Kites

We stopped in this morning at the kitemaker's shop to pick up my one souveneir of the summer, a 100-piece, 100-ft-long dragon kite along with some smaller butterflies and peacocks. Here the kitemaker Mr. Cu was preparing a load of butterflies, phoenixes and dragons for the journey to France where he goes each year for a kiteflying festival and to sell a load of his kites.

Thanks Thim Lac

We really could not have enjoyed Hue as much as we did without the constant attention given to us by Thim Lac. Thanks Thim! Every day she made us lunch at her place, entertained Scuppy with toys and games, and was an all around awesome and kind person. Here she is pictured with us going out visiting relatives. She's wearing the happy green Riverside shirt and white floppy hat that Hong Anh brought.

Week Five - Thom Lam!

The course is almost over, and we are getting ready for the next step in our travels, short stops to Hanoi and Saigon before we mosey on to Cambdia and Bali and then home. Here Scuppy follows my lead and smells this most unusual flower, saying "thom lam" every few moments to emphasize how wonderful it smells.

The students are wrapping up their projects and I'm done teaching for a while. See http://ucrss.blogspot.com

Khe Sanh and Lao Border

On Saturday we re-boarded our tour bus and headed inland to visit the scene of a famous battle in 1968 at Khe Sanh were People's Army troops laid seige to a US Marine base for six months before giving up. The US subsequently abandoned the place. But before we reached this spot, we stopped in for lunch at a local restaurant not far from the Lao border. Here we saw one of the biggest dragonfruit cactuses ever! It has grown over a tree and stands about 25' high. The staff cut down some fresh fruits to feed us for dessert. We have one much smaller one growing in our backyard, not nearly as large as this.







What trip would not be complete without a cute baby pose? Here she is, wearing her dad's straw hat.
















One of the interesting things about this old airstrip at Khe Sanh is that beginning about two years ago, local farmers persuaded the government to let them grow coffee plants on the very valuable acreage left open by the old base. So now, unless you have a tour guide, there is no real indication that there was ever any airstrip here, except for the few remnants maintained around a small historical museum.





Here Scuppy hides out with the other Marines in one of the bases bunkers.













Here is what the bunker looked like in 1968.












We ended our weekend trip with a stop in a thoroughly boring little village that Vietnamtourism had decided we needed to see as some symbol of "traditional Vietnamese culture" complete with approximately 100 people who live here year-round and make a few crafts related to the tourist industry in Hue. Anyways, Scuppy and I got some energy out walking on the little lanes, flapping our hands like birds, and playing with many bamboo sticks.

Weekend Trip to DMZ and Lao Border

This weekend we traveled with the students to the former border region between North and South Vietnam during the war and some other war-related sites in the area. The countryside up here in Quang Tri Province is beautiful, and one it is difficult now to recognize that this was one of the most heavily bombed regions of Vietnam during the whole war. One estimate says that about 3 times the total bombs dropped in Europe in WWII were dropped in Vietnam.

The reconstructed 19th century citadel at Quang Tri was the site in 1972 for a 3-month long battle for opposing sides during North Vietnam's Easer Offensive. As a result of this fighting, some 30,000 people died and North Vietnam took all of Quang Tri's territory for the duration of the war. Today there is a museum and a shrine for the unknown thousands (over one half of the total US casualties in the war) who died here in the ruins. More history pics from our trip can be seen at http://ucrss.blogspot.com.

After sightseeing around war relics, we headed to the beach for the night. The group enjoyed a very relaxing dinner at one of several shacks put up on the beach for summertime restaurants. Each shack includes a number of hammocks where patrons can swing to their heart's content. Here Scuppy enjoys here first hammock ride with her Ba.

Scuppy Shots Week Four

For those most interested in the goings on of Team Scuppy's main player, here you go. One of the ways I get Scuppy to enjoy drying off after her bath is to turn the towel into a towel dress and hat. Hong Anh has also picked up the habit.

Here she is practicing her runway moves at a park near Thim Lac and Chu Nghien's house.

