Did I just bribe someone?

Last weekend we took our first trip to Ha Long Bay, a 3 hour drive east of Hanoi and a candidate for one of the new seven natural wonders of the world. It's certainly beautiful - mainland Vietnam ends at the port city of Ha Long, and extending out nearly 100km further into the ocean are over 2,000 limestone islands rising up in the bay. The bay is something of a labyrinth, and it would be incredibly easy to get completely lost in there for days. Fortunately the boat that we were on managed to navigate the waters just fine, and we made it back to shore safely after about 24 hours on board. Out in the bay we toured around for a while on the boat, stopping at one large island that had a massive network of caves (they seem to be big on caves in Vietnam), and also going kayaking and swimming. The kayaking was great - we were able to really get the feel of the bay from down in the water and explore a bit on our own (though still surrounded by the tourist boats). We even found our way through a cave to a hidden lagoon, which we were very proud of, despite it also being filled with other kayakers. Sunset in the bay was spetacular as well, with the sun fading behind green islands and traditional sailing junks. Here's one of my favorites:
We're certainly going to go back, mostly to see Cat Ba island, the largest island in the bay, which also has a small town and a national park for hiking and biking. I managed to take a good number of pictures before my camera battery died, so they're up on Picasa now.

However, this lovely weekend was nearly stopped before it got started by my being a bit of an idiot (yet again). In Vietnam, anytime you do or buy anything major, especially including staying overnight somewhere, you need your passport. Naturally, I forgot mine, and realized this about an hour into the bus ride to Ha Long. After consulting somewhat frantically with Alison and having her tell me that I probably wouldn't be able to get on the boat, I decided to ask the tour guide and see what happened. He didn't look too happy, obviously, but after a phone call he turned back to me and said something to the effect of "It's okay, you just pay for passport." Then when we got to the dock and everyone else was handing over their passports, the official says to me "No passport, you pay for passport." So I handed him a 200,000 Dong note (a little over $12), and miraculously, everything was resolved nicely and I was on the boat a few minutes later. Now that's an effective system.

Outreach work in central Vietnam

Last week I met the president of VNAH, Ca Van Tran, for the first time. We had spoken over the phone before I left for Vietnam, but I had never actually met him face to face, and he's now in Vietam for a couple of weeks. He lives in the U.S. but comes here every other month or so, doing outreach work, meeting with donors and the government, and generally moving a mile a minute while talking on one of his two cell phones (one's an iPhone, which he also uses to constantly send and read emails). After talking for a few minutes, he invited me to join him on an outreach trip to Da Nang, which is right in the center of the country (and home to the famous China Beach).


Most of my work for VNAH has been in the office - helping with a project proposal, editing articles for the newsletter, doing research on rehabilitiation practices. I've also gone on a few site visits around Hanoi, meeting with the head of the Hanoi disabled persons organization and the director of a vocational training center for young people with disabilities, and attended some meetings of local and international NGOs around disability issues. But I had never really seen the original part of VNAH's work, which is getting prosthetics and wheelchairs to the people that need them and can't afford it (which is almost everyone that needs one). This is what we were going to do in Da Nang - prosthetics and wheelchair outreach and delivery.


I didn't have much of an idea of what to expect when we pulled our van into the parking area of a health clinic in the town of Ha Lam, about 30 minutes south of Da Nang, and I definitely wasn't prepared for the 200-plus amputees that were packed into the single large room of the clinic, all waiting for the prosthetics that we were helping to provide. Most of them were men, and almost all had lost their limbs in the American war or from land mines after the war while working in their fields. More than a few were double and triple amputees, those missing both legs getting around using blocks of wood by moving one with their hand while sitting on the other. After Ca and a few other people spoke, I spent about an hour meeting and trying to talk to some of the people there, which was obviously difficult with my lack of Vietnamese. I was sitting with one man who had been using a homemade prosthetic leg made of bamboo, cloth, and twine since 1969, and was just now finally going to get a properly fitted one. Another man was using a leg made of sheet metal and wood, and this had caused an infection in his stump, which was now covered in yellow pus. As I was trying to communicate with these men, I decided to have them write down what I hoped would be their names and their stories, since I really couldn't get any information from them in Vietnamese. Once I gave one of them my notebook and pen, even more people started crowding around me, and when he was done, another person took the book and started writing, then another, and another, all just so happy to have someone listen to them, even if it was through their writing. By the time we left, I had notes from more than 30 of the men and women there, although I didn't yet know what any of it said. I did learn later that they had given me their names, their towns, their ages, and their disability, hoping that by telling me this they would finally get what they needed.

