Student Shots - Hoi An, Noon Gate, My Son

It's a little bit slow adding pictures from our hotel in Hue, so the students asked me to post some of their pics from my memory stick to the blog. Below are shots (top to bottom) of: an outdoor lecture at a coconut juice stand, a coconut juice at the beach near Hue, Lidia as the god Siva at My Son, Lidia and Vicky in the jeep at My Son, the class receiving flowers from Hue University for July 4th, Albert playing the drum at the noon gate, a funky group picture at the noon gate, and the non-funky picture. Pictured along with the Summer Session students are some Hue University students who have been partnering with them on individual internship projects.

Free Weekend July 6-8

This past weekend was the free weekend in the program, no activities planned. Six out of seven students headed to the mountains to Bach Ma Natl Park with the Vietnamese students for an overnight trekking trip. While they hiked some seven kilomteres through mountainous jungles, Hong Anh, Xuan Anh and I opted for a more relaxed weekend trip to the beach on Saturday. We visited Canh Duong Beach about half-way to Da Nang and a lovely protected cove with a nice shallow, sandy beach as well as covered shade areas where our car parked and we ate freshly caught seafood.



Joining us on this trip were Thao, sister Dung, and Dung's friend May all travelling from Saigon to Hue for the weekend. Thao is pictured here in a basket boat parked on the sand. OK, we couldn't resist. Everyone took basket boat pictures. They are like giant floating cereal bowls.






No trip to Vietnam is complete without a picture in or near some kind of fishing boat. These boats are quite interesting, made of interwoven strips of bamboo then sealed with tar. There is a kind of near-shore squid-fishing boat also made from thick, basket-like interwoven bamboo. Why? Because in this region, there's a kind of sea worm that bores through wood. Bamboo is more fibrous, especially when coated with tar; and it can be more easily replaced. These are paddled with a single oar with the boatman standing in it, used for near-shore activities, getting back and forth to the boats etc.

All weekend people were burning votive paper and laying out incense in front of their homes. It isn't the full-moon period of the lunar month, so I was curious. It was an anniversary of an 1885 uprising in the citadel against the French where some 1000-2000 locals died, especially members of the royal family. The French troops were ordered to massacre civilians in retaliation for the newly crowned king Ham Nghi who urged all Vietnamese to fight.




Dung and May standing in front of a circular window of the palace gate. For her many admirers, here are some more pictures of Xuan Anh for the grandparents, some taken by Auntie MayMay.


"cheese"











the "ugly face"












"goggle face"











"hat head"

Scuppy Tribute in Pictures

July 4th at Duc Son Orphanage

This afternoon we visited an orphanage and school run by one of the most famous nuns in Hue, Co Minh Tu, who since during wartime has dedicated her life to loving and caring for abandoned and orphaned children as well as children with special needs. Lidia Tutarovina is doing her internship with the orphanage, writing a fundraising pamphlet about the orphanage's activities in English and teaching an English class to advanced students and nuns two afternoons per week. Unlike most institutions in Vietnam, Duc Son Orphanage does not require extensive permissions to work with foreigners and Minh Tu has received numerous awards even from the state. Why? Because all she does is care for children that nobody else wants. For any group that comes with cares for helping the children, they are welcomed with open arms. On this occassion, Lidia, Jonathan Chang and Vicky Nguyen as well as several partner students from the College of Foreign Languages and my colleague Huy as well as Co Hong Anh and Scuppy visited. Right after Minh Tu explained that she preferred not to receive large donations of candy because it rotted the kids teeth, we presented her with a big bag of candy. She laughed and said she appreciated the spirit of our generosity and I promised next year I'd come with toothbrushes and toothpaste. We presented her with pencils from UC Riverside - perhaps some graduate from Duc Son will attend UCR in the future? And we presented her with a 500.000 VND donation which she will sue to purchase formula for the infants that she cares for.

Duc Son is not an adoption agency and does not advocate putting children up for international adoption because of the unwanted attention and "market-influence" that brings into the community. Instead, Minh Tu explained that the purpose of her orphanage is to fill the kids with love and attention so they may grow up to be "complete" individuals even though they lack parents and family that is so important in Vietnamese culture. She likened the children to houses that if not kept up and filled with good atmosphere would have their windows closed, fall into disrepair. The Orphanage readily accepts children who have been abandoned...there are the usual stories: babies left on the steps of the orphanage, side of the road, born with severe deformities... as well as kids whose parents suffer mental illness, other severe disabilities, were simply too poor or who died in the flood of 1999. Pictured above is a guest member of our course, Dr. Floyd Killough, who also visited the orphanage. He has been volunteering his time working with some famous doctors at Hue Medical College who are doing research on rehabilitating kids born with genetic disorders--many associated with exposure to dioxin left as a residue of Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant sprayed in the hills about 50 km west of Hue on the "Ho Chi Minh Trail".

