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A HABITAT JOURNEY: HEADING FOR MY THO
May 22, 2012
By Ann Cooper and Larry Heinzerling
A Google photo search for the Vietnamese town of My Tho, in Tien Giang Province, yields scrumptious food pictures, serene river views and an occasional black and white reminder that war once scorched the earth in this region of the Mekong Delta.
One photo, below, labeled “Vietnam War, My Tho, Viet Cong Base,” is the kind of image that grew sadly familiar in Life magazine and on network news in the late 1960s. Behind an American solider burns the charred outline of a small building, possibly made of thatch, probably a Vietnamese family’s home. There’s no further explanation.
That building likely burned somewhere near where we will spend the next two weeks, with 15 other Habitat for Humanity volunteers, building two brick and mortar houses alongside the families that will live in them. It’s our fifth trip with Habitat’s Global Village program, our second as GV team leaders. Call us whacky, but building homes with strangers in far-off places is our idea of a great vacation. We choose to volunteer with Habitat because its model makes so much sense – the goal is a decent house, not a fancy one, and Habitat homeowners are required to invest their own money and labor to make it happen.
There is an extra dimension to this trip, at least for us as PHAM HUU THANH
Americans who grew up in the 1960s. We are from the generation that marched against the Vietnam War. We are also from the generation that went to fight the war in Vietnam. Whether we fought or marched, perhaps no bond holds us baby boomers more tightly than Vietnam and all the history, culture, and counterculture that surrounded it when we were young.
So, just imagine what it must have been like two months ago, when 22 Americans who served in the Vietnam War went back there on Habitat’s first-ever Vietnam Veterans Build team.
“The last time we were here, we were trying to kill them,” one of the veterans told Habitat, “and now we are building houses for them and helping them rebuild their lives.” The veterans’ trip, cathartic and deeply emotional, was covered on Vietnamese TV. You can read about it on the veterans blog and in this Habitat story.
PHAM KIM LONG
Thoughts of the war receded a couple of weeks ago, though, when we received photos and information about the families we will build with. The fathers of both families were children during the war: Pham Huu Thanh, born in 1959, and Pham Kim Long, born in 1963. Both have the same “career” listing: “odd jobs.” Both are married with children, have monthly incomes below what we just spent on dinner for four at our local taqueria, and yet each family has managed to save about $1,000 toward the cost of their houses. We fly to Vietnam Wednesday night (May 23), greet the rest of our team on Sunday, then go to My Tho the next day to start work. We'll report more after we get there.
FROM THATCH, TO WOOD, TO BRICKS -- a 30-YEAR ODYSSEY
May 29, 2012
By Ann Cooper
Photos: Pauline Eiferman and Larry Heinzerling
It’s just two months since Day Nguyen and Thanh Pham learned they would get a new home in their hamlet of Dien Loi, a half hour outside the Mekong Delta city of My Tho, Vietnam. And today, half of our team joined their family to start building that home of bricks and mortar.
Not a moment too soon, it turns out. Last week, Habitat Vietnam construction supervisors decided the old Nguyen-Pham home was so precarious that they needed to tear it down, even before the new house got started. Day and Thanh have lived in Dien Loi more than 30 years. They raised four children in a house with thatch walls and roof. They scrimped for years, buying wood planks when they could afford it, and stockpiling them until, in 2006, there was enough wood to replace the thatch walls.
But the wood was cheap, and within a few years it was rotting. Hence, last week’s decision to condemn the house to the scrap heap. Day, Thanh, and two children who still live with them are camping out with neighbors while we spend the next two weeks working with them to build the family’s new brick home.The process for selecting families eligible for Habitat for Humanity homes in Vietnam is very top down, with a big role played by local governments. When Habitat wants to build in a province, it first must approach officials at the provincial level (Tien Giang, in this case). Those officials then talk to officials at the district level, who in turn talk to officials at the commune level, who then survey hamlets like Dien Loi, looking for families most in need of an upgrade to a decent house.
