Au Revoir Hue!

So long, Hue, it was good to know ya! Most of the student have now left. They left in batches beginning with four or five who took off early on Saturday and continuing in stages through Monday. The only one remaining is Andrew who will leave from Danang after Hong Anh and I leave Hue at 2pm. To all of you who followed this blog, to the parents who supported the students going on this trip, to Mely, Richard and the staff at UCR Summer Sessions, and especially to my lovely wife Hong Anh and our trooper daughter Scuppy, a big thank you and Tam Biet!

Farewell Party

We said our final farewells to each other and the teachers and staff at Hue University this evening. Scuppy here poses with Amy and Daisy in their ao dai's. Most of the women in the group showed up in ao dai's, making for an evening with lots of color.








It was so colorful, everybody was taking pictures of everybody.












Professor Huy poses with Andrew, Tan our driver (back left), Loc (back center), and Andrew's two martial arts instructors Loc and Ngoc (back right).











(Left) David, My, Aunt Hue, and Huong. (Right) John and Gini.















Hong Anh pulls up for a pic with Ngoc, Hue and Anna.

Final Presentations

Pictured here are most of the student presentations. For some reason I missed getting a shot of Anna Nguyen's, but she did a very nice summary of her work at Duc Son Orphanage playing with the kids on that program. The PHO poster below was not an ad for noodle soup but was Amy and Daisy's poster of their work on public health outreach through their visits and study of the free public clinics established throughout Vietnam, especially around Hue. Giosep surprised us all by breaking out with a Christian rock song in Vietnamese. Andrew presented a summary of his research and practice of Vietnamese traditional martial arts, while Connie and Miguel presented ideas from their paper on how the past is remembered in Hue. Collin entertained us with a brief tour of American nationbuilding efforts in Vietnam's past after John and Hue gave us an exciting, musical powerpoint on Hue's special cuisine. Gini closed out the affair with four very tranquil yet exciting songs that she learned to play on the dan bau instrument pictured here. We concluded the day with an ice cream party at one of the biggest cafes in Hue that serves this amazing array of French style ice cream and sorbet. The Vietnamese language teachers Huy, Huong, Phuong and Ngoc joined us.

Agent Orange Survivors and Phuoc Tich Village

Today we headed into a different section of the hill country to visit a village where some 10% of its children suffer from dioxin-related illnesses associated with the use of Agent Orange and other chemicals by the US during the war. The group as a whole contributed $150 plus another $50 in school supplies to this village for its ongoing efforts to assist families with dependents suffering from such serious illnesses as encephalitis and more workable conditions such as deformation of limbs where children and adults have their mental faculties and can often use their feet in lieu of deformed hands to draw, write, and get around. After meeting the village head, we stopped in at some of the houses to meet some of the families of those affected. It was somewhat ad-lib, arranging this trip, but I think it at least helped to show students the complications associated with long-term affects of the war on the environment and society as well as the difficulties associated with aid work and charities here.

Before returning to Hue, we stopped in for a stroll to a country village called Phuoc Tich where the locals are busy redeveloping the village as a production center for all kinds of traditional crafts such as pottery and ceramics once produced for sale in Hue's markets before 1950. Xuan Anh and David played games on the road while the students stopped in to try the traditional drug of choice for women called betel nut, a mild stimulant and pain killer that when chewed makes the lips and mouth turn bright bright red.

To Khe Sanh and Lao Bao

In the morning we headed inland from the coast towards the Lao border area called Lao Bao. It was from foot trails and jeep trails in Laos that most of the supplies and people came south along what was commonly called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. We stopped in the hills about halfway to visit one of the bunkers left as part of the observation system related to the McNamara Line. It provided a clear view of both the mountainous border region and the coast, and for this reason was repeatedly attacked by NLF and People's Army units.








Oh, here are some cadres traveling now down the HCM Trail! They're actually workers from an area factory recently built traveling on what is now the Ho Chi Minh transnational highway. The government is rapidly expanding the highway system to accomodate settlement and economic development in the highland areas. Hence the rapid transition from the old bomb-cratered countryside to row after row of rubber tree and the occassional factory scene.


From there we traveled on to what was once a highlands base and airstrips for US Marines at Khe Sanh. This base fell unders eige as part of the Tet Offensive in 1968, and the conintued resupply of the base by air allowed for the Marines to hold it until July 1968 when the fighting died down. It was shortly thereafter abandoned. We were very surprised and happy to find the old dirt airstrip used to land thousands of flights of military cargo is now being put to use as a coffee plantation. Vietnam is now one of the world's largest coffee producers, so again some nice signs that war is quickly fading into the past here. While here, Darin negotiated to buy up all of the US military dogtags that local farmers try to sell to tourists to make a little extra money. Over 75% of them are real, and once back in the States, Darin is going to send them on to his Congress Representative to have them forwarded on through the VA Hospital system to those soldiers' families.

