The clam club at Long Hoa 
Rice field at Long Hoa CommuneThis past Tuesday and Wednesday our group had our first of our many excursions. For this trip we went to the Long Hoa commune, a destination which required a 3 hour bus ride followed by a ride across the river on a wooden, rainbow painted boat. Visiting Long Hoa was our first real opportunity to spend some time in the rural areas of Vietnam. While we spent the night in a nearby city, both days were spent entirely in the Commune, visiting farms and exploring the project that’s currently in affect. Part of the commune is involved in a project sponsored by Oxfam and the McKnight Foundation to bring sustainable and integrated farming practices to the farmers. Much different from any international traveling I’d done before, the government had us fill out paperwork with our name and birthday to record our visit to the Island.
Upon arriving we had out first interaction with government members and had an opportunity to talk with (via translator) a couple members of the people's council and people's committee as well as the head of the province’s environment and natural resources department. Continuing to follow government regulations, these local officials were also required to be with us during our entire visit. Unsurprisingly all officials were all men, which made for a very interesting dynamic at lunch time when we all sat on the floor of a farmer's home, then in button ups and dress pants and us in muddy field clothes. According to our academic director, we all officially become Mekong Delta researchers at lunch those two days since we survived our first experience with rice wine. Rice wine actually isn’t wine at all, but similar to a bad vodka. It's tradition in the rural Mekong villages to have at least one bottle of rice wine for shot taking during the meal. The men didn't think twice about passing along the shots to all of us and by the end of the meal I was about 8 deep and had probably eaten my weight in rice. Luckily the rice wine's alcohol content wasn't so awful so none of us were drunk, but the taste was horrible. Of course there was the option to refuse a rice wine shot, but it’s considered an insult. And despite all the awfulness of drinking the rice wine we noticed that we really were able to develop a closer relationship with the officials without even speaking the same language.
Besides local lunches we spent a good portion of our time visiting homes, rice fields and fish ponds. Being able to interview farmers was really interesting so as to understand their mentalities as to what are good farming practices, ones that are healthy and yet profitable. it's difficult for healthy farming practices to really be important, rather it's sustainable ones that farmers are discovering are the way to being more profitable. This means that farmers might be planting organic rice, yet still treating it daily with a store bought pesticide. Instead, the project is trying to help farmers integrate their crops, using the nutrients from one initiative to feed another, thus eliminating the use of pesticides. Our trip to Long Hoa was really only an introduction to this issue and we’ll be exploring it more during our My Khanh Village study this weekend.
On Wednesday we went out on a boat to the clamming club that was started a few years ago. The clamming club is a cooperative regulated by the government, but unlike earlier cooperatives is actually managed from the bottom up so proportionality it ensures that every farmer is getting his fair share. The clamming club has to be one of the coolest things I've seen. It's just a huge expanse of mud that during high tide is completely covered. Fingerling clams are put in the mud and after they’ve been given the appropriate time to grow they’re harvested. We had to climb off the boat and go through knee-high water to get on the mud. Getting back into the boat proved to be a little more difficult because as we were walking back through the water, we saw a storm literally moving right toward us, which beat us to the boat and go us completely soaked. The situation though was so incredible we couldn’t be upset.
Being in the homes and talking with the families gave us a good look at gender roles too. While in Can Tho there are definite signs of shared gender roles, the rural women certainly carry more of the role of housewife in how they are treated, although they work in the fields as well. For example, in one home we sat at the table with two men in the household, while the wife sat in the other room just listening in. When we tried to directly ask her a question, she was very shy and even reluctant to sit with us at the table. In the home where we ate lunch the wife didn't even join us until halfway through the meal on the second day (we ate at the same home both days). The project at Long Hoa is also looking to address this issue by attempting to empower the women and encourage them to take a more active role. As we discovered though, the project is really only focused in a few households so it was difficult to even gauge the amount of success the project had in empowering women.
Our visit to Long Hoa also marked our first motorbike ride. An experience that was really fun and at the same time so scary! I'm not sure what's worse--traffic filled city streets with lots of fast moving vehicles or dirt/concrete paths and no traffic to prevent an speed limit? With the rain the commune received on the two days, everything was sooo muddy. When we walked to the fish hatchery on the island I think I took a good portion of the mud in the field back with me on my Keens, which also left me with some pretty sweet tan lines on my feet. Ohh well, all in a day’s work as a Mekong Delta researcher!
No comments:
Post a Comment