The bureaucratic control at every level sounds like a hallmark of communism. But the embrace of a private, U.S.-based organization like Habitat, which has built over 8,000 houses here in the past decade, is a departure from communist tradition – just as Vietnam’s bustling, entrepreneurial economy departs from the stagnant Soviet command economic model.
In the case of Day Nguyen and Thanh Pham, Dien Loi officials identified them as one of the most destitute families in the hamlet. Habitat came in to survey their house. The verdict: it was most worthy of replacement.
The family needed two more things: about $600 to help pay for the bricks, sand, cement and other materials needed; and a significant investment in sweat
equity.
DAY NGUYEN
Money for the materials came in part from savings from Day’s weaving business. She pays about $10 for fabric scraps, cut into long strips, which she can weave into 100 small mats – about the size of a mat for a bathroom or front door. She sells about 100 mats a month, for $25 – or a profit of $15.
The sweat equity requirement has been even easier to meet. Day and Thanh’s three adult sons were all on the work site with us today. One son, Minh, 33, is a mason. He and his brothers spent the day encasing rebar columns in concrete, to form the posts that will reinforce the brick walls of their parents’ new home. We’ll start building those walls tomorrow.
Photos:
Day Nguyen with one of her mats, by Pauline Eiferman.
The old thatch home of Long Pham and Trong Nguyen, the other family we are building with, sits beside the brick walls going up on their new home, by Larry Heinzerling.
WAR MEMORIES LINGER, BUT VIETNAM MOVES ON
June 3, 2012
By Larry Heinzerling
Habitat for Humanity recommends that its volunteers avoid talking about the war while working in Vietnam, but for a certain generation of Americans -- whether you protested in the streets or fought in the jungle -- it’s impossible to escape what happened here.
Coincidentally, June 8, the last day of our team’s build outside My Tho, will mark the 40th anniversary of the day Associated Press (AP) photographer Nick Ut, himself Vietnamese, captured the wrenching image of a young, naked girl, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, fleeing a South Vietnamese napalm attack on the village of Trang Bang. The photo, one of the most haunting, iconic images made during the long conflict, ran on newspaper front pages and on television around the world. And it won Nick Ut a Pulitzer Prize. (See AP story on the anniversary here)
SINH LONG STUDYING
In Ho Chi Minh City, where our team initially gathered this week, and which everyone but officialdom still calls Saigon, there is a two-story War Remnants Museum, housed in the former U.S. Information Agency building. It’s a collection of horrors and tales of American and South Vietnamese atrocities, not so unlike those revealed of more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The section on Agent Orange and its legacy of grotesque deformities is particularly hard to look at. But the reminders of the war come in more subtle ways, too. A stooped old man, curious about our work building a new home for Pham Kim Long and his family outside My Tho, asks about my age.
My immediate thought: Is he truly curious about the age of an overweight, graying American hauling a cart of cement to the work site? Or does he wonder whether I am old enough to have come here at a younger age to wage war against his people? I tell him I’m 66, and ask his age, which turns out to be 75. I give him two thumbs up and tell him to “keep going.” I get a smile. (My only previous visit to Vietnam was in 1993 to open an AP bureau in Hanoi and resume coverage of the country following AP’s expulsion at the end of the war.) TOM KELLER AND SINH
Then there is Sinh, Long’s only son, a delightful, 18-year-old high school senior with a smile as broad as Texas. He works beside us, but takes occasional breaks from the scaffolding to study for an upcoming chemistry test. Sinh sees no irony whatsoever in wearing a baseball cap with “U.S. Army” emblazoned on the front. A friend of his wears shorts that are similarly branded. Both are among the 60 percent of the Vietnamese population born after the war with no memory of what occurred. From our limited range of vision, Vietnam looks prosperous and growing, and it welcomes Americans and others with warm hospitality. Millions have been lifted economically by the communist government’s adoption of market-oriented reforms. But there is still widespread poverty, just under 30 percent of the population, and more Habitat teams are needed here to help families replace the many dilapidated homes of thatch or wood or metal scraps that leak and flood in the monsoons.
