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UN > Future> Mai > Journal > Chapter 13 - Dak Lak

Mai's Travel Journal: Chapter 13 - Dak Lak

Tuesday, 12 October, 2004

I left Pleiku for Buon Me Thuot at 8:00am, yet I had to wait for about an hour for the bus to run around to get more passengers before really setting off. That’s the way of every bus here. Yet, it’s not the end of the story. I had to change to another bus because the one I was on didn’t have all the documents it needed to run. My goodness!

Getting off in Buon Me Thuot, I was determined not to catch a motorbike to the office of the Province’s Youth Union because I was tired of seeing motorbike drivers try to outdo each other to get passengers. After watching out for a while, I saw a bus station before the way to the center. I had to wait a few minutes before a bus arrived. It was as crowded as the buses that I used to go to school on. That was the time to go to the afternoon classes. The woman who sold tickets was so young and so pretty, and she gave me exhaustive directions. How nice buses were!

I must have looked silly in the office of the Province’s Youth Union because I was running round, looking for anyone yet seeing no one and not knowing who to ask. It was noon-break time. I ran out to buy a glass of milk to make lunch, together with some biscuits left in my pack. It was a really nice lunch, yet costly.

In the early afternoon, it was suggested to me that I go to a commune named E Kiet, Cu M’Ngan district. I had no idea about the place I would be going to. Even the name I found difficult to remember. I quickly bought a detailed map of Dak Lak. How big it was. But the map was of Dak Lak before it had been divided into two provinces, named Dak Lak and Dak Nong. I poured over the map so much that my eyes were tired; yet I couldn’t imagine what it was like at the place I would arrive at, stay a short time at and quickly leave. Anyway, I would wait until tomorrow for everything to be OK.

Once again, I felt that I was lucky enough to have a chance to know and learn about so many places and people – a thing that young people of my age could not normally do.

Wednesday 13 October 2004

I was going to Cu M’Gar by car, but I still couldn’t figure out an image or remember the name of the place I would go to. Do you think I’ve got “a bad head”?

I do. I have always had difficulty with every new place’s name, every day I’ve travelled. At first, everything seemed strange and made me anxious. And that was what spurred me on to travel from place to place, from day to day. Step by step, I discovered unknown things and discovered myself. With all my anxieties about EA Kiet, I was observing, listening, running around and exposing all kinds of questions I already had in my mind, or that would just come to me, such as “grandfather, why so?”

EA Kiet was a big village with 23 hamlets. At first, you wouldn’t think it was a commune of special poverty (a commune of zone 3), yet truly EA Kiet was a commune of zone 3 of Cu M’Gar.

In EA Kiet, there were places blazing with electric lights from inside the houses to the road. However, to nearly half of the commune’s population, those lights were very strange things. Roads in every hamlet were quite smooth and convenient, except for Xe Dang. Xe Dang was a special exception. It was far away from and far behind all the other hamlets, in terms of geographic distance and level of development. Xe Dang had only been recognized as a hamlet in 2003. Therefore, everything was in the beginning stage there. A temporary classroom built in the center of the hamlet was waiting for a teacher. Among the children of the hamlet, no one had any idea of what a teacher, or going to school or the first lesson, would be like.

The road in Xe Dang zigzagged up and down the slopes, through forests and across streams and wasn’t wide enough. Xe Dang was the only hamlet in EA Kiet that you could use your mobile phone because the mobile phone signal was very strong here. But the electricity, even with its high speed, couldn’t get here because there are no electricity poles or wires. The development gap was there to be seen with my bare eyes; no need to read the documents to figure that out.

However, I was impressed by the strong will and hard labor of Xe Dang’s people. To me, it was the first time I understood with my eyes, my ears and all of my senses what mutual protection and help to overcome difficulties was like.

The hamlet was bordered by three streams, the biggest of which was E Sup, which was always rich with water and fish. Yet the hamlet was suffering a severe drought. The anxiety about water and food was manifesting itself on the faces and in the work of each person. People of the hamlet had set up big, long pipes from the streams to save their fields and gardens and to save themselves. It was the only thing they could do now to overcome the severity of nature. The dream of rain was fading away; in some ways this was like the life of the hamlet people who were so dependent on nature.

I met the family of Mrs. A Ket and Mr. A Cui. He had a defect in his leg and had to move around on crutches so she was the breadwinner. They were old and poor, they were living a hard life yet they had not hesitated to adopt two children, when one had stopped breastfeeding and the other was taking its first steps. Now the children had grown up a little, but they were still very young. The old couple worked hard everyday on their garden and field to support the children. The house of Ms Y Hoa and Ms Y Ziet at the end of the hamlet was a wooden one with flowers planted around. It was more spacious and beautiful than the others.

