JACK BERNARD'S TRAVELS

Posted by jdbernard743

· October 24, 2011

Shouldn’t You Be In School?

This girl is selling coconuts on the street near the Opera House in downtown Saigon. My guess is that she is 12 or 13. She’s there every day. I see kids like her all over town. Some are working in street cafes. Some are selling lottery tickets. Some are hawking postcards. Some want to shine my flip-flops. Some want me to buy Chiclets. The question that always comes to mind is “Why aren’t you in school?” The reason is simple; her family needs whatever she can make to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads.

East Meets West has a scholarship program designed to help keep kids like her stay in school. SPELL (Scholarship Program to Enhance Literacy and Learning) is providing scholarships for more than 4500 students from the most impoverished families in Vietnam. These scholarships are incredible. Once the student is selected for the program, he or she is guaranteed a scholarship from the 6th grade through high school that includes tuition, fees, books, uniforms, mandatory tutoring, and a bicycle. No, education is not free in Vietnam. It costs roughly $150 a year to cover the cost of these items – minus the bicycle – and poor families simply can’t afford it. The reason SPELL starts in the 6th grade is that there isn’t much dropout in the lower grades, but at about age 11 or 12 the kids are big enough to help the family by contributing their labor. SPELL aims to help the families keep the kids in school where, if they hang in and graduate, there is a chance for a better life.
I pass this little guy, his sister or his mother every morning at 8 on my way to the office. They take turns working this cart, selling overripe bananas. I’ve never seen anyone buy anything from them but they are there every day. I wonder why he, too, isn’t in school but the answer is clear – his family needs his labor just to get by.

A friend of mine started the SPELL program in 2005. He was on a walking tour of Vietnam and he kept seeing kids like these and asking his guide why they weren’t in school. The guide told him their families couldn’t afford it. He asked how much it would cost and the guide told him $35/year. On the spot he said he wanted to underwrite 1000 kids. It turned out to be a little more complicated and a little more expensive, but there were a lot of after-market additions like tutoring and bicycles. Nevertheless, the program was born at that moment. The first group of scholarship recipients graduates this year and a new program, SPELL Goes to College is in the works.

A dollar goes a long way in Vietnam, and 4500 students are going to get a chance at a better life because of it.

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Categories : Saigon Diary

Posted by jdbernard743

· October 18, 2011

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What’s with the Hoodie? It’s 90 degrees!!

Southern Vietnam has two seasons – hot and dry and hot and wet. We are supposed to be moving to the dry season in October but no one has told the gods and they are still punishing us with rain. Nevertheless, wet or dry, I like hot. It takes little adjustments sometimes, but I like it a lot more than being cold. Yesterday I played tennis at noon in 90/90 conditions (90 degrees and 90% humidity). I drank two bottles of Revive and a quart of water but the tennis was OK and it got me out from behind the computer screen.

The south is always hot but there are some temperature control strategies here that leave me bewildered. In 2007 riding my bike from Dalat to Nha Trang I passed a woman wearing a puffy pink quilted ski parka crossing the road in front of me. I nearly crashed the bike turning around to check her out. What’s the deal? It’s over 90F and she has on a down parka zipped to the neck. I still have the picture etched in my memory and the why of it lingering in my RAM.

It’s still a mystery, but now that I’ve lived here awhile I realize she is just an extreme version of something I see every day. Vietnamese women are prized for their light skin and fine features. These qualities make them targets for trafficking in other parts of Asia where skin tones are darker and features coarser. The culture values these two physical characteristics. Vietnamese women are truly among the world’s most beautiful. But, one of the first things you notice about the traffic here, after you get over the volume, chaos, and sound is that every woman on every motorbike is wearing a face mask. My assumption was that they were just smarter than the men and wanted protection from the auto emissions. I’m sure that has something to do with it, but then I noticed something else. A significant number of these women are totally covered. It’s not just their faces that are covered but any and all skin is hidden from the sun. No skin is visible. In the morning and evening commuter traffic many of these women wear long gloves that cover to the shoulder and stockings of the same ugly cream colored nylon that cover their feet and ankles.

The final element in the great Vietnamese cover-up is the hoodie. Hard to figure but, yes, they wear heavy cotton sweatshirts with hoods. Not only do they wear sweatshirts in 90F, but they are zipped to the neck with the hoods up and a helmet on top. Not a square millimeter of skin is exposed. I guess the hood protects the neck from getting any sun, but man does it look hot. It’s a very good lesson in cultural anthropology. I think of the Swedes and other northerners who travel great distances to take their clothes off and face the sun. I think of the Muslim cultures who have ritualized cover up strategies and added a religious component to their violation. The Vietnamese are somewhere in the middle. I’m just having trouble with the hoodie. How about SPF 50?