XUAN NGO
Perhaps the best way to describe the state of mind is the reaction of Xuan Ngo, or “Annie,” our cheerful, efficient and enthusiastic Habitat Volunteer Coordinator. She also worked with the team of U.S. Veterans, a first for Habitat, which preceded our group. Vietnam Television produced an English report for its channel for expatriates on the veteran group. Here’s Annie’s reaction, in a note to her former team members:
“Dear Ken, Karen and all my team members,
“Tonight 3rd-May -2012, 9:15 PM, my Parents and me were waiting for the show on VTV4 about our team build trip.
“We could not stop crying while watching the show - even just watched by computer because my TV channel at home does not have connection to VTV 4,
“It was so touching to us, now it is so important to show more details about my job to my Parents and help them understand why their daughter- little princess at home - worked so hard for Habitat for Humanity & travel with Volunteers all the time, live such a simple life and forget herself for her job because she found the meaningful things of her life thru her job! I am glad that I have this opportunity to show my Parents what I have done during last 30 months with Habitat VN.
“Seeing everyone, brought me tears and miss everyone, thank you again for come back to help us, and please forget the past, the war is over, we are all looking forwards to the better life for the better future, and thank you for your kindly heart to help poor people.
“Take good care of yourselves and hope to see you next year for build trip again, keep in touch please, have a nice day to everyone.
“Xuan Ngo”
If that doesn’t make you want to sign up for a Habitat for Humanity build in Vietnam, what will?
Photos: Sinh Long and Sinh Long with Tom Keller, by Christine Yuan
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IN THE MY THO SUBURBS: LUSH AND COMMUNAL
June 5
By Ann Cooper
Blink at the wrong instant and you will miss the entrance to Dien Loi hamlet, where we are building a new home with the family of Thanh Pham.
ENTERING DIEN LOI
Our landmark for where to stop each morning is the cafe with two blue umbrellas promoting Tan Bao brand coffee. Of course, there are dozens of other coffeehouses with Tan Bao umbrellas, where residents of Tien Giang province, the larger district where we are working, start the day or stop by for a pick-me-up. The coffeehouses here are just as much a social center as Starbucks in the U.S., but with far more reasonable prices (about 50 cents for a rich iced Vietnamese coffee and condensed milk), and no laptops or New York Times. Dien Loi is neither urban nor rural. Maybe that makes it suburban, but it’s not like any suburbia any of us has experienced.
About 340 families live in the hamlet. When we enter it, we pass under a sign, held up by two tiled posts, announcing the Vanantu pagoda. It’s a small, tidy Buddhist center about half a mile down the “road” – the road being a concrete sidewalk, perhaps four feet wide, navigable on foot, bicycle or motorcycle.
Once under the archway, you are clearly not in Kansas any more – or New York, Sydney, Paris, Dubai, Singapore, Beijing, or any of the other cities that our Habitat team members call home.
One of our first landmarks is the chicken feather place. It’s just on the left, a black net tent with a deep bed of white feathers. At first we thought the owner ran a chicken plucking business, but now we think he’s a middleman of some sort. We see him emptying bags of feathers, turning them, airing them, drying them – well, frankly, we’re not really sure what he’s doing with them, but he’s very busy, several times a day, moving those feathers around. If you see him outside the tent, shirtless, there are always a few clinging to his back.
Just after the feather tent is a small brick house with a tiny yard where large roosters are penned in under domed baskets. We assumed they were raised
A TYPICAL HAMLET ROAD
for food, until we noticed how carefully the men who own them bathe the birds – and how very large they are. These are fighting cocks, a favorite sport here. Down the way a bit on the right is a little burial ground. Some graves are marked with ceramic domes, others with large, tiled platforms. Fresh fruit and incense are always laid out, This mini-cemetery is the neighborhood’s largest concentration of graves, but in many, maybe most of the yards here, families live side by side with the remains of relatives, buried right next to the house.About 200 yards from the hamlet entrance, we reach the Phams’ house. The landscape all around is claustrophobic, thick with coconut palms, mango, durian, and banana trees that grow in a jumble throughout the neighborhood. Some afternoons, our hosts take machetes to a coconut pile and give us each a fat green orb, the top cut open to allow a straw to draw out the delicious milk inside.
