Friendship Village, Vietnam

                                                              by Jim Goodman

       [The following article is several years old, but it seems very appropriate to reprint it now, especially as Friendship Village is still going strong.  This year marks the 50^th anniversary of America’s direct involvement in the Vietnam War.  Government officials ask Americans to honor the veterans who “fought for American values.”  I could make a long response to such an assertion, but essentially I would rather we honor the anti-war veterans who took it upon themselves to try to establish reconciliation between former enemies by establishing institutions to ameliorate the war damages inflicted upon the country.  Feelings of trans-national compassion motivated these men.  If such sentiments are not part of  “American values,” well then, they should be.] 

entrance gate to Friendship Village

       At the end of a small rural settlement a half-hour’s drive southwest of Hanoi lies a spacious compound with the name Vietnam Friendship Village.  It is not a place set up for tourists to meet local people.  It comprises a clinic, administrative building, residential and classroom buildings, a fish tank and herbal garden.  Friendship Village is the brain child of an American soldier in its Vietnam War, run by North Vietnamese combat veterans and designed to aid victims of Agent Orange, the controversial chemical herbicide sprayed by American planes over vast areas of southern Vietnam.

       One of the cruelest legacies of the Vietnam War, more insidious than unexploded ordnance, is the long-term damage wrought by the use of Agent Orange.  Intended to flush out the guerrillas by destroying their forest cover, Agent Orange, used extensively from 1965-67, did more than just kill off triple-canopy jungles and reduce them to the thick grass that blankets the areas today.  The chemical will stay in the soil four hundred years, so no trees will return before then.

residential area, Friendship Village

       Besides the jungles, the herbicide got into the air, the streams, the farms, everything permeable.  It entered the bodies of human beings, not only local villagers but also soldiers from the north and American infantrymen.  Over the years people who were exposed to Agent Orange have experienced a disproportionate number of rare diseases, miscarriages and birth defects.  The U.S. Government, loath to plunge into a compensation mess, refuses to acknowledge Agent Orange’s culpability.  The phenomenon of birth defects has continued to the present day, as perversely persistent as the casualties in Quảng Trị Province when leftover bombs explode beneath children playing in the dirt.

one of the permanently handicapped

       During its long post-war period of diplomatic isolation the Vietnamese were left to their own meager resources to deal with such residual war problems.  While the U.S. Government dragged its feet on normalizing relations with its former enemy, individual American veterans began pushing the cause of reconciliation on their own initiatives.  One of the key players in this movement was the decorated ex-combat hero George Mizo, who as an infantry sergeant operated in the areas sprayed by Agent Orange.  A full believer then in the U.S. wartime propaganda about saving South Vietnam from international communism, George re-enlisted for combat service and was serving in Khe Sanh when it came under siege in early 1968.  Wounded in a firefight, he was evacuated from the site just before North Vietnamese troops overran it during the Tết Offensive and wiped out his entire unit.

       Already harboring new doubts about the war, with this incident George turned irreversibly against it.  Soon after his release from a military hospital he stripped off his uniform and announced his “resignation” from the armed forces.  He was immediately arrested, court-martialed and given a dishonorable discharge.  George had also contracted mysterious ailments from his exposure to Agent Orange, but with a dishonorable discharge he was ineligible for treatment at military hospitals.

war veteran on the staff conferring with a teacher

      George then joined the Vietnam Veterans against the War, which played a small but important role in mobilizing American opinion, which eventually helped pressure the government to abandon its commitment in Vietnam.  A decade later President Reagan announced he was considering dispatching American combat troops to aid the Contras against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.  Along with three other decorated veterans, George Mizo turned in his medals to the Pentagon and the group commenced a hunger strike on the steps of the building.  After 47 days doctors advised them to call it off, fearing the already weakened George might die otherwise.

       By then the strike had drawn much media attention and the American public became alarmed at the prospect of intervention.  Reagan had to cancel the plans.  The hunger strike also attracted foreign journalists, including a German woman who soon fell in love and married George.  George then moved to Germany, where he could receive the medical treatment impossible for him to obtain in his homeland. 

tailoring student doing piece-work for a Hanoi manufacturer

       But George could not get Vietnam out of his mind.  In 1986 he visited the country and met with Vietnamese officials, long before the normalization of relations between the two nations.  George proposed a peace monument, but Vietnam’s countryside is full of memorials and monuments for one war or another and the Vietnamese didn’t find the idea very thrilling.  George next suggested a hospital and that provoked a positive response.  He then spent the next ten years raising money for it, expanding the idea to include a residential compound and vocational classes for Agent Orange victims.