Categories : Saigon Diary, Uncategorized

Posted by jdbernard743

· October 4, 2011

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A Cautionary Tale

I’ve written about motorbikes before. There are 6,000,000 of them in Saigon. They are everywhere – on the street, on the sidewalk, in the lobbies of buildings, and on the ground floor of most houses. Not just some motorbikes, millions of them. You are conscious, every minute, of their presence. Right now I’m in my apartment but the sound of motorbikes passing is in the room with me. They are noisy, quiet, dirty, clean, sleek, clunky, fast and slow. They are used for personal transport, pizza delivery, FedEx and DHL, taxi service, family transport (up to 5 on one bike), furniture delivery (I’ve seen 10 twin bed mattresses weaving down the street at 6am), livestock delivery (trussed inverted pigs or 30 dead chickens hanging by their scrawny necks), police patrols, mail, grocery, fast-food, flower, and window glass delivery. Almost any function is and can be performed by motorbike – including larceny and battery.

Traffic is chaotic. Bikes drive on both sides of the road and on the sidewalk wherever there is an opening. They swerve between cars and turn in front of them. I’ve seen them run red lights at full speed across blind corners early in the morning. There is some order to it, but it’s difficult to discern exactly how it works. Sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes there are tragic consequences. Last week a friend of a friend’s 6 year old daughter was killed in Hanoi when a taxi rear-ended the mother and two daughters on their way home from school. The mother may lose her foot. The taxi driver made a run for it but was stopped by a couple of other cars at the next traffic light. More often than not they get away and leave the motorbike driver lying in the street. It’s the law of the jungle.

The more common crime, on the increase in Saigon, is purse or computer snatching. It’s not new. When we moved here we were warned to be careful and always carry a purse or computer on the building side when walking or with the strap across your body on a motorbike. I don’t know if it is the global recession or something else but purse snatching is on the rise now and sometimes it too has awful consequences. It usually works this way: two men on a bike spot a woman walking or riding with a purse hanging from her shoulder. They will pass slowly to case the job and then do a U-turn and make their run. The second guy on the bike grabs the purse or in some cases cuts the strap and they’re off. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the consequences. The best outcome is a clean snatch and run. The worst is that the victim is pulled off the bike and dragged down the street.

Our friend, Kaci (many Vietnamese working with foreigners take Western names to make it easier for us to remember) had her purse snatched a couple of years ago. She was riding on the back of a xe-om, a motorbike taxi, when it happened. Her bag was strapped across her body and the thieves didn’t make a clean job of it. Kaci was thrown off the bike and dragged a ways until the thieves could free the bag. She was knocked unconscious and bleeding from a head injury. The xe-om driver stopped and went back to help. Eventually, he got her into a taxi, left his own bike and took her to the hospital – still unconscious. She had no ID because her purse was gone and no one knew who she was or who to call. She might have died because her brain was swelling, but doctors administered drugs immediately that kept the swelling down. The xe-om driver stayed with her until 8am the following morning when she recovered consciousness. By some miracle she was able to remember her mother’s phone number although most of her short term memory was gone. She doesn’t remember anything about the accident. She ended up with 8 stiches in her scalp and was kept in the hospital for a month until she recovered her memory. In the end she had to quit her job as a sales rep for Remy Martin because it was unsafe for her to drink alcohol (part of her job) following the accident. She’s fine now and has a new job, but it might have ended like the 6 year old girl in Hanoi.

We have another friend who was walking and whose handbag strap was cut. This time the thieves didn’t get it because she was holding on tight. A Vietnamese-American friend of mine lost his MacBook Pro the second day he was in town. Same modus – two guys on a bike, quick turnaround, snatch and run. My friend speaks fluent Vietnamese and went to the police station to file a report. He didn’t imagine that they would get the computer back for him but he needed the report for his insurance company. They asked him to fill out the report and come back the next day to pick up a copy. He did, but the next day they “couldn’t remember” him filling out the report. They asked him to fill out another one. In the end their message was “You’re a rich American. You deserved to lose it. You should have known better.” He never got the report he needed from them, but one of the guys in his office has a friend in the police department who happily provided one.