Chu Nghien Heads South

Chu Nghien feted us on Thursday night with one last big party celebration before he heads south for a month to visit friends and stay with his daughter and her family there. The meal included a roasted suckling pig as well as plenty of Hennessy and Bia Festival. Chu Nghien bought a case of it on the event of my coming, so every day at lunch I've had a beer which makes me very sleepy in the afternoon - naptime with Scuppy. The Hue music performers, particularly Ai Hoa, also attended, so we went through some rounds of music before breaking up.

Week Four: The Home Stretch

Here Xuan Anh dances in her Mekong Delta outfit "ao ba ba" while the students had a birthday party for Amy who just turned 19. So young!!! The end is in sight, even though in "The Vietnam Wars" we have not yet gotten to the Marines landing in Danang in 1965 or the Tet Offensive much less visited some of the war-related sites north of here.

This morning I ate pho with an American who works with local authorities in clearing UXO, unexploded ordinance, from the countryside in this region. He told me the worst kind of weapon used was the cluster bomb, what Vietnamese call "baby bombs," because a single payload from one B52 might contain over 500,000 fist-sized bombs and each one is capable of killing and injuring several people. He told me how when he and his team still discover many such bombs, especially in Quang Tri Province, and he is often surprised at how little they have aged in the past 40 years after being buried in the ground so long. Some still look factory fresh. This weekend we'll explore some of the war's legacy in central Vietnam as we head out on our final tour from Hue to Quang Tri, the former DMZ, Khe Sanh Battlefield, and some clinics and facilities for those affected by dioxin from Agent Orange. Quang Tri also has a really pretty citadel and there are some nice beaches to visit in the area.

History Nerds on Tour

Ed Miller, an old friend from the Saigon Archives who now teaches at Dartmouth, came up to Hue last night for a weekend visit. Ed's writing a book on Ngo Dinh Diem and I think its going to be a hell of a history about an individual we still know relatively little about in the US, much less Vietnam where he is still considered by the current government as an American puppet (r. 1954-1963). Hong-Anh gave me leave this morning and we headed out via motorbike, just like the moto-taxi drivers and their Australian quarry in this picture at the hotel, for a morning of extreme tourism. Only, unlike these heavy-set oz-land burger munchers, we were heading far beyond the usual array of king's tombs and UNESCO world heritage sites to see some lesser known, unmarked monuments to the memory of the Ngo family who were originally from Hue. Diem's father, Ngo Dinh Kha, was actually the Chamberlain (prime minister) under the rebellious king Thanh Tai in the 1910's and he resigned his position in the Court of Hue after the French Resident Superior had the king deported for supposed crimes of perversion. Kha nevertheless was instrumental in establishing the famous National Academy highschool in Hue and his sons attended there in the 1920's.

Our first stop took us to a cathedral on a hill outside the downtown, the site for one of the first Catholic churches built in Hue after the French conquest of Indochina began - it was founded by a French priest in 1862. The old church was torn down in 1963 to make way for this huge, new modern one designed by a famous Vietnamese architect and then overseen by the Bishop of central Vietnam at the time, Diem's older brother Ngo Dinh Thuc. Thuc fled after Diem and his other brother Nhu's assassination in 1963 and lived in Rome for a while before he passed on.

Besides learning a bit more about the church and Thuc, we got one of the kids at the church, a boy who hopes to become a priest when he is older, to guide us over to the tomb Ngo Dinh Diem had erected for his father after becoming President in 1955. Today, there is no sign for the tomb and the front gardens of this rather large tomb area are occupied by a steelworks yard in what seems to be a very carefully planned nod to Socialist realism. Still, nobody even questioned the two goofy foreigners waltzing past the reinforced steel rods and crawling over a delapidated fence to get a closer glimpse of father Kha's tomb. Curiously, after 1975 the graves of Kha's other son Ngo Dinh Can and a female relative were later exhumed and removed to Saigon next to NDD and NDN's graves in a more anonymous cemetary. We guess this is because NDK can still be seen as a kind fo influential patriot even in a history centered around the revolution.

From the relatively serene heights of this hill, we descended down a long slope towards the Tu Dam Pagoda where Ed took copious pictures of the large bodhi tree planted in the front yard in 1939. The tree had been brought here from India...nothing really tipped me off that this was significant until Ed explained that the Buddhist groups in Vietnam had lobbied for a long time under colonial rule to establish a national Buddhist church, and the French only relented in the 1940's as the Japanese invaded. Tu Dam Pagoda, the first center for the National Buddhist Sangha of Vietnam, then became a center for anti-Diem activity during the 1960's.