       Altogether George Mizo raised one million dollars for his project, the bulk coming from Germany and France.  Scandinavian countries were also generous, but not until the buildings were up and Friendship Village a going concern did money from the United States start coming in.  With the money George bought a tract of land in Nhon village near Hanoi and construction commenced in 1996. 

embroidering Hanoi's One-Pillar Pagoda

       Two years later the Vietnamese government created the Veterans Association of Vietnam to administer Friendship Village.  Its first president, ironically enough, was Trần Văn Quảng, formerly a top general in the NVA and the very one who commanded the unit that overran and slaughtered George’s unit at Khe Sanh in 1968.  The two became close friends.

       Friendship Village officially opened in 1998.  At present over 100 children reside in the compound.  Some of them are so handicapped—deaf and dumb, wheelchair-confined, restricted use of limbs, etc.—they are more or less permanent residents.  For some of them, regular massage sessions are part of their physical rehabilitation.  But most of the children learn a special skill so that they can return to their villages as an economic asset instead of a family burden.

making artificial flowers

altar to George Mizo

       Two such classes have been running for years, two more are under way and others planned.  Embroidery and artificial flower-making were the first two classes set up.  In the former, students learn to embroider simple flower designs, surrounding the logo Friendship Village, on tablecloths and pillowcases.  More advanced students embroider Hanoi’s famous One-Pillar Pagoda on larger pieces of cloth, which are framed.  The work is generally sold to visitors and used in fund-raising trips abroad.

Friendship Village's herbal medicine garden

       In another class children learn to make artificial flowers and these are marketed at a shop in the western part of Hanoi’s old quarter.  A third class, inaugurated in spring, 2004 teaches the use of sewing machines, 30 of which were donated by the Norwegian Red Cross and 10 by a French organization.  Friendship Village has a contract with a Vietnamese clothing manufacturer to produce piece work.  Thus, formerly reliant on donations, Friendship Village has begun to earn its own money.

       Unfortunately, George Mizo himself can no longer witness his project’s success.  He died in 2002, at the age of just 57, from complications of Agent Orange-induced ailments.  Following Vietnamese custom, Friendship Village officials established an altar to him, conscripting his spirit as the village’s protector.  Trân Văn Quảng retired, too, but the project continued with other veterans, such as Suel Jones, its chief fund-raiser, recruited while George was still alive.  And the project continued to expand.   A new Vocational Rehabilitation Centre and a new Physical Rehabilitation Centre completed construction.  The former includes a computer classroom, set up by Japanese donors, with ten computers and already two classes of eight students each.

weekend volunteers giving haircuts

       The project can never hope to help more than a tiny fraction of those affected by Agent Orange.  Children selected for the program come from lists submitted by village political officers in the affected areas.  The Veterans Association of Vietnam screens the lists and picks children from families too destitute to do anything for them.  The children generally stay for two years for medical treatment and vocational training.  Afflicted veterans can stay for 90 days of medical treatment.

       However it was set up any such institution faces the danger of donor fatigue.  Friendship Village’s new goal is self-sufficiency.  Suel Jones’s most recent fund-raising mission last summer (2005) collected enough money to guarantee the project’s staff salaries, maintenance, food and other incidental expenses for the next few years.  Friendship Village completed construction of its new buildings and inaugurated new programs to enable it to stand on its own.

Suel Jones talks with one of the embroidery students.

       The new optimism is based on several factors.  The compound already has a small poultry farm and an herbal garden.  Since last year it has begun pig breeding, with the dung used for fertilizer and composting and the animals sold in the market.  It also employs a modest bio-gas unit to produce part of its own fuel.   The original fish tank, closed because of pollution from the recently built neighborhood next door, will be rebuilt and enlarged to three parts, for separate species.  The staff is also preparing a plot for growing organic vegetables, part of which will feed the compound, while the surplus will be sold to expatriates and restaurants.

