Eleven a.m. Volunteers descend from one of Hanoi’s air-conditioned city buses onto the blazing hot street. They pick their way through the labyrinth of narrow alleyways that will eventually lead them to the banks of Vietnam’s Red River. They pass homes whose outside walls and doors are covered with phone numbers of various businesses, teeny grocery stores selling a handful of different foods and warm drinks, and the ubiquitous mopeds that speed through the constricted streets. This area is markedly more impoverished than Hanoi’s Old Quarter and French Quarter, the neighborhoods near the city’s landmark Hoan Kiem Lake. This is a district that the guidebooks neglected to mention – claustrophobic, dingy, and oppressive, even before noon.

The volunteers from the local NGO hail from North America, Korea, Vietnam, and France. Most of them committed to a two-week work camp to assist the villagers. Today, they are joined by the video work camp volunteers who will photograph and videotape these activities and the NGO’s other efforts. Few of them are prepared for what they will see.

The maze of streets ends at an outdoor cooking fire tended to by a woman squatting before the grill, stoking the flames. Unlike all of the volunteers, she is not sweating profusely. Behind her, at the foot of a steep embankment, flows the Red River, so named because it is the color of fresh bricks laid out to dry in the sun. The volunteers’ eyes move quickly to the bridge that spans the river and the quaint train that chugs across it to the other side. Oh, it’s so pretty, they want to say, because that’s what people usually exclaim when they chance upon the banks of a famous river.

Before the words can spill out, they step away from the woman’s cooking fire and a miasma drapes over them. A noxious, putrid, unfathomable smell, like vaporized garbage, hangs in the air. Two of the video crew volunteers begin to sneeze and cough, which will not abate until they leave the village. At their feet are piles of refuse: wrappers, plastic bags, discarded food, some syringes. A quick rain – it is July, the rainy season – will shoot this trash straight into the river.

But they cannot wince or groan – they must be stoic and maintain poker faces, because floating on the river are several houseboats, a euphemism for makeshift homes constructed from cast-off particleboard, wood, and scraps of plastic.

People live here.

Seven houseboats line the shore of this stretch of river. The volunteers refer to this as Fisherman’s Village #1, which is considered more affluent than the adjacent Fisherman’s Village #2, because it has electricity. But people in both villages bathe in and drink from the river. In both villages, the houses’ roofs usually fail to completely cover the house and always leak, and often have insufficient flotation so the houses can easily sink. Flimsy planks of wood suspended over the water serve as the entryway to the homes. As the volunteers approach, two little girls scamper across the bowing planks into their homes, lithe as gazelles. Read More...