Following Tu Dam, we continued down the road a long ways until we got thoroughly lost in an area of hills south of town covered in cemetaries. This city of the dead was where all of the lesser types and their families were buried, the real people of Hue. It also happened to be where one of Diem's brothers lived, Ngo Dinh Can, a man who in the 1950's ran a kind of Abu Graib interrogation prison here. Imagine the effect riding past several kilometers of headstones would have on a prisoner... In 1940, the French anticipated a Japanese invasion of Indochina, so they built bunkers for storing weapons, including a network of them on a hill in this cemetary area. Can used these for his shady activities in the 1950's. Somewhat suspecting the locals here to be a little wary of dredging up these memories, we were a little bit cautious asking where the famous 9 bunkers (chin ham) were. However, every local, young and old seemed to know exactly where it was "just a little further!"

With a few more stops, we finally came to a fork where government-installed roadside historical markers - the history nerd's homing beacons in stormy weather - appeared and guided us the last few kilometers down a muddy track.

After that, we found very little left of the actual bunkers, certainly nothing compared to WWII era bunkers one can crawl around in California or even Europe. My guess is that after 1968 or 69, this area was pretty solidly controlled by NLF guerillas and the US Airforce probably carpet-bombed the area as well as defoliating the hill with the bunkers.

The reason, however, that so many people knew where the place was is that sometime a year or two ago, the government erected a massive memorial to the several hundred people who died in Can's interrogation/torture bunkers. It looks as if most of the bodies have been exhumed and then relocated across the way to this large temple. I actually find the socialist realist style stone carvings here to be quite tasteful, and the artistic representation of the bunker carvedinto the stele quite appropriate, minus the 6'5" white guy.








Did someone say tasteful socialist realist art? We briefly stopped after a delicious lunch with the Missus and Scuppy at the former house of Phan Boi Chau so Ed could take a picture of the ginormous bronze head representing the nation's historical marker to Phan Boi Chau. I think the idea is that Phan Boi Chau contributed some great ideas to Ho Chi Minh and especially Ngo Dinh Diem who hung out with Chau in the 1930's. Thank you, Chau, for your abnormally large brain. Why couldn't he also get a buff bod like so many other heroes? And why do there have to be so many faces and people trapped on the sides of your head like so many conjoined twins?

Lazy Friday Eating and Shopping

Today is the first of three days off in the middle of the program. A kind of Hue vacation. We decided to lie low and not travel this weekend, so in the morning we headed out to Hue's first franchise, the Pho 24 noodle shop, an airconditioned shop that is super-clean with California-style pho soup and really delicious coffee. The meal was good, despite the completely empty restaurant. Locals say its outrageously expensive at 24,000 vnd per bowl. Thats more Saigon prices than Hue where a bowl of the local noodle specialty in the very best place is 10,000 vnd. But for aircon, super clean counters and plastic fruit, there is that extra markup.






Scuppy decided to be outrageously cute after our very relaxing and totally delicious, expensive bowl of noodles (about 1.50 usd). These two shots are my favorite from her Pho 24 photo shoot.














Upon returning to the hotel, Scuppy met one of the guys working in the office at the gate of the hotel with a lizard he'd caught just before. Scuppy petted it while the guy held its head between his fingers ina way that didn't hurt the lizard but kept it very still - the way a farmer with experience catching and killing chickens might hold an animal. Like me, Scuppy was very impressed with his skill. Another day filled with new wonders.