Across this landscape, hammocks are strung between trees and used for midday rest when the heat and humidity are too much for any other activity. Piles of coconut husks rot everywhere – in yards, in fields, in the network of ditches that carry away monsoon overflow. Most houses have a motley menagerie running loose in the yard: always a dog or two, sometimes a scrawny cat, almost certainly a collection of ducks or chickens.
BACKYARD MAUSOLEUM
Though it’s home to more than a thousand people, Dien Loi’s lush (but slightly overripe) landscape gives off a sense that, were the residents to leave for just a few weeks, the vegetation would claim property rights, overrunning the houses and strangling the electric wires that bring power for lights and fans. All of us are fascinated by the economic mosaic in Dien Loi and other nearby hamlets. In just a couple of minutes of walking, you can pass poor shacks of rough boards and thatch, modest brick houses, and grander homes of stucco and tile with fenced yards and lovely landscaping. The poor live right next door to the well off, and no one is trying to squeeze them out with gentrification.
We are also amazed at the communal nature of this economically mixed neighborhood.
“We don’t even know our neighbors sometimes,” said Mun Ying Chan, of Singapore, one of our team members, who noted how impossible it would be to NOT know your neighbors in Dien Loi.
Indeed, much of life is conducted here on the veranda that all but the poorest homes have – a veranda that always faces the hamlet’s narrow concrete artery, with its constant traffic.
The communal closeness has its pluses – neighbors are sheltering the Phams while their house is built, for instance, and sometimes helping with
THE PHAMS CELEBRATE NEW VERANDA
construction. But there’s the downside, too: just across the sidewalk from the Phams, a neighborhood drunk likes to celebrate his inebriation with loud chanting and singing. We got a glimpse of how important the veranda is last Friday, at the other house our team is building, with Long Pham and his family in Long Thanh hamlet. After a marathon day of concrete mixing, the team and the local masons succeeded in laying the floor for that home’s three rooms and a hallway. With brick walls halfway up and a solid floor drying, the place was really starting to look like a home – so much so that, as we were leaving, the family moved a table, tablecloth, chairs, and a tea set to the veranda of their half-finished home and sat down, savoring the life that is to come when the construction is done.
Photos: Dien Loi entrance, hamlet road, masoleum by Larry Heinzerling
The Phams' new veranda by Kethevane Gorjestani.
A DRY PLACE TO SLEEP
June 9, 2012
By Ann Cooper
Dedication day at the end of a Habitat for Humanity Global Village build is always overflowing with thank yous. In our case, several officials from local government levels in Tien Giang province came to the dedications Thursday morning to add their official imprimatur to the ceremonies. One read his thank you message from his notebook. Another presented official documents that, if we understood correctly, were the equivalent of the certificate of occupancy required in New York before you move into a house.
That was a little premature. There is still plenty to be done before either of the two houses we worked on can be lived in. Both have foundations and walls, and the cement floor has been poured in Long Pham’s home. At Thanh Pham’s house, there’s no floor yet, but the metal roof is painted and ready, just as soon as the last few brick rows are laid and the rafters put in place. Chanh Minh and Cuong Phuc, our construction supervisors, say that both houses will be finished in two weeks; the work will be done by some hired labor and family members (Thanh Pham’s three sons, all young adults, kept right on building Thursday morning while their parents attended the dedication ceremony with us next to the unfinished house).
Our work here has been hard, sweaty and mostly unskilled. We hauled sand and bricks from a nearby road to the work site. We mixed mortar – sand, cement and water – with shovels. We sanded. We painted. We broke up old tiles and bricks to create landfill under the flooring.