More special was a self-dug well of about 20 meters in depth. The well was dug by hand by the sisters, Y Hoa (born in 1979) and Y Ziet (born in 1977). In one corner was a piggery with eight pigs waiting to be fed. In the garden behind the house were green trees. Under them were peanut plants.

When I arrived, Ms Ziet was going to the field with her youngest sister, Ms Y Gianh. Ms Hoa told me: “ In the past, we two sisters had sent Y Gianh to the commune center to board with people there to study but she only finished primary school. Now, she has grown up. On seeing how hard her sisters have to work at home, she insisted on not continuing her study.” Then, she worried: “The drought is severe this year, the peanut plants are growing so well but they will die without rain. When talking about them, everyone called their house “ the house of the three sisters”. They dug the well, built the house, did the gardening and work in the field, taking care of their old and blind grandmother, all by themselves. The hamlet patriarch said they set a good example of labour for the whole hamlet. To me, they were hard working, enduring and active women that I knew I had a lot of things to learn from.

Thursday 14 October 2004

I had to sleep alone in the office of the People’s Committee of EA Kiet village after being threatened by stories about spirits. Yet, maybe the spirits were moved by my exhaustion due to traveling so they let me sleep soundly.

In the morning, I visited two hamlets of Za Wam A and B. At the first sights, upon seeing gardens of coffee, peanut and pea plants, I was sure about the well-off life of local people. Yet that feeling faded away little by little after each local family I visited and each story I was told.

I remembered well the story of Mr. Y Won H’Long which let me understand that one could not manage to have enough for eat, not to be well off, if they did not have the Land-use right Certificate for the area on which they plant coffee and built their house. Local people did not have enough money for purchasing good seeds and good fertilizers so they had to borrow with interest. The productivity as well as the quality of their coffee was low. They had to face the decrease in coffee price, the debt burden after each crop and never be sure if there was any money left for the family’s expenses until the next crop. They had to accept the quality of fertilizers that they could afford to purchase.

The vicious circle seemed to tighten. Thus, for some local children, working in the field or garden was given higher priority than going to school. I was told many stories about children who did not go to school, even when they did not have to pay school fees and were given books and notebooks for free. They thought that going to school would make the debt burden on their parents’ shoulders heavier. And they left school after grade 4 or 5, or, in the best cases, after grade 7 or 8 although their parents did not ask them to do so. Mrs. H’Lat still had 4 unmarried sons and daughters. The two boys left school after grade 5 and the two girls did after grade 6 and 7. A life of illiteracy and no access to information would keep haunting another generation.

I went to the district center at about 3pm to exchange relations with youth leaders of all hamlets of Cu M’Nga. I decided to stay in Cu M’Nga for the night to be able to say more to them.

I had thought about what to say to them at the beginning, in the end and in between the two. I did not know if it was odd but I began by answering the questions, which were posed to me before by most people I had met. Those were: who I was, which ethnic group I belonged to and whether I could speak their language. Here is what I said: “Hello my friends, I am Nguyen Thi Tuyet Mai. I am of Viet nation. I can speak, hear, read and write our nation’s language enough for communication, study and work. To me, compatriots are people of 54 ethnic groups, of Ede, Ba na, Xe dang, H’Mong, Dao, Kinh, Thai, Tay, Cham, Kho me … So, please do not ask me such questions as we are of one root, we all have Vietnamese blood in our heart.”

I had talked about the lack of food, knowledge, health care, medicine, forestry and water resources, the lack of sharing attitude to others, especially to aged people and women that I saw on each stage of my trip. I also talked about the redundancy of pollution sites, diseases and plague risks…

Lastly, I talked about the reason why I was there and why I was doing the journey towards a better future.

I had had conversations that I could not and dared not to imagine on my departure. That was the sharing, wasn’t it?

Friday, 15 October 2004

I got up early, eager to get on the road to Yok Don National Park, the place where the PARC project (Creating Protected Areas for Resource Conservation Using Landscape Ecology) is located, and where the UNV volunteers are working. I will be meeting with Ms. Hue, Mr. Chien, Paul, Max – people I really admire, as well as the seeing the wild natural environment.

It might also be because of this that the road to Yok Don seemed to be so long, who knows how far it was. Finally, though, Yok Don Park appeared before my eyes. I was eager to get in there and find out about it. There it was already, the area where the PARC project was. A mass of bougainvillea flowers made me smile. They looked so pretty!

After Yok Don, E’Sup region, then sunrise to sundown I spent returning to Buon Me Thuot with everyone. I was shown around who knows how many beautiful, enchanting places, like the upper and lower E’Sup lakes. Hue and I gasped, calling them a ‘sea in the mountains’.

In summary, I had a really surprising day, a day when I really came to understand the value of protection and development. A day with I don’t know how many discoveries, and I don’t know how many things that I couldn’t have imagined before about myself, and about life around me.