The Kianh Foundation

In January, before I started this blog, I visited Hoi An in central Vietnam. It‘s an historic river port a few kilometres from the coast, just south of Da Nang and about midway between Hanoi and Saigon.

I stayed with Roe and Colin Schroeder, two Australians who are working as Australian Volunteer International volunteers for a foreign charity operating in Hoi An called the Kianh Foundation, which helps children with disabilities.

Hoi An is a town popular with foreign tourists, who flock to its World Heritage listed town centre. UNESCO says on its website  that it is “an exceptionally well-preserved example of a South-East Asian trading port dating from the 15th to the 19th century”.

The visitors also come for the many tailoring businesses that occupy the centuries-old buildings, along with tourist restaurants and souvenir shops selling silk scarves, lacquer bowls, embroidered table runners and ornamental chop sticks.

Not far beyond the this precinct – a couple of minutes’ walk from the most outlying tailoring shop – is the office for the Kianh Foundation. A couple more minutes takes the visitor to the town’s orphanage.

The Kianh Foundation established and runs an onsite special-education school for the children with disabilities who live there, where they receive an education that’s tailored to their abilities. The foundation also pays the wages of five of their carers, for services such as physiotherapy, speech therapy and dental care and for excursions and other social activities.

I visited the orphanage with Roe and Colin Schroeder, and found the school rooms for the children, some of whom have severe disabilities, to be a bright, sociable and cheerful hive of activity, and well stocked with books and toys.

Conditions were drastically different in 2001 when two English tourists visited the orphanage while on a holiday to Hoi An. They found the orphans with disabilities lying two or three to wooden beds in a dark room. The Kianh Foundation website says: “The children’s lives were lived out solely on the beds: they ate there; went to the toilet there. They never left the room. They had a small amount of food, no toys, no books, no games, no music. They just existed.”

The pair decided to set up the Kianh Foundation. One of the founders, Jackie Wrafter, is now the director of the charity and others have joined their efforts, in particular the Schroeders. They had also initially visited the orphanage while on holidays to Hoi An, in 2003. They have been returning regularly ever since, currently for 18 months on the Australian Volunteers International placements.

Now the charity is setting up a brand new day centre for disabled children in the nearby agricultural region of Dien Ban, so that its work can extend beyond the orphanage.

Roe Schroeder has for years trained the teachers for the school at the orphanage, and is now setting up the educational program for the day centre. Twenty children are already being helped, in temporary premises, with special education, physiotherapy and speech therapy. Roe is training three teachers and one teacher’s aid. Another Australian Volunteers International volunteer, a paediatric physiotherapist, is training an assistant physio and will shortly start training two graduate physios.

Colin Schroeder is the project manager for the centre’s permanent home, which will be purpose-built on land made available to the charity by the local authorities.

The Kianh Foundation website says Dien Ban was bombed heavily with dioxins during the war with the Americans and has the highest proportion of people with disabilities in the local province.

The dioxins were contained in herbicides including Agent Orange. This recent report from the US-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/Dioxin outlines the extent of the problem in Vietnam.

For those in Hoi An on holidays a visit to the Kianh Foundation and the orphanage shows a side of Vietnam far removed from the souvenir shops and tourist cafes. The charity and its dedicated staff and volunteers work hard to enrich the lives of children who otherwise might have little chance for health, personal growth or joy in their lives.

Donating money to the charity helps it to continue and expand its work for children with disabilities The Kianh Foundation, which is a registered charity in Great Britain, depends on donations from individuals to carry on with its work. Donations to it really do make a difference in the lives of these children of Hoi An and Dien Ban.

www.kianh.org.uk

Hold the greens

Frozen yoghurt on bia hoi corner, Hanoi Old Quarter

This post is about the food I have eaten in Vietnam rather than about Vietnamese food in general. My food range is far more limited than the dishes Vietnam offers as I am a fairly squeamish eater in a country where just about every part of just about every animal is consumed. So I haven’t tried duck broth with congealed blood, for example, or snake, or dog, or those breakfast boiled eggs with the chick  cooked inside.