The whole event was just incredibly powerful. These people lived less than 20km from the third-largest city in the country, a thriving port town, and not one of them could afford a properly made prosthetic. One man that spoke a little English told me that 30% of the men in his town were amputees. 3 out of 10 men are missing at least one limb. That's astonishing. And from what I gathered from Ca, this is not even close to unusual; in fact, it might be a little low compared to some other provinces that were the sites of the most intense fighting during the war. Not only that, but on the whole, the government has completely ignored these people for years - it's only with outside funding (here from the Nippon Foundation of Japan) that they have begun to provide the most basic care for amputees in the rural areas of the country. Still, that's something, and now with a government clinic making the prosthetics and a private hospital equipped with rehabilitation facilities, hopefully things will start to improve. From what I've seen, though, I wouldn't bet on it. Vietnam may technically be almost out of developing country status, but this is just one example of how its health care, education, and social protection infrastructure is way behind its economic development, especially in terms of people with disabilities. And until that changes, outside aid is the only thing that's helping the people I met this weekend.

Also, the pictures from the outreach events are up on Picasa now.

I see you've played knifey-spoony before

I arrived back in Hanoi last Friday after spending two weeks in Australia with Jamie, visiting Adelaide and Sydney. There are a ton of pictures from the trip now up on the Picasa site, so if you're looking for a way to avoid work (like I am, since I'm posting from the office), I'd recommend checking them out. Especially the album on Featherdale Wildlife Park for some sweet shots of me and Jamie with koalas, kangaroos, and emus. And little kids, since it was actually just a petting zoo. But the best petting zoo ever.

Australia was a great trip, although it took a little while to get used to the cold, the clean air, driving on the left side of the road (and shifting with your left hand), and everyone not staring at me all the time. Adelaide is a small city, despite having 1 million people, but it's nicely laid out with a ring of parkland surrounding the downtown area. The best part is that it's right in the center of some of Australia's best wine producing regions - the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, and Adelaide Hills. Naturally, Jamie and I spent two days wine tasting and I flew back to Hanoi with four bottles of delicious wine wedged into my backpack, secured with dirty clothes. The wine regions reminded me of Northern California, with rolling green hills that are part pasture land, part vineyard, part olive groves (we also did olive and cheese tastings).

Still, the highlight of Adelaide had to be an afternoon trip to Mt. Lofty, a (fairly low) mountain on the outskirts of the city, where we heard there were good views of the area. After taking a public bus out to a park and ride lot where we planned to catch another bus to the summit, we learned that the summit bus only runs twice a day, and we had missed both runs. Well, we're already here, we thought, I guess we'll just have to walk the 3 miles up the road to the top. After about 30 seconds, we got sick of trudging along the shoulder of the road, and decided to give hitchhiking a try. So Jamie stuck out his thumb, and after one car of old women blew by us, another car pulled over and a hand waved us up the road. We probably should have been a bit more wary, especially since as the car pulled over and backed up a bit, it slammed into and up onto the curb, but we figured it'd work out. We're intimidating guys. We climbed into the back seat of the car (which was filled, strangely, with pillows and beer), and met the two guys who were giving us a ride. Or, more accurately, we tried to decipher their drunken Australian accents as they asked us which footy team we followed (Jamie mistakenly answered the Adelaide Crows, to which they yelled "Aww, no! Gotta be the Port Adelaide Power!!) and if we were in the Navy (um, what?). Fortunately we made it up to the top and they let us off, at which point we figured that was the end of them. But no, they found us again, which resulted in a pretty awesome photo opportunity. The guy on the right was the extra-drunk one, as you can probably tell:

Sydney was great as well, much more of an international (and huge) city, set right on a fantastic harbor and with much more going on than Adelaide. We spent a ton of time just walking around, every day stopping in the afternoon for beer and hot chips (french fries, most delicious in wedge form with sour cream and sweet chili sauce). Here's the requisite Sydney opera house photo:

We also took a day trip out to the Blue Mountains, about an hour and a half from the city, where we did some hiking (and beer drinking, naturally) and saw some amazing views of what we both agreed looked sort of like the Grand Canyon, if it were filled with trees. Massive sandstone cliffs dropped off into a wide valley that was covered in eucalyptus, and there were tropical birds everywhere. Other Sydney highlights were going to our first Australian Rules footy match (go Sydney Swans!) a ferry out to Manly Beach, and delicious meat pies (filled with beef and topped with mashed potatoes, mushy peas, and gravy).

And now I'm back in Hanoi, which is actually starting to feel quite a bit like home, motorbikes and all.