I tell my students not to waste a lot of money on cheap souveneirs in Vietnam but to wait until they see something really cool that will retain its meaning for them for years to come. A well-placed purchase of $100 for a piece of art or other item is much more interesting than so many straw hats, wood statues, and ho chi minh t-shirts. Well, today we finally found our special item for the summer. We are getting kites! We stopped in to visit an older man who makes kites only to find that he passed away 5 yrs ago and now his nephew continues the tradition in a house next door. Hue has always been famous for kite-flying and kite-flying has for centuries been a favorite past-time in Asia. Besides beautiful hand-assembled kites such as this phoenix kite, the kite-maker also has produced a dragon kite that includes over 100 pieces and is over 70 meters long. I decided to purchase one of these kites and hope that with a good 30-knot wind I might be able to start some ridiculous new fatherly tradition with Xuan Anh and others that involves trying to get a 120 foot-long kite to fly. From what I have seen it involves a Dad or kid holding the string, a smaller kid in the middle, and a Dad or kid in the back keeping everything stretched out. We've also purchased smaller butterfly and peacock kites for our arsenal of low-wind flyers.

Ai an gioi? Do tay len!

Scuppy is asleep for the night and David, the more regular contributor to this blog, handed me the computer and asked me to write the blog for today.

"Who is a good eater? Raise your hand!" is being demonstrated here - a rather patriotic looking move that could easily go with the local phrase, "Chao, Dong Chi!" or "Hello, Comrade!" This has become Scuppy's favorite game at our daily lunch spot at Thim Lac and Chu Nghien's house - taught to her by her great-auntie "Ba Thim".

This photo was taken this morning over a banana breakfast in the hotel garden. Mama had Bun Bo Hue, her favorite soup, and Ba was already teaching in the classroom by then.

Vietnamese onlookers still marvel everywhere we go at Scuppy's highchair, her ability to sit still in it and to feed herself . Local children are carried while being fed until they are 3 or 4 years old, if not being chased around with food or as we see at the local kiddie park, being fed while riding coin-operated horses or swans. Scuppy is considered skinny, especially because a plump fat baby or child is still the ideal here. From what I've witnessed, local children are force fed "chao" a rice porridge all day long, even when they are not hungry. My guess is that they are so distracted during these "chay dut" or "running feeding" sessions that they do not protest. Scuppy and I are both admired for our wily Western know-how - she for being able to self-feed and chew solid food - and me for not playing maid servant to my daughter and being able to eat at the same time.

Scuppy is thriving here and has settled into a good routine. Her activities include admiring snails in the garden, collecting what she calls heart leaves to drop in the pond, going on bike rides with Mama, feeding raisins to the imaginary monkeys around the corner, and making the housekeeping staff laugh with her various funny faces. Today she played with a 5 year old boy named Samuel from Italy at the pool and had pizza, her favorite exotic food, for dinner at a local backpacker restaurant called Little Italy. There, she ate a whole slice all to herself, while commenting to the curious waitstaff, "Delicious. Ngon lam."

Resting Under My Net ...

It's a Friday morning and I'm resting under my mosquito net on a lazy morning when I don't have to teach, I didn't get up at 5am to go jogging, and Hong-Anh and Scuppy are snoring as a duet in different octaves. We haven't been taking many pictures the past few days as the students are now mostly on their own with the free three-day weekend and we're recuperating from a long workweek. A good friend of mine from Academia, Ed Miller, is coming in this afternoon for a weekend trip here so we'll probably do some nerdy sightseeing to some places like the Catholic cathedral designed by a famous 1960's architect close to Ngo Dinh Diem and his family. No visit to King Minh Mang's tomb is complete without a funny shot of his stome-carved retainers doing something silly.



Since its really the desire to catch a glimpse of this traveler that keeps our devoted blogwatchers coming back, no post would be complete without a new shot. I took this one while waiting in an interior courtyard of a shop in Hoi An at a table with complimentary tea and a sign that said "bored husbands table." Not all men may be bored in a shop, but probably most husbands will be as its clearly geared towards wives thinking about doing things like Christmas shopping early, things I admit I don't think about in July. Scuppy was worried about me and came out to bring me a book to read. I think this is one of her South African outfits, a kind of supercute gunnysack that affords maximum room to breathe.





