Today was an interesting day. On the agenda was a trip to visit three families who had been accepted for OGCDC microloans. We accompanied a representative of the staff to visit these three families out in the countryside to the southeast of Hue. In each case, as in our earlier rural trip, the families were remarkably poor. In one case, we had to hoof it around half a mile from the van because that's how far the house was from any road. All three families are basically subsistence farmers who try to pull in additional money by selling livestock.
One of the families was Catholic, and there seemed to be a significant Catholic presence in the area, with several churches and Christian shrines intermingled with the Buddhist ones. This goes back to my earlier observations about the similarities between religious Buddhism and Catholocism. This is a culture that has its roots in animism and ancenstor worship, later importing Buddhism and then Christianity (French, therefore Catholic, Christianity). The result is an interesting sycretism that seems to see no conflicts between the three. The Christian shrines are virtually indistinguishable from the Buddhist ones until you realize the statue is of Mary, not Amida Buddha, and there's a cross, not a swastika. (NOTE: Most of us are used to associating swastikas with the Nazis, but they stole it, in a really historically misguided reading of "Aryan" history, from the Buddhists. It has no racist or fascist connoations in Buddhism. The four branches represent the Four Noble Truths, and the eight lines represent the Eightfold Path. It's a little unnerving to see swastikas all over the place here, but you get used to it quickly.)
After another country lunch, this one far more agreeable than the last, we went to a ceremony at the local Party meeting hall, where the families were distributed their monies and some salutory gifts. It was quite touching, despite the presence of a large bust of Ho Chi Minh overseeing the procedings.
All of these official agenda items were great and provided lots of good footage, but the real fun came from three unplanned excursions. First, in between lunch and the ceremony, our hosts decided to take us to a nearby graveyard. "Graveyard" is nowhere close to an accurate description of this place. When you get to the center of it, as far as you can see in every direction are huge, elaborate tombs. They make the austere, gray western mausoleum look puny. We're talking giganitic, ornate, expensive tombs that wealthier families provide for their parents. They're a riot of color and baroque east Asian design. We got out to shoot some footage, because we'd been talking just last night about how we needed more "decorative" footage of distinctly Vietnamese subjects to use interstitially in the film. I swear, I could have shot in there for days. It was really remarkable.
After getting back in the van, we still had about half an hour to kill, so our host asked us if we wanted to go to the beach. We had no idea we were so close to the water, but in fact there was a beach less than a mile from the cemetery. We drove down and stepped out onto a beach nothing like any I'd ever seen before. It was not a tourist beach at all, although it easily could have been. The vista was tremendous, with the mountains reaching right to the seashore on the south and dramatic cloud formations all around us. There was a small bar/cafe on the beach, but the people there looked at us like we were the first white people they'd ever seen come there. We got more great footage of fishing boats, the clear ocean, even water buffalo on the beach. The Pacific water must have been around 80+ degrees, and it's a shame we couldn't go swimming. But it was a real unexpected treat.
The last little detour happened on the way back into Hue after the loan ceremony. Again on our "authentic Vietnam" footage kick, we decided to get some shots of people working the rice paddies, of which there were many down this one-lane road. We got out at one point and shot some good stuff, but everything was far away. So I ended up with lots of wide telephoto shots, which tend to look a little flat because of the planar distortion you get shooting long focal lengths. So Matt and I became obsessed with the idea of getting up close to someone tending the fields with a water buffalo and we drive on until we saw such a scene pretty close to the road. We stopped the van again and all got out. Matt and I walked down onto this dike between paddies and approached the man with the buffalo, which had by then climbed up onto the dike.
In a move Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) would have been proud of, we offered him money to take the buffalo back into the field so we could film it. I felt a little ethically odd about this but rationalized that it was only decorative B-roll. Matt did his best to convey to the man what we wanted and flashed a 10,000 VND note. That's only about 70 cents, but it's probably about a third of what this man makes in a day. The man seemed to get the general idea, so he took the money and led the cow back out into the flooded paddy. But he didn't hook up the plowish device, so the cow was just standing there in the field. That's when I took off my sandals and climbed in. So there I am, up to my knees in a flooded rice paddy that smelled like what it was, a refined mixture of stagnant water, mud, and cow dung. I'm holding a $4000 camera and hoping to God I don't trip. I'm getting some good shots, but I'm frustrated that we can't get the man to understand that we want a shot of the animal at work. Then the buffalo lowers its head a little and snorts at me. Keep in mind that this is no dairy cow. It's about 2/3 the size of rhino and has a set of horns that would make any person think twice. In its defense, this was probably the first time in its life that it had had a six foot white man walk up to it and point a camera in its face.
I start backing off slowly, still shooting. The farmer starts laughing. I'm sure he was thinking something like, "Stupid American, pays me 10,000 dong so my cow can kill him!" But there was no attack. Given the consistency of the mud, I'm pretty sure charging was as futile an option for him as running was for me. Instead, he made it back up to the dike and started walking away. We tried to get the man to understand that we wanted to get a shot of him working with the buffalo, but at that point the animal was walking off and the man started "chasing" after it, with Matt's money in his pocket. I supposed that's what we get for trying to set up a shot in a documentary. Really "authentic," huh? I imagine that right now that farmer is drinking on us and regailing his friends with his story about the ridiculous westerners he met today.
Several people in the group took pictures of this madness. I'll try to get one of them uploaded to my photo page sometime soon. In fact, I think that would make a heck of a great picture for the back of my business cards. What do you think?
Stu
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