       Soon the tailoring class will have 30 students learning the trade while another 70 children will engage in piece-work production for the Vietnamese company.  Another class has started teaching bicycle repair.  Other types of vocational training will be added as the project grows.  The Veterans Association of Vietnam, which is involved in various economic enterprises throughout the country, will try to arrange employment for the skilled graduates.           

youth club members taking children for a walk

       Since October of 2005 volunteers from four different Hanoi youth clubs have been coming to Friendship Village on weekends.  They give haircuts to whoever needs one, impart instruction in hygiene and personal care, arrange football and badminton games and teach drawing and painting.  Art teachers divide their students into three groups.  The first is for children whose sense of art is basically therapeutic.  The second group has some talent, so the instructors try to improve their abilities.  The third group comprises those with innate artistic talent, who are trained to work as commercial artists in the future.

       It’s a pity George Mizo wasn't around to see this final transition.  Yet what a legacy this man left!  Thanks to him hundreds of children have redefined their lives, from a painful awareness of how different they are from the ordinary, healthy children around them, to the knowledge that, in spite of all their disabilities, they now have a marketable skill and can become useful members of society.  And hundreds more will get their chance, too.  Even the crippled crave dignity.

drawing class for one of the handicapped children

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for the story of veterans’ work clearing unexploded ordnance in Quảng Trị province, see http://www.landmines.org.vn/, the Project RENEW website 

Rockets Over the Plain of Jars

                                                             by Jim Goodman

       The Lao province of Xieng Khouang lies northwest of Vientiane, bordering Vietnam’s Thanh Hoá province on its eastern side.  Most of it consists of an elevated plateau of 1100 meters altitude, surrounded by largely deforested hills rich in mineral deposits.  Hmong and Khamu live in the hills, while Tai Phuan, Tai Dam and Tai Daeng, along with Vietnamese and Chinese, live in the plains and towns.  Farmers grow rice and vegetables, supplement their diet with hunting, fishing and gathering, raise cattle and in many ways reflect the kind of lifestyle prevailing in the rest of the country.

the Plain of Jars

       Two physical features, however, distinguish Xieng Khouang from every other province in Laos.  One is the presence of hundreds of big stone jars on the plateau, called the Plain of Jars because of this phenomenon, relics of a mysterious vanished Iron Age civilization.  The other, a relatively recent transformation, is the existence of thousands of bomb craters all over the province, a legacy of the Vietnam War in the 60s and 70s.

       A road does connect Vientiane with Phonsavan, the provincial capital, and it has been improved in recent years, but it’s still a long, grueling ride by bus.  Twenty-one years ago, when I made my visit, the short, inexpensive airplane ride was a more attractive alternative (and still is).  By taking the flight I soon became acquainted with Xieng Khouang’s second outstanding feature—the craters.  They were everywhere, not just around the populated areas, but also on hillsides, next to creeks, in places where there was no possible target.  It was if the bombs sought to destroy the water supply and obliterate the pastures that fed the cattle.

Phonsavan girls

       Actually, there never was a campaign specifically targeting the creeks and pastures.  The objective was to disrupt the funneling of supplies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  But often then pilots encountered thick clouds over the Trail and couldn’t see any targets.  They had to return to Vientiane, but were not allowed to land with any bombs still on board.  So they just dropped them over the last province en route, not really caring where they fell, nor even bothering to find a worthy target.  Thus the Xieng Khouang landscape is more pockmarked with craters than anywhere else in Laos. 

       Even worse, the US dropped 262 million cluster bombs on Laos, a large proportion of them on the Plain of Jars, and 80 million failed to explode—a permanent hazard to the population decades after the war ended.  Xieng Khouang, along with Phong Saly and Hua Phan provinces to the north, were longtime Pathet Lao strongholds.  And since guerrillas favored jungle bases, US planes also splattered the province with herbicides and defoliants, while opposing forces on the plain planted mines and launched rockets against each other.