Traveling to the DMZ

This Friday is the first day of three on the road north of Hue to the former border or "demilitarized zone" that once divided North and South Vietnam. For Friday, we traveled to visit to main sites, one the Nguyen era (1820 CE) citadel in Quang Tri that was the scene of the largest offensive in the war, the 1972 Easter Offensive, and then on to these tunnels just north of the DMZ where an entire village lived underground to avoid shelling from US ships just offshore. Before getting to Quang Tri we stopped at this shell of a former church that has been left as a reminder of the destructiveness of the war in this region. Especially from 1968-1973, the area suffered from some of the worst bombing and fighting of the entire war. Here Darin stands with a staff person, Loc, from Hue University.

The museum at Quang Tri had a lot of archival photographs such as this one depicting what the small city and old citadel, not much different from the area where we are staying now, was reduced to rubble after three months of terrible fighting, over 40,000 killed, and over 1,000 US bombing missions. The citadel was the center for this fighting, where the People's Army nearly succeeded in not only taking Quang Tri but also continuing their drive south to take Hue.

After a brief lunch in the town of Dong Ha, we continued north towards the invisible 17th Parallel that runs through the former DMZ. Just south of this line ran a line of bunkers and forts all the way from the coast 60 miles inland to the Lao border. It was often called the McNamara Line. It included a whole array of electronic and infra-red surveillance equipment for detecting movement across the area. Now a monument stands commemorating this spot at which many people died trying to cross into South Vietnam to fight the war. Andrew, Anna and Darin stand in front, looking very socialist realist.

From there we then arrived at the Hien Luong River where a lone bridge served as a kind of diplomatically protected connection point between north and south during most of the war. This was also where prisoners of war from both sides were frequently released in the prisoner exchanges that commenced in 1970 or 71.

Our last stop for the day was the fishing village of Vinh Moc just north of the river in the DMZ. Beginning in 1967, US Navy ships pounded this part of the northern coastline to prevent supplies and troops from making it to South Vietnam. So people responded by putting their entire village underground in a network of tunnels that included undeground toilets, hospitals, meeting rooms, and living quarters. Oh yeah, and the whole area is not rock but clay. They carved these tunnels all out of clay. Here the group poses at one of the entrances into the tunnels.

We descended into the tunnels over 200 feet under the surface with a local guide. I am pictured sitting in one of the small holes shooting off the main tunnel where a family of three would have lived. A few people got pretty freaked out by the tight conditions, but once we got used to the darkness, it wasn't too bad. Still, I don't think I'd want to spend a night in there, especially not if B52's were dropping bombs on top of me.

After a long sweaty day of war tourism, we finished our day where else but the beach, a beautiful beach just south of Vinh Moc. Anna, Andrew, Xuan Anh and I enjoyed the sand while the tour guide, the driver, and Mr. Loc walked on to some beachside restaurant stands down the way.

Week Four in Hue

Its been a relaxed middle week of the program as students have been focusing on their own independent study projects and reading before the end of the course. Here by the pool, Andrew Wilson and Gini Yoo pretend to be reading seriously from a textbook assigned for the morning lecture course and some article about the musical instrument Gini is studying here, dan bau. Andrew has been studying a local martial art form for his project.




Amy Le turned 19 last night, so Happy Birthday, Amy! Her sis Daisy produced a lovely birthday hat for her and the group arranged a cake. We ate at a 2-story, outdoor bamboo restaurant just a short walk from the hotel.
Amy and Daisy have been volunteering at a free medical clinic run by a very amazing local woman, Dr. Que (mentioned in an earlier post).











This week, John, Hue and Hong-Anh concluded their cooking course with Ms. Cuc at her garden restaurant inside the old city. Here they are posing upon completing the class. Hong-Anh took the course and discovered a few new dishes she can offer as part of her catering business in Riverside. Hue and John both claim they knew nothing about cooking before taking the class, and they plan on impressing their relatives when they visit them in the States, besides cooking delicous Vietnamese food for themselves.


This is really the calm before our final studying/touring storm as this week we are going into the history of the Second Indochina War and traveling from Friday to Sunday to visit the former demilitarized zone north of Hue and some places severely affected by the war. We'll also spend one evening at the beach for some rest.

