I'm sorry it's been a while since my last post. Things have been pretty busy the last few days. On Sunday, we went to Ha Long Bay, which was further away than I thought but worth the drive. It was also nice to see some of the country after being only in Hanoi since arriving. Ha Long is a magnificent site, although it's very touristy and we visited on an overcast day. I think I put links to a couple of stock photos of it in my last post. We took a boat to an island in the bay that has two large caves. One of the caves was discovered many centuries ago and has long been used as a meditation spot for Buddhist ascetics. The other cave was only discovered in the 1980s, and the inside is a riot of gigantic stalagmites and stalagtites, very much like Mammoth Cave or Carlsbad Caverns.
We made it back from Ha Long in the nick of time to catch the train from Hanoi to Hue. Forget any romantic ideas you may have about a train ride through the Vietnamese countryside. The train is more like "adventure" travel. Six people (and their luggage, which in our case includes several bags of video gear) share a sleeper cabin roughly seven feet square and 9 feet high. It smells. The toilet is a squatter that dumps directly onto the tracks. And to top it off, the loud French tourists in the cabin next to us were blissfully ignoring the no smoking signs. "Ugly Americans," indeed. More like "Les Franciase betes."
It probably goes without saying that I didn't sleep much on the train, and I got out of bed at 5 am and stared out the window at the countryside for three more hours until we arrived at Hue. Oh, I forgot, the loudspeaker on the train was playing a loop of traditional Vietnamese music, Asian pop, and historical propganda lessons in Vietnamese, French, and English. It turned of at 10 pm and turned back on at 7 am. I presume that if we had taken a day trip instead of an overnight, we would have been listening to it the whole time...(shudder).
Hue is very hot, but it's much more dry than Hanoi. It's also cleaner, slower, and the people friendlier. We stumbled around town yesterday looking for the office of Dr. Nguyen Viet Nhan and finally found it after quite a lot of sweat and sun. Since some of you may still be unclear on what I'm doing here, maybe I should take a minute to explain. Dr. Nhan is a professor at Hue Medical College. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, he runs the OGCDC, the Office of Genetic Counseling for Disabled Children. The OGCDC runs a wide range of services for poor children in Hue and in the central Vietnam region. At the most important level, this involves raising money and coordinating microloans to poor families so that children with genetic malformities (especially cardiac problems) and can have life-saving surgeries. But the center also runs a number of coordinated charities to provide services and work to disabled people as well. We are here to document the work of his office and, where relevant, connect the issue to the persistent problem of ecological and genetic damage caused by the lasting effects of Agent Orange use in the war. For the conservative among you, don't panic; we're not making an anti-American film. We're just trying to document how the war reverberates to the present day here and trying to provide a tool for reconciliation. More practically, we hope to find film festival and/or broadcast outlets for the film, as well as distribute it to veterans' groups and Vietnamese cultural organization in the US, perhaps raising funds for the OGCDC in the process. The trip as a whole was funded by a grant by the Asia Network division of the Freeman Foundation, though that grant only funded one faculty member (Steven). So my funding was actually provided by a summer research grant from the college...for which I am quite grateful. The students are doing research in their respective fields that will supplement and support the film work. For example, two of the business students are researching the OGCDC's microloan program, while someone from Earth and Environmental Science is studying the long-term effects of dioxin on the local environment.
We started the real work on the film today, visiting the Hope Shop in Hue City (the old walled city center across the river from our hotel). This is one of the charities coordinated through the OGCDC. It's a place where young people (roughly 16-30) with a breadth of disabilities...physical, mental, blind, and deaf...make a variety of handicrafts for tourist trade. If this sounds like forced labor, trust me, it isn't. It's an opportunity for these people to earn a living and live in a welcoming community in a society that has almost no services at all for the disabled. I was reminded of Lion's Camp, a camp in Texas for disabled children that Amara and I worked at several summers in college. It was quite moving to see what Hope Shop does for these people. Funny story, we got into a conversation with some of the deaf people there, and I was able to hold a semi-competent conversation. You see, after four years of Lion's Camp, I was once a passable signer, though I'm 13 years rusty. But ASL, with some obvious modifications, is essentially a universal sign system. So the easiest people for me to communicate with in Vietnam are the deaf. Go figure.
Then in the afternoon we visited a pagoda where the nuns run an orphanage that includes many disabled children. The nuns run a school for the children in the pagoda, and the OGCDC sponsors special classes for those with disabilities. We were able to interview the abbess, but there was some construction going on in the background that may make the audio very difficult to use. Despite that problem, we got some great footage, and it was exhilirating to be working on something after so long. I've been teaching video production for ages, but it's been years since I actually worked on a project of my own. I'm very much looking forward to the next two weeks in Hue, shooting footage, finding the golden moments, starting to edit in my head in preparation for the actual editing process once we get home.
Internet access here is a little dodgy. Both of the computers in the hotel have intermittent access. I'm going to try to find an internet cafe nearby so that I can keep up with email, uploading pictures, and the blog. Speaking of pictures, I still can't figure out how to add pictures to the blog posts. So if you're interested in seeing the pictures, just email me at sminnis@vwc.edu, and I'll send you a "view pictures" invite for the site I've been using to upload them. Just don't be too shocked if it takes me a while to get back to you. And don't forget that I'm 11 hours ahead of EST.
Best wishes,
Stu
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