For a takeaway breakfast I prefer banh mi trung (literally bread egg). It’s a crusty bread roll filled with an omelette cooked while you wait, plus a smattering of picked vegetables, what appears to shredded dried fish, and chilli sauce. Not bad at all.

Bun cha is a common lunch dish. The main ingredients are barbecued pork and pork patties in a broth that’s sometimes served hot and sometimes cold, also often accompanied by fried spring rolls (nem). There’s usually a side-bowl heaped with lettuce and herbs. They add some green stuff to a dish that is otherwise meat and rice, but there’s a widespread view among foreigners that they make you sick. I have also been told that many locals have the same view, and certainly at the place I frequent many leave the greens bowls untouched. I regretfully decided to follow their lead since seeing bowls of the leftovers, potentially picked over by various sets of chopsticks, tipped into a big plastic bag for re-serving to other diners.

Pho bo (beef noodle soup) is a Hanoi specialty. There are supposed to be 24 ingredients in classic pho, including spices, although I would have trouble identifying that number in my pho haunt near work, where a bowl costs 17,000 dong (A$1). A restaurant chain here is called Pho 24, after the number of ingredients. It’s a much more upmarket venue for sampling pho -no squatting on small plastic stools at small plastic tables – and is also two or three times the price – all of 42,000 dong (A$2.50).

Its website  gives a rundown on pho and its ingredients. Did you know, for example, that one of those ingredients, star anise, contains shikimic acid, which is used in the production of  Tamiflu? Now you do.

Pho ga is the chicken version, which I sometimes have for lunch in the tiny restaurant across the road from my home. It’s like many such places in Hanoi: one dish is served, in a “restaurant” that’s actually a family’s front room and adjoining pavement. After lunch everything is packed away until the next day. This family’s pho ga always comes with tender chicken breast – no gristle, bone or fat. It’s a pick-me-up in a bowl, all for 15,000 dong (A85c), followed by iced tea for 1000 dong (A6c).

However, pho is a little on the bland side, like a lot of the food I have tried in Hanoi. The cuisine is “subtle”, say the guidebooks. Fortunately there are jars or bottles of chilli sauce on the tables in many places so some zing can be added that way.

Bun rieu dau phu is spicier. Bun rieu is a soup with rice noodles, crab meat, tomatoes and, in this version, fried tofu (dau phu). It’s reasonably hot already without the addition of extra chilli sauce – although I usually do add some. The place I go to serves shredded lettuce in a side dish, for the strong of stomach. I ate litres of the stuff in Hanoi’s short but chilly winter.

Dessert? Frozen yoghurt cafes are popping up all over the place. My favourite one, Yokool, is situated on one corner of a busy crossroads in the Old Quarter that’s known as bia hoi corner by foreigners. It’s named after the outdoor bars on the other three corners, which sell bia hoi (draught beer) and are very popular with backpackers. At Yokool you choose the frozen yoghurt (such as blackberry, blueberry or strawberry), which is piped into a tub, and then the toppings – nuts, sweets, chocolates and chopped fruit. Then sit in the window and watch all Hanoi go by.

To find out about the Hanoi dishes consumed by a far more adventurous eater check out the popular Sticky Rice food blog.

Summertime

Bathers crowd the pool at the Hotel La Thanh, July 2010

At a small lunchtime restaurant near my office, which sells noodle soup for a dollar, office workers sit on ancient plastic stools next to dingy walls that have not been painted in many years.

Yet the owners have just installed a brand spanking new plate-glass door and windows, plus an air conditioner, at the front of the establishment. In this hot, sticky summer they’ve got their priorities right.

It was even hotter than usual for several weeks during June and July; temperatures were in the high 30s and humidity was at 80 or 90 percent. The city is far from the ocean, so no sea breezes waft in at night.

Air-conditioned homes, restaurants and shops are welcome oases in the stifling heat, for those who can afford them.

