As many of you know, I spent three months in Vietnam during the summer of 1967 as a student volunteer. I lived with a Vietnamese family in the town of Gia Nghia up in the mountains and worked in the local hospital as a translator for a US Navy team consisting of one medical doctor and four non-commissioned “medics”. It was an experience that changed my entire life. The house I lived in for that summer had a thatch roof, wooden walls, dirt floor, no running water or electricity or a bathroom. The kitchen was also detached from the house for several reasons:(1) a fire in the house might burn the roof and then the entire house; (2) the chickens could eat the scraps of food that were discarded while preparing the meal and afterwards when cleaning up.
For water we had a rain barrel that collected the rain off the roof. When we ran out of water, we had to go to the river about 786 steps away (I know because I counted them) and carry water home using a traditional bamboo pool on our shoulder that had a pot hanging from each end. We used the same water barrel for drinking, cooking, cleaning and bathing. So we had to be very careful and just ladle the water out as we needed it. I took showers that summer in my bathing suite and the women took showers with their clothes on as we just had to stand in front of family members and our neighbors to take showers. We went to the bathroom in the rice paddy, again in full view of our family members and neighbors. The sun went down at 6:00 each evening and was up at 6:00 each morning and since we had no electricity that meant we were all in bed for 12 hours per night. We washed our clothes down at the river. I also went swimming in that river every afternoon after work or early in the morning before work.
The town of Gia Nghia was primarily Catholic, Vietnamese from North Vietnam who had fled to the south when the communists took over North Vietnam. But most of the people who lived outside this town were ethnic minority- Malay type people who were quite primitive. The women “Mountagnards” were still topless in those days. They also had no soap. When I went down to the river to go swimming I would take a bar of soap and would then have at least 50 if not 100 topless women of all ages begging me to let them use my soap. They called me “Mr. Soap.”
My work in the local hospital that summer so long ago was interesting, challenging and depressing as we had very little equipment and no sterilization other than a pot of boiling water. So a lot of our patients died of simple things. Because we were shorthanded, the Navy Team let me also perform minor procedures like sewing up wounds,- not war wounds but accidental wounds like people who would accidentally cut themselves with a knife. I also removed a lot of splinters including one in a person’s eye. The result of this summer working at a hospital is that I realized the medicine is not for me. So upon my return to the UW that fall I changed my major from Pre-Med to Business Administration.
Except for conversations with the US Doctor and the four medics, I spoke almost no English that summer and came home fairly fluent in Vietnamese. I took Vietnamese language at the UW for two hours per day during the spring quarter of 1967 as preparation for that summer.
Because of the summer experience in Vietnam and my language skills I was recruited by the foreign aid department of the US State Department (USAID) when I graduated from the UW and then spent from November 1968 until April 21, 1975 in Vietnam where I worked as an advisor to the Government of Vietnam for social welfare, community development and land reform.
During these exciting six plus years I lived in a number of different cities- Ban-Me- Thuot and Pleiku in the Central Highlands, Nha Trang- a beautiful seaside, resort town, Chau Doc, in the Mekong Delta and Saigon. I also worked on a number of challenging jobs. In all of them I was advising the Vietnamese government in the areas of refugee/social work, County Government administration, Land reform and Post War development plans. During these years (age 23-30 of my life) I made a lot of good Vietnamese friends, got fluent in their language, and fell in love with their food and their culture.
The places you remember in life are the places that seduce you with their heart. They are the places you return to, again and again. Vietnam is such a place for me. It’s hard to sum up a land of such diverse pleasures in a few simple words. There is the dazzling chaos of the cities, the tranquility of the countryside, the long, unspoiled beaches and misty hills. There are the locals working the rice fields; or hauling goods to market with ox-drawn wagons and odd sights like pigs riding on the back of motorbikes or seven people on one motorbike. There are the spicy smells and seductive tastes of the delicious cuisine and the hot, sweet coffee. Most of all it is the people - it is always a joy to see their smiles of welcome.
Next chapter: Why Hanoi?
