knew immediately that the tag was legitimate, not a reproduction made to sell to tourists. And so, Tours of Peace will receive another personal effect which will, following some careful research be returned to its owner or the marine's surviving family.

The handshakes and smiles said just one thing " Our losses bind us...we are brothers"

A Promise Kept

Last year when we visited the isolated leprosy village of Hoa Van, one of the women (the one pictured with Elaine on the right of the collage) asked that if we came back could we bring food for the elders who could no longer work in the fields and therefore were hungry. Today we did exactly that with the help of the staff of Global Village Foundation and our dear friends Stan and Marie Teitge.

Le, the proprietress of our homestay, had volunteered to procure and bag the $500 worth of groceries for seventy families. The loading of these precious bags onto and out of the boat, via a narrow concrete jetty on one end and via basket boat across the surf at the beach in the village was tricky, but we managed with the help of a wonderful boat man and a welcoming group at the village. We struggled up the beach and through the lanes with each of us carrying several of the ten pound bags.

We brought another precious gift from Canada, hand knit bandages for the wounds left by leprosy. We had a good talk with the male nurse, who was grateful for the delivery (we had included bottles of bleach and lessons on how to sterilize the bandages) The nurse assured us that he knew this procedure, but when we went over to deliver the food packets to the patients in the hospital, we were aghast at the condition of their bound feet. The bindings were far from clean and certainly not sterile. The nurse estimates his needs to be about 600 bandages a year. The important piece of information for the Bandage Brigade is that the finer gauge bandages are preferred, and surprisingly he would like them to be a shorter length, about three feet......so girls, it will be more tedious to knit on smaller needles with finer yarn, but at least we will finish in the same time with the shorter length.

Once again, we are committed to getting more bandages to this village and also to provide the gauze dressings which they so desperately need. In addition, there was a wish for a little money for each family, about 100,000 VN Dong...that's $6 US. To fulfill this dream, we would need to raise just $500. We can do that!!!!

There are more pictures of this day for the Journey of the Heart team on the web album, accessed by clicking on the small slide show at the top right of the blog.

Blessings to all our knitters and generous donors.

A Lucky Baby

Even though this little tyke was abandoned by her parents, she has had the good luck of being taken in by the Buddhist nuns, who run the Duc Son Orphanage in Hue.

For twenty five years the nuns here have been creating a loving home for abandoned children. The facility is clean and well organized. The children of school age go to the local school. There is a list of all the students in the main hall, and Thich Nu Minh Tu and the 25 nuns in this pagoda are particularly proud of all the Duc Son kids who have gone on to university. At this time there are 200 children in their care.

On this visit, we saw a little bit more of the orphanage than we have done on previous visits and were delighted to see that the children with disabilities are taught right there at Duc Son. The two small classes, with about six kids in each , were being taught by lay teachers. We learned also that in addition to the nuns there is a corps of "mothers", lay women who come to take care of the babies. There is no shortage of hugs!


In an effort to subsidize their work, the nuns have built a very nice dining hall on the property, where they hope that visiting groups will eat a vegetarian meal for $4.00 US. It is a pleasant space and we are hopeful that the idea will catch on with philanthropic travellers.

As we were about to leave, a troup of primary school age kids returned to the pagoda for lunch. They filed in quietly, offering a prayer of greeting to Minh Tu, smiling broadly when they saw us and giving us a big "hello".

It is hard to leave Duc Son and harder yet not to vow to make a special effort on our return to Canada, to add to the small donation that we left for their food program. The budget is 30 cents a day per child for food, $60 a day for the 200 kids whose lives and fates have been altered by these beautiful nuns.

Teaching English and Selling Skills

Here is Elaine's classroom! We are assembled in the courtyard between the retail store and workshop at Reaching Out. Behind us the work goes on to create lacquer ware.

Binh is substituting for Quyen, who is the usual translator, but this week she was off in Ho Chi Minh City taking a business management course. Binh and Quyen are really trying to stay current with management theory and practise. It is great to see them applying what they have learned.

Even though we start the class at 8:30 a.m., it is crushingly hot one half way through the hour long session, so Teacher is mopping her brow and drinking a lot of water, between exercises and "lectures." It is difficult work for both students and teacher, as we try to bridge cultural differences as well as language differences.

Determining customer needs is really tricky, as it is not in the Vietnamese nature to ask questions, never mind "open ended" questions! Our store is full of such beautiful products, many of which go unnoticed or unappreciated, because the tendency of the staff is to go with whatever the customer is standing next to, or wait for the customer to find the treasures. How curious...... in a culture where asking one's age is very OK, it never occurs to them to ask "would you like a set of six?" when they see a customer handling a single coaster or " would your husband find a beautiful money clip handy for carrying his Vietnamese money while travelling here?"