Week Three in Hue - Visiting Nationalist Shrines

In the middle of one of the rainiest days I have ever experienced in Vietnam--it must have rained more than 5 inches in 24 hrs--we went ahead with our regularly scheduled city tour of two historic sites for Vietnamese nationalism. The first is a simple house in the city where Phan Boi Chau, a man from the generation before Ho Chi Minh and a founding member of the Vietnam Nationalist Party, lived under house arrest from 1925-1940. Will the true nerd please raise his or her hand? That's me, David, along with Hong-Anh and our baby in the hippy sling. The students quickly rushed through the rather plain room of mildewed photographs highighting important figures and moments in this man's life. I took a little more time and took pictures of mounted photographs I have not seen reproduced elsewhere. This much lesser known Vietnamese nationalist is I think a very interesting figure for his alternative vision of a modern Vietnam, one that local histories typically dismiss as just a stepping stone to the more revolutionary brand of nationalism envisioned by Ho Chi Minh. These days, with Vietnam's rapid opening up to commercial ventures and the rush to build industrial zones etc., I think Mr. Chau deserves some reassesment as a visionary of a very viable Vietnamese future.

After an hour there, we loaded back into the van and traveled across town through torrential downpours to a little village just beyond Hue with one of many little homes in Vietnam where Ho Chi Minh stayed as a youth while he followed his dad around with his brother. Mr. Cung, that was Ho's given first name, lived in a little thatch house with his dad and brother from 1906-08 while he attended the elite National Academy (same highschool as Ngo Dinh Diem). Young Mr. Cung was expelled after helping organize a protest of the crazy taxes imposed by the French on poor people at the time, so he moved south to Saigon and then as a ship's cook to Paris, London, New York, Moscow, Hong Kong, and thirty years later back to Hanoi where he became Vietnam's first President in 1954.

Hong-Anh poses for the last of these rain shots peaking out of the kitchen door from Ho Chi Minh's home for a few years. While I first thought such a place would be really special and important home because of its significant guest, I soon learned that Ho Chi Minh stayed in many homes, so there is a little bit of an effort to preserve all of them perhaps in the manner of the "George Washington slept here" homes and campsites one finds throughout the former 13 American colonies.

While both houses were certainly very simple, we all agreed that this house where HCM the boy stayed was one of the most comfortable and elegant in its simplicity, carefully maintained interior and traditional construction with the family altar of the house's current owner arranged in the middle of the room. Every piece of bamboo and thatch was carefully assembled by hand in age-old construction techniques rarely seen now even in the countryside.

Free Weekend in Hue

This weekend the group is enjoying the first of two "free" weekends. Folks are catching up on their independent projects, reading for Monday, going out on the town, and today just hanging out inside as its pouring rain. Saturday was the beach day it seems. From the hotel, it takes about 20 minutes by cab to get out to a quiet, peaceful beach. Shop owners have set up little shelters like this one that they rent to beach goers for about $1/hr. They also provide cold beer, fresh grilled squid or crab and other seafood, and inner tubes for floating around in the sea.

On Friday, a smaller detachment headed out in the morning to an orphanage run by a famous Buddhist nun at Duc Son Pagoda. Thich Co Minh Tam has been helping both orphaned and disadvantaged as well as disabled kids through her network of orphanages for over 45 years now. She started caring for sick and poor children before the end of the war in 1975 and has continued her work despite some resistance just after 1975 from the central government. That resistance has faded now, and she is growing full steam ahead, having also just started a series of Head Start programs for poor kids in the countryside so they can perform up to par with more advantaged kids when they enter first grade. Anna Nguyen is going to devote her project research time at Duc Son with these orphans. Some, such as this baby, suffer from illnesses related to exposure to dioxin while in the womb. Two generations now since the end of the war, and this byproduct of the chemicals sprayed on Vietnam's forests continues to affect prenatal development, especially in central Vietnam. Co Minh Tam says this child will receive a surgery to fix the cleft palate in another year when she is a little older.

Here is the cafeteria for the children. Children here get three square meals a day and before eating sing a kind of Buddhist blessing very similar to what you might expect in a Catholic or other faith-based school before every meal. We didn't stay for lunch but instead headed back to the hotel. The children seen here are the largest group at the orphanage ages 7-9. About one hundred children were orphaned when massive floods hit the area in 199. Flood waters reached to the second story of the pagoda and orphanage. Their parents brought them here then tried to go back and rescue others.

On Friday afternoon, Hong Anh, John Lam, Connie Chu and Hue Pham attended the first of four cooking classes at a nearby restaurant. Hue is focusing her independent project on the history of Hue's special dishes. Week Three is the second of our three "middle weeks" where are basically sticking around Hue, having classes, and working on projects. At the end of Week Four we'll head north to the former demilitarized zone and visit sites most heavily damaged by the bombing and fighting.

Snapshots of the Group