There are some areas of Vietnam where development is exploding, and then there is Quang Ngai. A beautiful province with mountains to the west and the East Sea to the (you guessed it) east, Quang Ngai is still over 80% rural, quite poor and with no tourism to speak of. There are a few industrial projects, and downtown Quang Ngai is bustling, but for most people in the province, life goes on much as it did ten or twenty years ago.
Quang Ngai, located south of Hoi An in central Vietnam, is best known as the site of the My Lai massacre, a particularly nasty example of American soldiers out of control and killing every person they could find. These days, according to the members of the provincial People’s Committee I spent a few days with this week, My Lai is a local symbol of how to turn hatred into something positive, an example of how evil can be transformed over time into inspiration for peace.
How this works, I don’t exactly know, but it’s a part of Vietnamese culture that I, like many Americans, find particularly appealing. I’ve spent a lot of time in Vietnam over the past five years, and not one person has accosted me with accusations of coming from a country that perpetuated My Lai and countless other less well-known horrors, including drowning the province in Agent Orange.
I’ve also worked in North Africa, where the situation is a bit different. Me: “Why do you hate that guy so much?” Friend: “His uncle killed my uncle.” Me: “Oh, that’s awful! When did that happen?” Friend: “Two hundred years ago, give or take a couple of decades.”
In addition to historic sites that, whatever the local impression is, most foreign tourists (myself included) find painful and agonizing, Quang Ngai has miles of beautiful beaches (no beach hotels, though), lovely rice fields stretching across the coastal plain to the low mountains, roads that run west up into the temperate plateau of Kon Tum province and people that, even by the standards of Vietnam, I find extremely friendly.
There are also an awful lot of disabled people in Quang Ngai. More than in other provinces, as a percentage of the population? I’m not sure, but the East Meets West program that works with the disabled has found thousands of adults and children suffering from a variety of disabling conditions, from cerebral palsy to limb deformities, mental illness and impairments of vision, hearing and mobility of hands and feet. There is also a catch-all category called “strange behavior,” which covers a lot of things (and one would assume could also be used to include many residents of San Francisco, my adopted home town, where every day is Halloween).
Disabled kids in Vietnam , most of the time, are just kept in the home – forever. They don’t go to school, they don’t get out very much, and they get virtually no help. Our program in one way is pretty simple: We surveyed all the disabled people in Quang Ngai, did a needs assessment for each one, and are in the process of getting them the help they need. Some need corrective surgery, others need various kinds of physical therapy, others need employment and a lot of the kids just need to go to school.
One young woman named Que is partially paralyzed on left side. Her fingers curled into her palm, making her hand useless, and her arm pulled tight over her body. She went to school for a few years, but dropped out in primary school. For the past 15 years or so, she has basically sat in her parents’ home with little to do, and no idea how to access any help. East Meets West paid for corrective surgery, giving her functionality in her hand and improving mobility in her leg and arm, and then found her an internship as a seamstress with a local woman who owns a small shop not far from her house. For the first time in many years, she has something to look forward to every day, she feels like a productive member of society and she has a reason to leave her house.
When I asked her mother why, before East Meets West came along, she did not find help for her daughter, she replied that she had no idea that any help was available. Que came to the attention of East Meet West thanks to a network of community health workers we are training as part of this program. To date, we have trained over 300 of these workers just in two districts of Quang Ngai. They serve the essential function of finding people with disabilities, training the families on how best to care for them, and providing information on the resources for help that are available.
I came away from this monitoring trip with a profound appreciation for how community networks are an essential part of affordable large-scale solutions to addressing community needs.
I also tried some local specialties –after five years of work in Vietnam, I am constantly surprised by food items never before encountered. One is a fried spring roll filled only with corn, eaten wrapped in rice paper, herbs and dipped in spicy fish sauce. The other is a home-brewed liquor known locally as nep than – “black spirits.” It’s an unfiltered rice alcohol, thick and gritty and reddish in color. It takes a bit of getting used to, but I found it, well, intoxicating.
And can I talk about chicken for one minute? I don’t know how I will ever go back to eating American chicken, with those giant inflated breasts that taste of salt water and refrigerated air. The local chicken in Quang Ngai, as in many places in Vietnam, is chewy, dark and savory. Every part of the bird is served, except the feathers – on your plate you might get both head and feet. I will forever grateful to my Vietnamese hosts, colleagues and friends for the opportunity to make amends for what happened during the American war, help a few people, and experience the splendid variety of local life in places like Quang Ngai.