We are making progress and have lots of fun. When talking about difficult or fussy customers, we explored the "wants" of the most difficult......teenage girls!!!! We found surprising similarities across the cultures and ended up with all sorts of suggestions for this target customer....we even learned the word "cool".

Que Son Hospital Benefits from Canadian and Japanese Gifts

Today we traveled out to the town of Que Son, in the district of the same name in Quang Nam Province. We were part of a delegation from Canada and Japan representing Global Village Foundation.

Five years ago doctors from Japan had visited this small hospital and vowed to return to donate equipment and supplies. Today, our Canadian family and friends helped them to deliver on that promise.

The journey by van was a rather bumpy and hot ordeal for two hours over mostly rutted country roads. The medical staff were so happy to see us! Ten of the twenty beds had already arrived as had the diagnostic machinery for ear, nose and throat diseases. Included in the gifts was a "kit" of supplies for the midwife who travels to outlying villages to assist at births, when the mother is unable to get to the hospital on the only means of transportation, a motor bike.

After the usual tea ceremony and speeches we were ushered through the ER, ICU and Operating Theater. The two pictures at left are of the "ICU", a small baby close to death with pneumonia and an elderly woman suffering from unknown ailments lay listless in their beds. It was very difficult to wrap our western minds around what we were witnessing. The Operating Room was so full of mould, that we did a quick turnaround. How crushingly sad and over whelming.

Thanks to our generous family and friends the beds and midwifery kits will alleviate some discomfort

Out To the Country

Today we were invited to Loan's family home in a village about 30k from Hoi An. One half hour before the appointed time, Loan showed up at our home stay, with Ha in tow. These two charming young women were the receptionists at our hotel last year. You have seen our initial meeting with Ha in her village at her brother's wood carving shop on a previous blog post.

We were surprised to see two additional motor bikes at the gate, so we were actually a motorcade of four bikes, winding our way through the streets of Hoi An and out onto the country lanes.

Loan's family live in a substantial house. overlooking the rice paddy pictured right. The ride, once we were over our terror as we wove through traffic; trucks, buses, motor bikes, bicycles, pedestrians with shoulder poles and little kids and dogs dangerously close to the roadside.

Once onto the more narrow country roads we relaxed and soaked in the exquisite scenery of blindingly green rice fields. We had travelled due west towards the mountains, which stood in the near distance, a deep blue grey in color.

Loan, Ha and their friends all 27 year old single women immediately began at 9:30 am to prepare lunch. Mounds of fresh greens from the garden. Elaine did her bit by Frenching the beans with Papa's straight razor! We heard, but chose not to witness the killing of the chicken outside the kitchen window. A delicious meal, with Loan's mother, father and older brother, our escort of four young women and ourselves, all clustered around a small table.

After a short siesta (Bruce and Elaine being entertained by a DVD of a Vietnamese slapstick routine while the others slept) we mounted up for the journey home. This homeward journey seemed less treacherous...we are getting the hang of being passengers behind a tiny feminine driver, but still really clutching the small bar behind our butts or the waist of our skilled driver.

It was a wonderful day. We are so fortunate to see the "real" Vietnam up close and friendly!

My Vietnamese Grandson is a Star

Today was the Vietnamese equivalent of sports day at Sesame's school, so off we went; his Mom Quyen, his Dad Binh and Grandma Ba Elaine and Grandpa Bruce. We were a large and fitting cheering section for our boy! Ok, OK some of the other kids were pretty cute too, especially the 2 and 3 year olds.

Each class was attired in t-shirts of the same color and Sesame proudly wore a yellow shirt, given to him by his Canadian friends Kieran and Taylor who live in Vancouver. He wore a tiny Canadian flag pin on his sleeve for good luck.

The day began with demonstrations of calisthenics, very regimented, but colorful with flags, balloons or streamers. Each class did two routines, before the relay races and games began. The old egg on a spoon race is obviously a cross cultural race!!

We were really impressed with the kindergarten and Quyen confessed that she and Binh had a lot to do with improving the standard of teaching and care there. They opened their computer school four years ago to the teachers and delivered three months of night school training. Quyen then showed the teachers how to use the Internet to research teaching skills and techniques for early childhood education. It was glaringly evident that these teachers had used well the resources made available to them. With simple equipment, colored sticks, yards of Christmas like garlands, balloons and bits of material they had plenty of equipment for their games, which were fun but also included reading and counting skills.

A really great day and we were so pleased to see a small pocket of creative education going on. Uncle Ho Chi Minh would be very happy!

Note: if you want to view only the pictures on each blog post, rather than going through the whole slide show ( icon on right) you can click the picture on the post and it will enlarge to a full screen.