Mai's Travel Journal: Chapter 9 - Hue

Thursday 30 September, 2004

The Hue railway station welcomed the S3 train at 10.45am. The hospitality of the City of Festivals attracted me right from my first steps out of the station. It is in the whole-hearted attitude of local people when they showed me the way to a guest house or restaurant. Thanks to their help, I quickly managed to settle down.

I came to Province’s Youth Union of Thua Thien-Hue. It was a surprise to me that most of the Province’s Youth Union staff were men. I would have preferred there to be more women, as I am always attracted to the voices of Hue girls.

I had a student’s meal with the kind of whole-hearted and thoughtful service from the kitchen staff that I hadn’t enjoyed since I was a student. How lucky are Hue’s students! I was sure that if students in Hanoi or HCMC knew about the service they would be as envious of Hue’s students as I was.

I had chance to meet the prime movers of some volunteer movements in Hue. In their stories I found creativeness, enthusiasm and a sense of responsibility. And I tried to get something of that for myself.

The Green Hue volunteer movement was an example of this. Hue’s young people set up a new tour going to ecotourism sites. The tour guides were students of Hue University. Ngoc Anh, a student participating in the program, said: “I like it so I participate. This is a good chance to see Hue in a new way.”

I followed Hung and Loc to a floating village in Duc precinct. This was the 18th inhabitant group of the precinct, consisting of 63 households, of which two had poor household books. The whole village earned its living by mining sand. Duc precinct was the main sand supplier for construction projects in Hue. As a consequence, every household had many mouths to feed and children had to start work when they were small.

Mr. Hoa, the group leader, estimated that each ferryboat had at least six people of two or three generations. Children’s working from a young age was a problem in the village. At the moment, there are more than 30 children of 13 and 14 having to carry baskets of 30-40 kilos of sand everyday. Working hard, getting up in the middle of the night, yet each ferryboat earned only 60,000-80,000 Vietnam dong a day. Hence, illiteracy was a normal phenomenon in the village.

Along nearly two-kilometres of the Perfume River bank there were three sites of sand mining. The long-held desires of these people were to have an area to settle down in so as to let their children go to school and play around and to have a sand-mining co-operative to coordinate their work.

Mr. Hoa expressed his worries that the village people would loose their means of subsistence once the dam protecting against river flooding was finished. “Having the dam is nice, never having to worry about floods. But floods bring alluvial soil and sand. It’s thanks to that the village has been in existence for generations”.
Seeing the boats bobbing on the river at night I couldn’t get the desires of the floating village’s inhabitants off my mind. And I felt as if someone was following in my footsteps when I left the village.

Friday 1 October 2004

The Future Special School was in the centre of the Children’s Hall of Thua Thien-Hue province. It is a world both close to and isolated from the outside world. It is for 42 children with congenital disabilities who study under the instruction of seven female teachers. The 42 students were divided into four morning classes and three afternoon classes.

The school was operated with money from the Heredity Consultancy and Defects Children’s Assistance Office. However, the amount of money was not enough to cover the expenditure of the school. Hence, the parents of each child had to contribute 15,000 VND/month. The teachers and students also made cards to sell on some special days.

My first impression upon meeting them was of the innocent features on the faces of the students and the indulgency of the teachers. I admired the patience, love for the children and the career of the teachers. That was the context within which I experienced a fairytale in real life.

Ms Ton Nu Dieu Hanh had identified herself with the school since its opening in 2002. When I met her, her leg was in a plaster cast and she was limping. She had twisted her ankle when she was teaching her students to dance for a performance. In her presence, I felt ashamed of my laziness and hesitance. I never knew the number of interesting games I had missed due to my lack of courage.

I saw them being together and thought of the attraction of the teachers to their students. It was like the attraction of fairies. Ms Y told me about her first day in the school, the obstinacy and dullness of the children. “Sometimes I wanted to resign from my job, yet when thinking again and again, I found that I was too selfish, and that I had a deep affection for the children, so I keep on”, she said.

The children’s daily lesson was learning how to stand and sit and recognize gestures and colours.

In the morning I attended a cooking lesson. Each child was instructed on how to do different tasks, from going to the market, lighting a fire, preliminary food preparation to cooking. Children who were more agile and healthy than others took the responsibility of tidying up and cleaning.

In the afternoon, I learnt skills together with children in the class of Ms Y and Ms Thuong, a trainee teacher. There were six children attending the class, each learning a type of skill with a special studying method. Hoang often tapped on the teacher’s hand to attract her attention when he completed his work of classifying pictures of animals. “Old man” Duy used to fix his eyes at the animals’ pictures to do the classification, but he had a good memory.

In the embroidery class, I saw Lac Thuy still absorbed in her work when all her classmates were playing outside. She was making a nice flower.

I looked out to the playground and didn’t see disabled students but children who were making concessions, expressing love and making friends with each other. Joy, noise and animation pervaded the playground.

I was so lucky to be loved by the children. They wrote my name carefully on a board, and they gripped my hand or tapped on my shoulder to attract my attention. All their actions and gestures were special gifts to me. Here, I studied a lot about love, and the way to express and share one’s love from normal things the children did everyday.

It was getting dark. I went with Lan to compassion class in An Cuu hamlet. Lan was a university student who had been a teacher of the class since its opening.

The class was in a small room of An Cuu primary school. Each class had pupils of five different grades, from grade one to grade five. The blackboard was divided into three parts, a part for each grade. The younger children grouped to learn, and the teacher had to tutor each of them. Each teacher was in charge of a group and each group had its own lesson. Yet the children didn’t lose their concentration. Patience, concentration and passion were passed from teachers to pupils and vise versa during the whole lesson.

The class meeting started with the self-review of children who didn’t attend classes. You could feel the tension; the uneasy features on the faces of the children and the severe features on the faces of the teachers could be seen anywhere in the class. The children promised not to play truant and apologized profusely when a teacher said, “If you guys still want to play truant I will ask your parents to permit you to do so, very easily”. The teacher was Mr. Chiem, a student of Hue University.

You see, it’s the way they called each other. The student teachers were like their pupils’ brothers and sisters, teaching the children and sharing the difficulties of the children’s family with them.

Chapter 9 - Hue - Photo Gallery

Photos: Loc, member of Duc precinct Youth Union took all pictures in Hue
(select image to enlarge)

1. Bác Hòa, tổ trưởng vạn chài phường Đúc (picture 28)
1. Mr. Hoa is a leardship of Duc fishing community
2. Xe cát, một công việc nặng nhọc mà trẻ em phường Đúc thường làm (p. 29)
2. Carting sand, a heavy work that the children in Duc fishing community usually do

3. I am at Duc fishing community
4. Living at Duc fishing community

5, 6, 7. Lack of a place for children at Duc fishing community

8. Going to compulsory education in the evening