The expatriate community is depleted as many head home for weeks or months, or choose this time to leave Hanoi permanently. It’s a good time to rent a place if you are a foreigner, as it’s a buyer’s market now.

Most local people stay put, don’t have air conditioners, and escape the heat at night by sitting outside their homes, in laneways and streets and in parks. There are also a few public swimming pools and many hotel pools are open to the public (the entry fee varies from about $1 to $10), and they are well patronised. In the evening men sit drinking bia hoi (draught beer) in establishments on street corners and in open-air bars and beer halls.

Ice-cream vendors wheel bicycles around with the ice-creams packed into an insulated box on the back. Motorbike riders deliver bags of ice from similar boxes to cafes, which often don’t have a fridge on the premises, for cold drinks.

New businesses and products pop up. Stalls appear on many streets selling sugarcane juice freshly squeezed on the spot by ferocious looking presses that chew up the cane.

Brightly printed cotton jackets designed to shield women motorbike riders from the sun are strung up on shop fronts across the city. Each one has a hood large enough to fit over a motorbike helmet, and also flaps attached to the cuffs of the sleeves to cover the rider’s hands as she grip the handlebars. Some women wear opera-style long gloves instead.

While I have not taken those precautions myself, I’m getting good mileage out of my $2 folding umbrella to ward off blazing sunshine as well as summer rain.

There have been regular downpours over the last couple of weeks, and on July 13 Hanoi experienced the first flood of the summer – but probably not the last. The rain bucketed down overnight, putting the streets, and the ground floors of many buildings, knee-deep in water. (See this video of the flood in my own neighbourhood on YouTube taken by a work colleague who lives nearby).

Flooding aside, the rain has given Hanoians a welcome break from the extreme summer heat, if not from the humidity.

For me, as well as the relief that comes from lower temperatures it has also been a pleasure to experience really drenching downpours after so many years of drought back in Australia. I luxuriate in the curtain of rain falling outside my window, water coursing down gutters, glistening wet surfaces and the lights reflecting off them at night, and the thunder of raindrops on the roof.

Bargaining

A real estate agent recently asked me how I found living in Hanoi. I told him it was certainly an interesting place, but I found bargaining difficult: I was just not used to doing it. I was all at sea in the land of no fixed prices.

He smiled. In Vietnam when you buy something, he told me, you get the highest starting price if you show up in a four-wheel-driver, less if you arrive on a motorbike, less if it’s a bicycle and less again if you walk to the business.

It’s so different from what I am used to in Australia, where just about everything has a set price. You know what things cost because the price is attached to the product on a sticker or a tag. You shop around if you want to by comparing those prices, not by bidding down the price in each transaction. The fact that prices are attached to most products also mean they don‘t vary too much between businesses. So easy.

Not in Vietnam. For example, the price I have been charged for paracetamol has ranged from 6000 to 20,000 dong – in pharmacies, by pharmacists or their assistants wearing their white-coat trappings of respectability.

Apart from the few supermarkets, most businesses don’t have even nominal price tags on their wares.

The real-estate agent’s rule of thumb probably does not apply to westerners either, who are all assumed to be rich. We are likely to be given the “four-wheel-drive” price even if we show up on foot. Indeed westerners are pretty well all rich in a country where US$200 a month is a good wage, and many earn US$100 or less. And the westerners living here on western wages are fantastically wealthy by local standards.

Not only does the asking price vary, and is often higher for westerners, but also, because price tags are so few and far between, it’s hard to gain an idea of the price for which a vendor is prepared to sell his or her goods or services.

Some vendors, particularly of fruit or vegetables, can be quite aggressive too, in an effort to sell more of the product to me, which adds another wrinkle to a process that is so seamless at home. Not only do you negotiate over price but also amount.

From my point of view this is tiresome, but I can also see the point of view of the vendors, particularly the ones who work on the streets. Each works in all weather, plying her wares from the two heavy baskets suspended from a bamboo pole slung over her shoulder, and would make very little money each day. According to an online exhibition at the Women’s Museum in Hanoi these women are working on the street because they can’t get jobs in their village or because earnings there are so low.

