Vietnam - Week 2

Our second week in Vietnam was quite an adventure! On Sunday night, after being at Thanh Ba all day, we all piled in a bus (one of our main modes of transportation while we there) and drove to the train station, where we took an overnight train to Sapa. This was another new experience for me - I've never riddern in a sleeper train car before! Really, they shouldn't call them that, because I don't think I slept much. The train lurched around and stopped and started all night long. We left around 9 PM and when we got there it was about 5 AM. Then we took another bus to the town of Sapa. Sapa is in the very northern end of Vietnam, about 30 miles from China. I was told that you can usually see China from there, because Sapa is way up in the mountains. But it was unseasonably cold there this year, and it was so incredibly foggy the whole time we were there that you couldn't really see more than several yards in front of you. The city of Sapa was very tourist-oriented, and the look of it seemed almost Europen to me.





Sapa, and the mountains of northern Vietnam, are where the indigenous people live - a lot of them migrated from China, Mongolia, etc. hundreds of years ago. They are the Hmong and other tribes, and they are now the ethnic minority in Vietnam, and they are very discriminated against. Again, these children are normally not allowed to go to school, so COPI gives them scholarships and help set up a school for them to attend. It's very interesting there. The indigenous people live in very primitive conditions in small villages outside Sapa, but they come into the city or wait for the tourists to come to their villages so they can sell their handiwork. Besides farming, that is how they make their living. There was a whole group of little girls waiting for us when we got to our hotel. They followed us around the city for hours, trying to get us to buy the things that they had made. And they make everything - jewelry, handbags, blankets, wall hangings, scarves, etc. A lot of it is hand embroidered and hand-dyed with dye from the indigo plant. It's all very pretty.





The market in Sapa. They had lots of crazy things (can you see the dead chickens?) like chopped up cow and pig parts, and bottles of "healing" wine with snakes, scorpions, and lizards in them. They also had lots of cool stuff, like Pashmina scarves and handmade blankets and pillowcaes.

We went on a trek to two of the native villages. The government had paved sidewalks put in the villages a couple of years ago so that tourists could go on these treks and the villagers could have a little industry. They surrounded our bus the minute we pulled up, and walked with us all over the villages for a couple of hours, in hopes that we would buy things from them at the end of the trip. It was all women in the group of villagers that were walking with us, and one of them would latch on to one of us and walk with us the whole time, speakingin perfect English that they have learned from all the tourists coming through. What I didn't realize was that that person then felt that you were obligated to buy something from them at the end. Well, I didn't end up buying anything from my little friend, because the lady next to her had stuff that I liked more. I felt bad, especially after she followed me around and yelled at me for about 10 minutes after that! Here she is:




And a picture of what their housing looks like. It's basically just some wooden boards/planks thrown together with a tin roof and a dirt floor. They build a fire in a fire pit inside the house to keep warm, while pigs and chickens are running in and out all the time. Most of them are rice farmers as well. Here is a picture of what their rice fields look like. The hills are all terraced for their rice paddies.



The next day we did a clinic in Sapa, at a boarding school for the indigenous children that COPI supports. They were lined up and waiting for us at the gate to their school, and all along the entrance. They clapped for us as we walked in, all the way through the last person that made it in. They were so grateful to have us there. We probably saw over 300 children that day, and we were there for about 12 hours.





The next day we had another clinic, at another school in Sapa. It was in a pretty remote little village, which we actually had to trek into on foot after quite a long and nauseating drive in a van. I was actually shocked when we made it back to our hotel in one piece. The combination of the lunatic Vietnam drivers, plus the extremely narrow mountain roads with cliffs plunging down the sides, and the incredibly thick fog made it pretty much the scariest ride of my life. Way scarier than any amusement park ride, because at least on those you know you can't actually get hurt. Anyway, we had to trek over this rickety little bridge, up this hill on a muddy, swampy, unpaved road to the school and back. I was pretty much covered with mud when we got back. Oh, I'm also attaching a picture here of what our dental clinic looked like that day. Pretty scary.




Anyway, once we survived the van ride back and cleaned all the mud off ourselves as best we could, we drove back to the train station and took another all night train, this time to Hanoi. Hanoi is the capital, and it was a fun place to spend a day. I did a lot of shopping there. COPI supports a store there were we all bought a lot of stuff. They give women in the small villages micro loans to have some start up capital to make more of their handiwork, and then they can sell it in the store for fair trade prices. It was a little more expensive than most of the stuff you could buy there, but definitely worth it for the cause. Most things in Vietnam were ridiculously cheap.



We also had the opportunity in Hanoi to visit a leper colony. Contrary to popular belief, leprosy is actually very hard to catch from other people. However, the government forces these people to live in isolation, and not only the lepers, but their children and grandchildren, who are completely disease free. Only the elderly in this colony have leprosy, but their descendents are completely ostracized as well. The children are not allowed to attend school, and the are hardly even allowed to leave the colony. The government "provides" them with food and medication, but once you visit there you can see that these are completely inadequate. Also, the government is mostly corrupt, so all the food, medications, etc. that we brought the people had to be handed out one by one directly from us to them. The government representative who just happened to show up on the day that we were there would have liked to take them and "distribute" them to the people, but past experience has shown that the people never end up getting anything that way. The government or who ever happens to be in charge will take and sell whatever they can get. This was another hard thing to see - these adorable children who are completely normal in every way having to live in isolation, and the older people suffering from leprosy, losing limbs and extremities because they aren't getting their medication often enough.







We were able to donate some money while we were there to give the children scholarships to go to school. Here I am with the little boy I gave a scholarship to, and his sister (I think?)



This is getting to be quite a long post...I think I'll split it up some more to give all you readers a break. (All 4 of you...)