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.