If I agree to buy a kilo of oranges for more than the price a street vendor needs to make a profit, she tries very hard to sell me two kilos. This may mean, I think, that she can afford some meat for dinner, for example.

I also think sometimes, when buying from a tenacious trader, that it’s no surprise that this country has seen off so many foreign armed forces. There’s a steely persistence here in many daily pursuits!

Not all drive such a hard bargain though. I once even had a shopkeeper knock down the price for me. I had agreed to pay the 180,000 dong she asked for a bag – that’s about $10.50, and the bag would have cost me $40 or more in Australia. I didn’t bargain, and after the deal was closed the shopkeeper reduced the price herself by 10,000 dong. She must have taken pity on me.

Although I am still a hopeless bargainer I have developed a few shopping strategies.

My approach where the price varies so much for a standard product, such as the paracetamol in those pharmacies, is simply not to return to the places that charge more.

I do bargain sometimes, and think of it as practice for times when there’s more of an imperative to haggle over the price, such as if I need to buy a big ticket item, and for the weekly shop for fruit and vegetables when I don’t want to regularly pay too much over the odds. The other day, for example, I bought a length of 150-centimetre wide silk with a beautiful 1950s-retro pattern for 80,000 dong a metre rather than the 90,000 asked for. Not much of a reduction but I got in some practice – and even at the higher price it’s all of $A5.50 metre.

I have also taken enough motorbike taxis to have an idea of prices and bargain if I know the price is way too high. I still pay more than a local person, but by only a dollar or so. I don’t want to spend the time getting the price down further – and that dollar means a lot more to the driver than it does to me.

Even if I was a better bargainer, that awareness of the value of a dollar to the vendor would make me reluctant to get too serious about regular bargaining. The cobbler who works near my office, on a stretch of roadside pavement under an offcut of tarpaulin amid heat, dust and petrol fumes, charges me 50,000 dong to re-heel a pair of shoes. I suspect that this is double what he charges other customers – I have seen 25,000 dong change hands. However, it would be a hard life working on a city pavement so I don’t mind throwing some extra money his way – and after all, for expert repairs I am paying all of $3 rather than $1.50.

I also take note of a very good piece of advice I heard recently: “If the price seems reasonable to you, forget what others are paying.”

However bargaining is a story that’s different for everyone, and it doesn’t have any particular conclusion. There are more views in these two discussions on the New Hanoian website:

http://newhanoian.xemzi.com/en/aska/answers/qid/2451

http://newhanoian.xemzi.com/en/aska/answers/qid/1333

Step by step

Hanoi footpath

Walking in Hanoi is rarely a stroll in the park. Footpaths are uneven and crowded with shops’ wares, food stalls surrounded by patrons sitting on small plastic stools, residents who treat the pavement as an extension of their cramped homes, tradesmen who treat it as extensions of their workshops, and of course rows of parked bikes. Pedestrians alternate between patches of clear footpath and the road, where they stick as close to the kerb as possible in order to avoid the traffic.

I have found one spot in Hanoi where the footpaths are clear. It’s on the perimeter of the Citadel, the military area north east of the city centre. The streets of the Citadel itself are closed to the public and the streets along its borders are open, but clear of parked bikes and street stalls. Around here I can manage a 15 or 20 minute walk without once needing to look down at my feet to check for obstacles. Bliss.

Most other walkers I see in Hanoi are foreigners like me trying to cling to their western habit of a daily constitutional, come what may. Either that or they are local people who must walk in order to make a living, such as fruit sellers and the women who go door to door buying household rubbish to resell to recycling businesses. It seems that most Vietnamese people who have a choice stick to motorbikes for even short trips.

