While Scott was flitting aroud beaches and tailor shops...

We knew it wasn’t binh thuong.

As we entered hour 14 of what would end up to be about two straight days of downpour – preceded and followed by more showers – my unshakably blasé coworkers insisted that nothing was out of the ordinary. Yes, the drains had reached their limits hours ago, yes, we couldn’t cross the street to get to the closest café for lunch, yes, that woman was holding her baby above her head to keep it out of the water, but what else would a storm look like?

As my friend who hadn’t been able to escape her apartment watched the water creeping into all the shops on her street and heard the ceramic statute in front of her door shatter under the weight of the deluge, her landlady assured her it was all binh thuong: fine, normal, not exciting.

But the news was on our side. By the end of the weekend, reports were that the floods that hit the city were the heaviest in more than two decades. We’d received four times more rain in a week than the average for the whole month of November. About 20 people in Hanoi, and 120 internationally, were killed. With roads closed and almost 650,000 acres of cropland under water, produce was running out and food prices were quadrupling.



To live through all of that with no idea what was going on and everyone telling you it’s just a standard rainy day is an absurd adventure. Cars were creating wakes like boats before noon, motorbikes were up to their handlebars in water an hour later, and my boss sent an email that said maybe employees who had children to pick up could leave the office at 4:30.

Wading almost a mile home in the dark that evening, my housemate (Tim the snake-eating Canadian) and I tried not to identify all the soft, squishy objects getting caught in our sandals. Since our first floor didn’t flood overnight as expected, we felt gypped of the action and sloshed out again the next day to find our neighborhood lake severely overflowed and people spear fishing on the sidewalks. Take that, food shortages.



By the following night, I was able to get cocktails with the friend who’d been trapped inside by submerged broken glass. We were celebrating seeing the sidewalk again.

Whew

Last Friday I finally returned to Hanoi after a whirlwind trip to central Vietnam for work. In true Vietnamese (or maybe just VNAH) fashion, I didn't find out until the day before I left that I was going, and I didn't know how long I was staying until two days after I arrived. Turns out that I was away for about a week and a half, which is way longer than I expected. Fortunately, there was plenty to do and I got to see some new parts of the country.

I spent the first week of the trip in Da Nang, where we have several continuing projects and one new one starting up. There was a launching ceremony for the newest grant from USAID and quite a bit of showing the USAID folks around the rehabilitation clinic that we helped to start and that will be the hub of the new service network we're setting up in Da Nang. Of course, this was all interspersed with delicious local seafood and plenty of Heineken (strangely enough, that seems to be the high-class beer of choice among Vietnamese).

After a few days of work, I was granted the weekend off (unlike the last trip), and spent a day in Hoi An, an old city south of Da Nang that used to be the major port for the area until the river filled up with silt. The city is incredibly well-preserved, with tons of old homes, meeting houses, and pagodas, but it's also 100% tourists, which is a bit strange. The old part of town is also off-limits to cars and motorbikes for most of the day, making it incredibly glorious to walk around and giving a slightly more authentic feel, despite the hordes of Westerners traipsing about with cameras and guidebooks (me among them, although I forget the guidebook). Besides the architechture and history, the main draw for Hoi An is its clothing and tailoring shops. They're supposedly the best in Vietnam, and 3 out of every 4 buildings is either a tailor or a shoemaker. Despite my best efforts to resist, I ended up walking away with 3 suits, 4 shirts and 2 pairs of shoes, all hand-made within a day and of amazing quality. The total bill: $485. Crazy.

The real highlight of the whole trip came after Da Nang, when we drove up to the province of Kon Tum in the central highlands. Kon Tum was the site of some of the fiercest fighting of the American War, and is also a place where the U.S. dumped huge amounts of Agent Orange and napalm to clear the forests and expose the supply trails leading into Cambodia and Laos (Kon Tum is the province where Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos all come together). Not only that, but the region is mostly ethnic minority groups, which have been suppressed by the Vietnamese government for some time (pretty violently around 2000 or so, when access to the province was drastically cut off for foreigners and NGOs). VNAH is starting a new project to assist people with disabilities there, in particular Agent Orange victims, so we met with all sorts of local government officials to sign cooperation agreements. Turns out that the head of the foriegn affairs department of Kon Tum celebrates signing an agreement with the chugging of beers at 9:00 a.m. No, seriously, I had to chug a beer at 9:00 a.m.

VNAH is also involved in an ongoing project with the Nippon Foundation of Japan to build primary schools in ethnic minority villages throughout the central highlands, and we attended the opening cermonies for two of these schools. In order to get there I had to pile into a Soviet-era jeep that could navigate the dirt roads leading to the villages, almost cracking my skull every time we went over a pothole. The people in these villages are incredibly poor, despite the land being very fertile - they're just completely cut off from the rest of the country and the government doesn't do anything for them. If they have a school, it's made of bamboo, with a tin roof if they're lucky, no heat, no lights and a dirt floor. But despite all of that, they were all some of the friendliest and most welcoming people I've ever met, excited to talk to me and willing to share their food (and jars of rice wine) with us to celebrate the inauguration of their new school. This is a photo of the ceremony, with the old school in the background:

From VNAH Primary School Opening in Dak Ro Nga

The whole region is stunningly beautiful, and very much like the Vietnam of Hollywood, with thick jungles, tiny villages, and green rice paddies all over. Certainly different from the modernity of Hanoi, and it made for an amazing trip. There are a ton of pictures up on the Picasa site, so I recommend checking those out to get a sense of Kon Tum (and Da Nang and Hoi An, of course).