young women in the market

Hmong woman selling porcupine

       There are still lots of no-go places in Xieng Khouang, where unexploded ordinance and leftover mines make passage too dangerous.  The original capital was all but demolished by the war and a new one, Phonsavan, now serves as capital and main commercial center.  A town of about 35,000, it boasts a lively, interesting market that, two decades ago, offered such unusual items as forest rodents, deer, porcupine, wild chickens, jungle roots and tubers and opium poppies.  Opium cultivation was still legal then and small patches of poppies stood in the nearest villages.  A few years later the government outlawed the plant and nowadays you won’t find it for sale in the market.  Practically everything else sold then is still available, though perhaps fewer porcupines.

stone jars scattered on the plain

       Phonsavan is a quiet and friendly town, but its only real lure is its proximity to the ancient stone jars.  The jars lie in several locations, but some are in or close to no-go zones.  Three large and safe sites are south of the town and the easiest to access.  The jars, of sandstone and other local stones, vary in height and diameter from one to three meters, placed in no particular order, some cracked or split or fallen.  None have lids, though they may have originally had lids of perishable material.

       Legends that the jars were used to make rice liquor to celebrate an ancient conqueror’s victory and theories that they were for smelting metals have been discarded in favor of a general consensus that they were burial jars.  Excavators have found fragments of teeth and human bones in them. Puzzles remain, though, about the precise use of them as burial jars.  Were the corpses interred there ad left to decay under a presumed lid?  Were they cremated inside?  Why are the jars so many different sizes, with too many smaller ones to imply a great proportion of child deaths?

       Even more nebulous is whatever happened to the people who constructed them.  The sites date to the Iron Age, about 500 BCE to 500 CE, but whoever made them left no trace of cities, temples, building foundations of any kind, artifacts or written records.  They simply disappeared and existing historical records for the area appear only from the 11^th century, when Tai Phuan migrated to the area from further north.  They became Buddhists and established a state that was sometimes subjected to Luang Phabang, sometimes independent, and prospered by being on a major trade route north to Yunnan, east to the Vietnam coast, south to Cambodia and west to the Mekong.          

Site !, closest to Phonsavan

       It was also vulnerable to invasion from all directions.  Vietnamese forces sacked it during the Tây Sơn Dynasty in the late 18^th century.  Siamese soldiers occupied Xieng Khouang in 1777, 1834 and 1875 and forced large portions of its inhabitants to relocate to places under more direct Siamese control.  Not long after this, Chinese Black Flag bandits, remnants of the suppressed Taiping Revolt in southern China, attacked Xieng Khouang and destroyed its temples.  Things calmed down during the Colonial Era, but after the Second World War ended, insurgency action commenced and continued after the French departure, turning the province into a major theater of hostilities until 1975.

Leftover war material serves as fenceposts.

       The war wrought incredible damage on Xieng Khouang, completely destroying its capital, littering the area with UXOs and killing off much of its vegetation.  But with its conclusion people went back to a life more like that of their grandparents’ time, before all the conflicts started.  There were places they dare not tread and maybe had to watch what they hoed, but they could carry on something resembling a normal existence.  They even made use of some of the war’s detritus by using bomb canisters and artillery shells as fence posts, flowerpots and hotel decorations. 

       Like the craters viewed from the airplane window, the canisters walling off the vegetable patches were instant reminders of Xieng Khouang’s turbulent past.  Craters even marked the areas with the jars, like the one I saw at Site 1, sign-posted “US Bomb #2” (my driver was unable to find out where was US Bomb #1).  But none of that seemed to affect the local people’s attitude towards tourists, even Americans, when Laos opened the province to foreigners in the early 90s.  Like other newly opened Lao destinations, Phonsavan was a Sabai di City and travelers everywhere were greeted with smiles and welcomes.  No one expressed any resentment about the war damage.  That was already relegated to what seemed like a distant past; even more so now, two decades later.

       Phonsavan is most interesting in the morning, when villagers arrive from beyond town to buy or sell things in the open market.  Merchants wheel their products into town on wooden carts and use the latter to display their goods.  Women tend to dominate the crowd and many dress in traditional clothing, like the embroidered sarongs worn by the various Tai sub-groups.  Next to the town lies a lake at the foot of a couple of large, mostly barren hills, with fancy wooden houses near the summit and cemeteries in several locations on the slopes. 

Phonsavan Buddhist temple

       You get good, broad views of the town and the surrounding area from the top of this hill.  Distant mountains rise more than a thousand meters above the plain.  Some have caves where both guerrillas and local residents took refuge during the bombing campaigns.  The caves didn’t automatically guarantee safety, though, and in one tragic instance bombs sealed and destroyed a large cave sheltering a few hundred people, all of whom died. 