Holidays are the worst time for petty crime. At Tet, lunar new year, Vietnamese need to take a gifts to their families. If they don’t have the means they might just snatch a purse. Be cautious. Be aware. And, don’t expect the police to help. But for the right price you can get almost anything even help from the police…

Categories : Saigon Diary, Travel, Uncategorized

Posted by jdbernard743

· September 16, 2011

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The Lure of the Exotic

ex·ot·ic [ig-zot-ik] adjective

1. of foreign origin or character; not native; introduced from abroad, but not fully naturalized or acclimatized: exotic foods; exotic plants.

2. strikingly unusual or strange in effect or appearance: an exotic hairstyle.

3. of a uniquely new or experimental nature: exotic weapons.

4. of, pertaining to, or involving stripteasing: the exotic clubs where strippers are featured.

Webster is too clinical for me. Exotic has danger implicit. It has romance. The air is heavy and moist. There is a little mold forming under things. You feel different. The air is charged. The mind is altered. And, yes, it is not native.

I feel alive in Saigon. The danger here is not the danger of the past. No more war. No more malaria. Now the danger is more about motorbikes than mortars. But, grown men find it difficult to leave the curb. It becomes an act of faith. Step off the curb. Walk slowly and steadily – no quick or jerky movements. Watch the traffic but don’t fixate on any one motorbike. Step up on the opposite curb and Voila…

The romance is palpable too. Think Catherine Deneuve in Indochine, Jane March in The Lover (above), or Do Thi Ha Yen, the girl who plays Phuong to Michael Caine’s Fowler in the film adaptation of The Quiet American. It’s hot. It’s tropical. It’s juicy. It’s sensual. The Vietnamese women are among the most beautiful and stylish in the world.

The tropics are steamy. A drop of sweat on the upper lip. Dark patches under your arms. Orchids growing in vacant lots. Buildings mottled with mold and peeling paint. In a year or two underbrush becomes a canopy. Sometimes it feels like you’re trying to breath underwater.

Why would anyone find this alluring? It’s hot, noisy, smelly, uncomfortable, disease ridden and occasionally dangerous. But… it’s truly exotic.

Categories : Film/Television, Saigon Diary, Travel, Uncategorized, Weather

Posted by jdbernard743

· September 16, 2011

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The Wall

In the 1970’s and 80’s I was living and working in Berlin. And occasionally in those years I would make a wrong turn while looking for an unfamiliar address and end up facing The Wall. It was always disarming. I was living an ordinary life – except that I couldn’t walk, bike, or drive out of the city without running the East German gauntlet of checkpoints, blockades, and restricted rest stops. Life seemed normal enough – get the kids to school, go to work, shop at the local supermarket, hang out in trendy bars and cafes, and run in the Grunewald with the wild boars. That part was a little sketchy sometimes, but for the most part it seemed like a normal life. Then there was The Wall.

Right now, I’m sitting in an American espresso bar across the street from the US Consulate in Saigon watching the traffic ebb and flow as 6 million motorbikes move people around in some sort of system that I still don’t understand though I’ve been observing it for 2 1/2 years. Things look normal but, like The Wall in Berlin, the Consulate is a reminder that everything here is not entirely normal. The Consulate sits where the US Embassy did on April 30, 1975. That date marked the fall of Saigon and the chaos as thousands of Americans and South Vietnamese struggled to exit the city as the NVA was entering. I’m about a block from the site where the last helicopter lifted off a building with people hanging onto the skids (taken just after the one above).

The NVA stormed the Embassy grounds and destroyed most of what was there. By then the Americans and some of our loyal friends were safely aboard ships of the Seventh Fleet lying off the coast. I have friends here who have never seen family members since that day. I have one friend whose mother left him to go back and get another relative. The people at the airport put him on an airplane for Guam and the mother never made it. 17 years later, he got a call, routed through Canada (there was no contact between Vietnam and the US). It was his mother. Neither he nor his mother had any idea if the other was still alive until then. He was in college at San Jose State and his mother was running a tour business for the government. They are reunited now and he runs his mother’s successful private tour business. Good story. But, not all of the stories are that good.

The Embassy grounds were repatriated in 1995 when Vietnam re-deeded the property to the US. The Consulate was rebuilt and diplomatic relations between the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the United States resumed. I attended a ceremony celebrating 15 years of those relations last year and listened to speeches by diplomats of both countries extoll the virtues and successes of this relationship. As someone in the State Department recently said of Iraq “mistakes were made.” The diplomats here didn’t say that. I did.

I feel privileged to be part of the reconciliation process, but I keep running into The Wall, whether it’s in Berlin, Saigon or Jerusalem. Maybe someday I’ll make a wrong turn in Baghdad and see The Wall.

Categories : Aviation, Politics, Saigon Diary, Travel, Uncategorized