 

 However some Vietnamese people do walk for exercise, even though the locations where they can do so easily are relatively few. Walkers step out in the early morning around the city’s many lakes, or stop on the lake shore for stationary exercises. There are also the parks, although these seem to be more popular with badminton players, who set up nets all over the place in the hour or so after the working day has ended. 

 

 I also saw, early one evening, people using the lawn in front of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum for exercise. This area is called Ba Dinh Square, and it’s where, in 1945, Ho Chi Minh delivered the speech in which he declared the independence of Vietnam. 

The lawn is beautifully maintained by a team of gardeners in conical straw hats and signs in English and Vietnamese warn passers-by not to walk on it. However it is criss-crossed by a grid of footpaths, along which strode dozens of serious walkers charging up and down, like swimmers doing laps.

Business on a bicycle

Small-business niches are quickly filled in Hanoi. Anywhere that potential customers gather you will find a stall selling drinks or food, a roadside cobbler, a roaming shoeshine operator.

While waiting for a bus recently I watched a woman set up her business selling drinks next to the bus stop. She turned up on a bicycle which had a small, low plastic table strapped cross-ways and upended on the back behind the seat. The rest of her business inventory was packed on top of it; the ubiquitous kindergarten-size plastic stools for customers to sit on, cans and bottles of drinks, glasses and a small brush broom with a bamboo handle. This last item she used to sweep clear dust and debris from the two or three square metres of pavement her business would occupy for a few hours.

Such scenes would be repeated hundreds of times across Hanoi each day, f not thousands.

A cobbler near my office works on about two square metres of pavement under a tarpaulin while breathing in the traffic fumes from a busy road. . He has no workbench, sitting on the ground as he skilfully mends shoes with a handful of simple tools. He could easily pack his business on to the back of the bicycle at the end of each day.

Another familiar scene is the business conducted from a bike, a cart or even from a couple of cane baskets. Women wheel bicycles fitted with frames from which hangs household products, such as mops, baskets and buckets. Other women push carts about the size of a wheel barrow, also fitted with frames that are crowded with clothes or shoes. Men sell hardware displayed on bicycles.

I suspect that all these micro-business people work not only for little money but also for long hours. The street I live on is unusually quiet for Hanoi with no through traffic, and I have seen street vendors having a nap on the footpath there, next to their goods.

Some businesses take up even less room. Women sell fruit, vegetables or flowers from large shallow cane baskets attached to the rear of their bicycles, or from two of the baskets suspended from bamboo poles balanced on their shoulders, fore to aft.

Youths go from cafe to cafe carrying rags, a spray bottle of water and polish as they look for shoes to shine for about 5000 dong (30 cents) a pair. I recently met a youth who is now being assisted with a proper education by the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation. He used to be one of the shoe shiners, and made around one US dollar a day.

Then there are the street restaurants, all surrounded by those tiny plastic stools.

Some sell only drinks, such as the one that set up near my bus stop, or the ones that offer sugar-cane juice, freshly squeezed on the spot.

Others sell food, and generally only the one dish, such as banh mi, a bread roll with egg or meat, pho bo, a beef noodle soup, or bun cha, a soup with barbecued pork and pork meatballs. The dishes are cooked on small coal-fired braziers. The coal comes pressed into squat cylinder shapes about 25 centimetres long, which fit neatly inside each brazier – and, of course are also sold from bicycles.

See more photos on Flickr of street businesses.

Coffee culture

Sua chua ca phe - yoghurt coffee

Cafes are everywhere in Hanoi. Some are western-style cafes and cafe chains serving espressos, lattes, macchiatos, mocha coffees and so on for 30,000 to 45,000 Vietnamese dong. That’s a pricey $2 or $3, in a country where a bowl of noodle soup costs a dollar.

For anyone visiting Hanoi some of the chains are Highlands Coffee,  Papa Joe’s and Joma.

Then there are the traditional Vietnamese cafes that are dotted all over Hanoi, and where a coffee costs 12,000 dong or thereabouts (about 75 cents).