At the orphanage, Floyd introduced me to Le Dang Kiet, a 2-yr-old born a few months before Scuppy whose parents were deficient in Vitamin A. Vitamin deficiency is especially common in the highlands among some very impoverished communities, and it often affects the eyes. One couple living near the orphanage actually tried to adopt Kiet, but they themselves were too poor to look after him safely, to keep him from falling or bumping into things, and so they brought him back. Women living near the orphanage routinely donate hours of time to care for such kids. Floyd explained to me that while he was blind right now, one of his eyes could be restored to vision if he receives a transplant, and such an operation in Hue would cost only $3000.

Floyd is here with one of many American aid groups called Vets with a Mission where American veterans of the war in Vietnam come back and provide expert medical and professional support. Floyd is working in particular to bring much-needed laboratory and research equipment to the local hospital. On his first trip here, outside Quang Tri in January 1968, the pilot told passengers that below them in the city of Hue, the VC flag had been raised over the city. The NLF controlled Hue for ten days during the Tet Offensive.

The Most Beautiful Truckstop in the World

After visiting the My Son monuments, brick towers built in a Hindu style by the Chams from the 10th to 14th centuries on a hill that gets pretty hot in summer, we headed by bus back through Da Nang to Hue. One member of the group complained of being hungry, and pretty soon we had a fullscale turista insurgency on our hands, so the bus pulled off near Lang Co Beach into a roadside truckstop. Fresh seafood was cooked to order and cold beers and Cokes were had for a slight markup on the regular in-town price. What I didn't expect was to have this incredibly scenic view out the back of the Tam Giang Lagoon, a large shallow estuary between Hue and the beach. Pictured here is an ideal family Christmas photo. Now if I can only get around to sending out the cards...

The light was just perfect, making everything sparkle in the late afternoon just after a thundershower had passed.

We Love Hoi An

This past weekend we traveled to Hoi An for the first weekend trip. Hoi An is this sixteenth century trading port where Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese all lived together and had raucous parties all night long. This picture is taken from one of many tourist shops - the towns entire economy appears to be about beach resorts, silk pajamas, and late night clubs.






Hoi An is also known for its lanterns. Its one of those weird things that started here back about ten years ago, maybe one shop that made lanterns the old-fashioned way, that has mushroomed into a nation-wide phenomenon. Every backpacker joint and tourist shop from Hanoi to Saigon now sells these lanterns. They are like beacons attracting all manner of scantily clad tourist to buy some statues or order a cafe sua da (ice milk coffee).




Yep, Hoi An brings out the best in tourists. There was a full-moon festival when we went, and the students hooked up with a few Vietnamese pop stars and spent the evening at the beach with Vicky returning to show an autographed poster of the main pop icon. Scuppy, Hong Anh and I opted for more staid entertainment. We rode swan boats and wandered among the carnival.

This picture is for the grandparents reading this and Scuppy's many admirers...

It's this pretty, really. I shot this at 5:15 am walking across the river from our hotel to the main downtown market.

The Green Zone in 1966 ... Danang

This past weekend we stopped off in Danang at the former US military headquarters for I Corps that is now a divisional headquarters for the VN army and has a military museum. Visiting military museums tend to all fall into the same pattern of the long narrative of resistance against foreign agression, but I nevertheless think its important to show the students some of the hardware to get a sense of just how different this place was in 1965 with thousands of helicopters and hundreds of thousands of Americans moving about. I snapped this picture of Vietnamese kids dressed in their patriotic red scarves (elementary school uniforms) crawling around on the remarkably well-preserved equipment.

The other detail that often gets lost on students is the ordnance that the United States dropped on Vietnam. Its impressive just to get a sight of some of the larger bunker busters and to think how many millions of tons of sucvh weapons fell from the sky. A friend here told me that after the war, people began mining unexploded ordnance for scrap. The metal used is of such high quality that it has significant value as scrap. A bomb like this, once defused and cut apart, might sell for four or five hundred dollars as scrap. I think this story, scrapping bombs for cash, is perhaps even more incredible.