       Xieng Khouang’s Buddhist Tai Phuan are still the largest ethnic group in the area.  They did not rebuild all the grand temples destroyed by 19^th and 20^th century wars.  But post-war Phonsavan has its own modest temple, on stilts, as do Tai Phuan villages in the vicinity, distinguishing them from settlements of the Tai Dam and Tai Daeng, who are animist.  They are in roughly the same style as Therevada Buddhist temples elsewhere in Laos, featuring angled, sloping, tiered roofs, thick supporting posts and the typically carved shutters depicting kinarees and other celestial beings.  By the time Xieng Khouang started receiving visitors the Lao government had relaxed its former fiercely secular attitude and became more tolerant of religious expression.  Buddhism thus made a comeback, monasteries once again filled with monks and devotees resumed their religious customs, duties and the enthusiastic celebration of their festivals.

rockets on display in Ban Sawn

       My own visit to the province late in the month of May coincided with a rocket festival in the nearby Tai Phuan village of Ban Sawn.  My driver to Jars Site 1 had informed me of it, scheduled for the next day.  I arranged to get there early morning, just as the villagers were erecting the scaffolds to launch the rockets.  People from other villages participated as well, bringing their own rockets and marching to Ban Sawn behind a file of musicians playing gongs, drums and bamboo reed-pipes, dancing all the way, some of the men carrying beer bottles full of strong rice liquor and taking occasional swigs en route.  Others made the journey packed in the backs of pickup trucks.

monk conducting rituals iside the tent

       While some of the men upon arrival immediately set out to choose a site to erect the launching scaffold for their rockets, other people headed for the huge, silk saffron tent near the center of the village.  Inside the tent monks carried out rituals for devotees to witness and join.  A makeshift altar stood in the center flanked by cases with shelves full of gifts from the faithful, textiles, betel boxes, rice containers and money trees, spilling over to the sides of the officiating monk, a rather young man distinguished by his elaborate red miter, embellished with spangles and gold embroidery, with flaps down to his shoulders.

       Religious rites had been going on since the official start of the festival two days earlier.  The purpose of the festival is to bring on the rainy season and it probably predates the arrival of Buddhism in the area.  It does not mark any particularly Buddhist event, but for the Tai Phuan, like their cousins the Lao, who also stage rocket festivals both in Laos and northeast Thailand, essentially animist activities are endowed with a Buddhist veneer. 

monk adding the fuel

firing the rocket

      The first two days of the festival feature processions, rituals, music and dance.  Rockets are displayed on tall bamboo stands and on this day removed to the launching scaffold, which is more like a wide ladder propped up against a tree.  The rockets are basically thin bamboo poles several meters long, wrapped in bright colored paper and shiny foil, filled with gunpowder.  Monks fill the fuel tube wound around the lower part of the rocket and then men hand it up to a comrade on the ladder, who fixes it to the top of the launching scaffold. 

And the rocket soars to Heaven.

       Right after ignition, the rocket blasts off spewing thick smoke and, barring misfire or accident, soars into the heavens, reminding the gods it’s time to bestow the annual rains.  Some of these rockets can fly right past the clouds and continue for several kilometers before falling to earth.  Observes judge them by how high and how far they reach, as well as by what kind of trail they leave across the sky.  

       The launching is not without risks.  If the rocket fails to fire it’s quite a loss of face for those who brought it.  Even worse, it could streak off in the wrong direction, maybe even into the crowd, rather than into the sky, causing casualties that rudely reminded people of those other kinds of rockets from the 60s and 70s.  And on the spiritual side, it would not be sending signals to Heaven.

       Such accidents are extremely rare, fortunately, and the festival spirit is mostly celebratory.  It has its rituals, but for the villagers there’s always a good reason to make merit.  They may not believe that their rockets really do bring on the rains, but the event is full of entertainment and a good excuse for a rousing round of revelry.  After all, when the rains do come it’s then the season of hard work and little or no leisure.  The Rocket Festival is the last opportunity before that to have fun.  It’s not surprising that it’s still as popular as ever.

revelers at the Rocket Festival

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