This picture I took while somewhat husband-bored out of my gourd on the Monday trip to the Hue Food Cooking Class at the house of a real lady sheister. There's a type of woman I sometimes meet in Vietnam that I have very rarely met in other places who is about 60 years old and a one-woman, narcissistic show that typically involves shameless helpings of self promotion at the center of the operation. The cause is generally a good one, in this case a traditional Hue food restaurant, but what's always odd to me is that these ladies seem to have lost all perspective on their place and significance in such matters. The "chef" here greeted us not in an ao dai or regular cooking clothes but wearing a 3-ft-high French chef's hat and a white kitchen uniform she must have paid $200 for in a restaurant supply catalogue. The hat was ridiculous, as she herself like many such dynamos, was only about four feet tall. Everywhere she turned, this hat kept threatening to whack someone following behind her in the head. Beyond creating an intensively hot cooking environment for the 12 students and us, she didn't mention that she'd also arranged to have the local television station come and film us Americans making Hue food at her restaurant. Perhaps that is why she bought the hat? Somehow this picture really spoke to me. This flower pot sat empty on a windowsill, and inside it the devils are looking at a group of little frogs hanging out at the bottom. I know what those frogs felt like as I was paraded out in front of the camera to do my monkey-dance for the camera in Vietnamese. Fumbling for words, I made sure to say how "I love Vietnam" and how happy we are to be in Hue etc... I wasn't alone in my assesment of the chef. My colleague at Hue College was mortified by this lady's behaviour.

How is Scuppy Doing in Hue?

Some of our more devoted blog watchers may be wondering how is Team Scuppy holding up after five weeks overseas, thirty some postings and four weeks in Hue? The answer, happy to say, is that we are doing fine. This blog entry is intended mainly to share with our blog watchers how things are going according to Scuppy as best we can tell. "Room" has become our home and its here that each morning she enjoys a routine of playing with toys and dollies before getting some breakfast in the garden. Breakfast is usually followed by a walkabout in the garden and then a swim in the pool.

Each day for lunch we head over to Nghien and Lac's house at noon where Uncle Nghien entertains Scuppy with his grandfatherly antics. Their son is married to Hong-Anh's cousin on the other side of the family and now lives in Boston, so they're enjoying Xuan Anh in lieu of their grandson who is far away. Nghien makes lots of crazy noises and games as he dances with his hands or drums on the table. Scuppy gets great food each day thanks to Thim Lac, especially regular servings of shrimp and rice. Today was "ga rut xuong", a dish that took Thim Lac three hours to prepare and was absolutely delicious.


In the afternoons she takes a nap usually from 1pm to 3pm. On Tues-Thurs this is also Ba time when I stay here while Hong-Anh teaches the afternoon Vietnamese language class. When she wakes up from nap its Ba-time. (She calls me Ba.) We often start out with pool play. Last Thursday Scuppy was one of the otters she read about in her book, and she swam in the pool on her back (me holding her), collecting coins (little fruits that fall into the pool from a tree overhead) while saying "au revoir" to her French friend, Elisa. This week the pool's been a little cold and the Frenchies have gone, so we haven't gone in yet, but maybe this afternoon since its sunny again. After the pool and a bath, we have snacks and watch Dora the Explorer on Hong-Anh's i-pod. From there we might go out for a walk, get food at the restaurant, or go play with Mama when she comes home. In this picture, Scuppy visited the fabric store with Mama to look at beautiful fabrics for making "ao dai" the traditional Vietnamese dress. Hong-Anh with Thim Lac's help is getting us outfitted for the new school year; a set of new linen work shirts for me and a few new pairs of slacks all to be tailored sometime next week. She's also getting new pajamas and a few other items made upon request for Di Quynh, her mom and her dad. I'm not sure who the friend is in this picture. Maybe this is the lilliputian ao dai shop and she's the owner? (Hong-Anh tells me it's the shop owner's 2 yr old daughter.) Scuppy is definitely right at home and her Vietnamese has definitely improved as she hears it each day. She's counting in both English and Vietnamese and knows some basics about greeting people. Also, thanks to Ba-time, she's picking up some yoga poses such as downward dog, boat, and mountain.

Visiting Hue's 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--I went ahead with the regularly scheduled tour of two historic sites for Vietnamese nationalism. The first is a simple house in the city where Phan Boi Chau, a 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. The students quickly rushed through the rather plain room of mildewed photographs highighting 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.