A few of us even developed some good masonry skills. Donald Stewart, an intensive care doctor from Australia, got so good at laying bricks that the local masons were sad to see him pulled away to sand-carting duty one day. Stewart claims that, at least in some philosophical sense, there’s not much difference between trying to help a patient get better and building a brick wall. “You just get the job done,” he said.
Easy for him to say. While Stewart, the local masons, and Thanh Pham’s sons make brick work look as easy as stacking Legos, most of the rest of us struggled to get the right amount of mortar on each brick – or even to get the mortar to stick properly to each brick end before it is laid to rest.
“I didn’t imagine it to be so humbling,” said Rosalyn Leitch, who was making her first Habitat Global Village trip, just after finishing a masters program in international security and nuclear nonproliferation at Georgetown University. “You come in as the idiot, with no idea how to use a hammer or a trowel,” she said.
Leitch became one of our more successful volunteer brick layers – a new and unexpected skill in her repertoire. “For once it’s nice to have an identity that’s not defined by what I am or what degree I have or where I went to school,” she said.
For most of our 17 team members, this was their first Habitat Global Village trip. As we’ve learned from past trips, it can be a life-changing experience. One woman who joined our Alaska team last summer went home determined to quit her corporate job, just as soon as she could find work with Habitat. She’s now a Habitat staffer in New York state.
Most of us won’t make such drastic changes. But Tania Pirozzi, who’s traveled with Global Village to Tajikistan before this trip, says the experience of building homes, side by side with people in need, “changes your perspective. You don’t sweat the small stuff so much” when you get back home.
The night before the dedication, we talked about the difference this trip may make in our lives – and in the lives of the families here. Xuan Ngo (“Annie” to all of us who have trouble with Vietnam’s tonal pronunciations), the Habitat volunteer program coordinator here, reminded us that a decent house can mean much more to a family than shelter.
“With Habitat, we can change people’s lives, change people’s futures,” she said. Life is healthier in a solid home with decent sanitation, as these houses will have, and children can study better and take more pride in where they live, and in their own lives.
One day last week, a monsoon downpour sent us inside the ramshackle wooden home of Long Pham (there was no roof to shelter us on his new, half-built home). We spent a pleasant hour chatting with him and his son Sinh, who is 18. But as we waited out the rain, we realized that holes in the thatched roof allowed leaks, including one coming right down onto Sinh’s bed.
A little later, Tom Keller was talking about the sense of accomplishment he gets from working on Habitat Global Village builds (this is his third). Some of it is personal, but it also is tied up with the very tangible life changes that families will experience.
In the case of Sinh, Long Pham’s teenaged son, that change is incredibly basic.
“The quicker this house gets done,” said Tom, “the sooner Sinh has a dry bed to sleep in.”
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We’ve worked with an wonderfully international team here in Vietnam. Besides Don Stewart, now on his way back to his medical work in Australia, the team included Mun Ying Chan, a counselor in Singapore; Nadia Mounajjed, a professor of architecture in Dubai (her family is in Syria); Noelle Eiferman, an artist in Paris; and Kethevane Gorjestanti, who works for the 24-hour TV news channel France24. Henry Zhang just finished his undergraduate studies at Columbia University and has moved to Beijing, where he was born, and Michael Beck is returning to Switzerland and his work as a software developer. Steve Williams will go back to Tokyo, but probably not for long; this was his 14th Global Village trip in four years, and he shows no sign of staying put.
Others are headed back to the States – Rosalyn Leitch; Christine Yuan, Pauline Eiferman and Tania Pirozzi, who are all from New York, Scott Maughan from Utah, Laura Trader from Kansas. Ann, Larry, and Tom are now in Hanoi for a few days of sightseeing in northern Vietnam, then back to New York and Baltimore for the summer. We thank all of you again for your support of this incredible project we’ve worked on for the past two weeks.
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