These little cafes, usually limited to a handful of tables and chairs, are everywhere. I suspect that one reason there are so many of them is not only the clear popularity of coffee breaks among Hanoians, but also that they would not cost much to set up. Hanoi is a city bursting at the seams with small businesses, and a small cafe serving only drinks would not require too much start-up capital for one of the legion of eager micro-entrepreneurs in this town.

As in the westernised cafes, the coffee in these places also come in a variety of styles. all using industrial-strength filtered coffee. You can practically stick your teaspoon up in it.

The most common are ca phe den nong (hot black coffee), ca phe den da (iced black coffee), ca phe nau nong (hot coffee with sweet condensed milk) and ca phe nau da (iced coffee with condensed milk). A variety of teas, hot and iced, are generally also on the menu, and freshly squeezed fruit juices as well.

When drunk black the coffee tastes comes somewhere between an espresso and a Turkish coffee in flavour – and closer to the Turkish coffee in the caffeine jolt it gives to your body. It is served with the sugar already added, although this is usually at the bottom of the cup so if you don’t stir it’s not too sweet. Sweetened or unsweetened, it’s not for the fainthearted.

My favourite local coffee is called sua chua ca phe, which is a mixture of iced black coffee and yoghurt. It’s not a combination I had encountered before, but it’s delicious.

One coffee I won’t be trying is “weasel” coffee. It’s made from beans that have passed through the digestive system of an animal called the civet. The process is said to improve the flavour but I won’t be testing that theory myself.

Motorbike city

Not so long ago Hanoi was a city of bicycles and cyclos, but now the motorbike rules.

Parked bikes cover many pavements, and shops and homes usually have small ramps to allow easy access. It’s common to see shoppers on motor bikes navigating the narrow aisles of open markets. During peak hour motorbike drivers take to the pavements where they can, to bypass roads crowded, gutter to gutter, with bikes and an increasing number of cars.

Motorbike taxis (xe om) are everywhere, and are the fastest way of getting around a city clogged with traffic. Xe om driver can be found on many street corners and usually identify themselves to potential foreign passengers by calling out “oto“. The other way to identify them yourself is by spotting the extra motorbike helmet they all carry. It’s illegal to be on a bike without a helmet, and that law is usually enforced. Negotiate a price before you get on so that there are no surprises at the other end, put on the helmet and you’re away.

Watching the world go by from the back of a motorbike is exhilarating. The bustling streets, where so much life is lived, are a kaleidoscope of images as you flash past – people working, chatting, cooking and eating on the pavements, in between all those parked motorbikes.

Then there are the other motorbike drivers to watch, and their passengers and cargo: women driver wearing regulation sky-high heels, children nestling on their father’s knees at the front of the bike or sandwiched between father and mother; pregnant passengers riding side saddle; delivery bikes carrying chairs, coat stands, mattresses, 20-litre water bottles, floral arrangements the size of wagon wheels; cages of chickens; full-length mirrors; potted plants a metre high.

I recently saw a motor bike with the passenger balancing a sheet of glass the size of a window pane on his thighs, while holding it at each end with his bare hands.

The Old Quarter

 

Street market in Hanoi’s Old Quarter

The first impression of the Old Quarter in Hanoi is chaos.

The streets are crowded with traffic – mostly motorbikes, but also cars, often ridiculously large for the narrow streets,and the odd bicycle, usually ridden by an elderly person, a person who’s clearly very poor, or a youngster.There are few traffic lights and apparently even fewer road rules.

The footpaths are not for walking on. They are crowded with parked motorbikes and with people using them as an extension of their living room, workshop or shopfront. They are also occupied by street restaurant selling drinks and food cooked over coal-fired braziers, surrounded by diners hunched over small plastic tables on even smaller plastic stools for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Walking’s hard work, even if it’s a time of year when it’s not too hot. For a westerner used to sauntering down the street an empty stretch of pavement is a (rare) sight for sore eyes.

After a while it becomes apparent that, more than many cities, Hanoi is a collection of villages, and the chaos starts to make sense.