After an hour there, we loaded back into the van and traveled across town to a little village just beyond Hue to one of many little homes where Ho Chi Minh stayed as a youth as he followed his dad around with his brothers as a teenager. Mr. Cung, that was hcm's real 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 Ngo Dinh Diem attended as well as To and David Ly decades later). Cung was expelled after helping organize a protest of the crazy taxes imposed on Vietnamese people by the French at the time, so he moved south and then 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.

A Sunday Walk in the Rain and on American Tanks

On Sunday we got the first of a three-day-long rain storm as a typhoon in the S China Sea basically collided with the wet monsoon air coming across from India creating super wet conditions. The rain was pretty mild in the morning, so we finally headed down a few blocks to the Hue History Museum just to get some exercise. Hong Anh decided to get her Scuppy pose over by the eastern gate of the palace walls, while I opted for the very predictable cannon shot. These cannons are most likely the remnants of older 18th century manufactures built in a style first introduced here by Portuguese cannon-makers for the Vietnamese lords in Hue since the 1500's.

When we got to the museum, we were told by the lone attendant trying to stay dry in the guard's office that the museum, normally open from 8-11am all week, was already closed at 10:30am. So we still have yet to see any of the photographs or other materials typically presented in the exhibition halls. The museum is rather predictably organized into an ancient artifacts hall--everything from 1945 on back--in the middle, a French war building on one side, and an American war building on the other. So, we did what most discombobulated Western tourists do when they come to this slowly deteriorating place, and we crawled around on the assortment of US tanks and mobile artillery anchored in a courtyard in front of the museum. Its an extremely effective reminder for tourists of the heavy physical presence of Americans here for a moment in the nation's recent past. I was surprised that the tires on the lighter pieces were for the most part inflated which means that someone has to go around every so often with an air compressor and keep them filled up. Also, I was impressed with how well the metal has held up given several decades of such intense humidity since these machines were shipped here.

Alisa

For the last week and a half, Scuppy has had about six little French kids to play with in the pool outside our rooms at the hotel. They are part of an extended French and Vietnamese family that comes back to Hue every year for a few weeks. We learned that two Vietnamese brothers in the family are martial arts experts who come back each year for competition and to visit some relatives. They married French women and so a large extended family has followed them, with the boys catching frogs in the garden, kids playing tag and marco polo in the pool, and a coiuple of the little girls like Alisa smothering Scuppy in attention. Scuppy picked up a little French as a result, with words like "au revoir" to add to her Vietnamese. Her alltime best buddy was Alisa, pictured here in an ao dai on her way out to a farewell dinner for part of the family heading back to France tomorrow.

Saturday Dinner at La Residence

After a long two and a half weeks, we decided to dress up tonight and stop in at Hue's new five star hotel called La Residence. Its owned by Accor Hotels, a French chain, and it has a really great restaurant as well as a nice pool. In a town where dinenr usually costs about $3, its a little bit crazy to spend $40 at a hotel like this; but the food is incredible, especially if you try the French food and splurge for a bottle of wine. Scuppy had fun, too, as they have a kids menu and supplied her with crayons and coloring paper. We ate during the kiddie shift at 6pm-8pm, so it was quite fun dining out together. We ate dishes we wouldn't normally order in the States, things like grilled veal and roast Australian lamb.

Another great thing about empty French hotels in VN is that you can be totally
goofy and casual without having to worry about a French waitstaff giving you a hard time. We're getting into week three starting tomorrow as I get ready for class on Monday. This is the mid-point for the class, and I suspect after next Friday we'll really start speeding into the final home stretch as we have a trip planned to the former DMZ two weekends from now and then we wrap up the program after that.

Saturday at the Beach

Today after a morning webcam session with Ong Ba Ngoai, we headed out to the nearby beach. It was a gorgeous day out there and we rented one of the little bamboo shelters and ordered some fresh grilled squid and crab for lunch. While we ate, little beach crabs darted in and out of their holes around Scuppy's sand play area. The water was cool and the wind waves were almost just barely big enough to actually push a styrofoam board.
Good little knee-high mush. The squid was fantastic and we enjoyed a whole range of kids selling snacks and sodas passing by. Two girls stopped and chatted and told us they are working the beach during the summer before they go back to school in August. Their English was quite good, probably better than most kids who do English language study at college in Vietnam because they actually have an ability to converse with foreigners.

Hue is very close to the beach. From the hotel we got a cab and it took about 20 minutes. Because the fares are so cheap here, you can actually just leave the meter running while you swim for a few hours then take the same cab back.

Chua Duc Son Orphanage

On Friday morning we headed out to Duc Son Pagoda and an orphanage that a nun there has been operating for over twenty-one years. She is another one of these amazing Buddhist women in Vietnam, having done humanitarian work since war times, and is responsible for building perhaps one of the most advanced orphanages in the entire region. Pictured here is Anna Nguyen, Hue Pham, me and Scuppy as well as nuns and kids from the orphanage, with Hong Anh behind the camera.

This orphanage in particular is serving 200 children, many of whom lost their parents during the catastrophic floods of 1999. The pagoda and orphanage has also established 85 satellite schools and orphanages in the severely impoverished highlands. Thich Co Minh Tu has also started a kind of Head Start program for kids from poorer families who live in areas where there were previously no kindergartens. She also organizes for school supplies and uniforms to be provided to the families free of cost. She spoke at length about showing all children as much compassion as we're able to give, and how she's simply harnessed this compassion from those around her, that there are many hearts involved in her operation. She proudly told us of her children who are now grown, having attended university, who often come back to help run the orphanage in which they were raised. There was a special dorm room for those children who come home to visit from college during their breaks.

Pictured here is Anna with one of the infants who was born with a severely cleft palate. This condition is especially common in children who were exposed to dioxin as fetuses, but it can be fixed through a relatively simple reconstructive surgery. This is perhaps one of the least severe but most common manifestations in children exposed to dioxin left as a byproduct of Agent Orange. Anna is going to focus her independent study project on the orphanage, perhaps looking at the kind of organizations that support such operations and their history with regard to the activities of Buddhist nuns and orphanages during the war and since 1975.

I think we were all very impressed by the clean and bright conditions at the orphanage. Having seen a few in the past, I expected to see a building and conditions much poorer than the average place. In fact, I think many of these children probably get a better education and learn more here from the nuns than do children in the countryside around here. Pictured here is our group with one of Scuppy's new friends at the orphanage and one of the junior nuns Co Lien Nhu at the orphanage.

Dr. Que's Clinic

This afternoon Hong Anh took some of the group out to visit Viet Nam's first free health clinic, opened 17 years ago, to serve the poorest of the poor here in Hue. We found out that Dr. Que is well known for having dedicated her life to helping the sick and the poor. She and her volunteer team of retired health professionals prescribe a combination of traditional and Western remedies and all treatments and medications are given free of cost to patients. Her clinic, staffed by volunteers, is entirely funded by private donations. In particular, Hong Anh's father, To Ly, has been giving donations to the clinic for many years, which is how we found out about Dr. Que's work at the Phong Kham Chua Benh Tu Thien Thuong Lac.

The group has been to many places in and around Hue these two weeks, but no place had anywhere near the impact that Dr. Que's clinics of last hope did. While visiting two locations, tissues were passed around as students followed Dr. Que on her rounds and she was greeted by patients, both those recovering and some dying. Daisy and Amy, the two sisters in the front, are going to do a project on these private voluntary clinics in Hue, and plan to raise money in California to help. Andrew, pictured left, also intends to share his experience today when he gets home to encourage others to donate money to this worthy cause.

The doctor also founded a hospice in association with an adjacent Buddhist pagoda in the outskirts of Hue for people who have been diagnosed as terminally ill and sent home by local hospitals when they no longer have money to pay for treatment. There, a centuries old fasting technique is used as an alternative to morphine and other western drugs to bring a more peaceful pain-free end to illnesses. Many patients who were told they only had a week to live have actually been cured by this method.


Dr. Que is insistent that a combination of fasting, eating organic brown rice, and drinking green tea are cure-alls to many ailments. She had a stone ground water well dug before the buildings were built so that the water that her patients drink will not contain any contaminents or chlorine. While most streets and parks are filled with noise, beeping horns, stress, and the angst of a restrictive society and developing economy, the hospice was a model of tranquility, a peaceful garden and sanctuary setting where the students were truly impressed and overwhelmed by the intense compassion and selflessness exhibited here by Dr. Que and her fellow volunteers.