Living on the River

The Perfume River bisects the city of Hûe.  Though often romanticized, the river is also home to some of the worst grinding poverty in Central Việt Nam.  The river people live and work on their boats.  This makes it difficult to send their children to school, leading to a cycle of illiteracy.  When docked, some boats are able to pirate electricity, but most of the time, life on the small craft is primitive at best.  Some of river people operate bulk carriers bringing construction gravel downstream from the pits, while others gather fresh water mussels.  Still others operate “dragon boats” taking tourists to see the tombs of the kings or the pagodas. 

The smaller boats are used as taxis to go ashore for food shopping or other errands.  Oftentimes, these are used for fishing.  Notice too the construction of these small boats.  They are made from aluminum with wooden rails added.  Lightweight and durable, they are a great example of “swords into plowshares” as they were once ½ of an external fuel tank from an American jet fighter plane.  They can even be used to herd flightless ducklings from their feeding area on the river bank to a floating cage attached to the larger boat.

Being born and raised on the water, the kids develop their boat skills at an early age.  It is not uncommon to see a small child left alone in a boat while Mom goes ashore to the market.  He won’t return a smile, much less move from his perch.

The future is very uncertain for the river people.  Because their bodily waste and garbage go directly into the water, the river downstream from the city is an environmental disaster.  There have been previous attempts to close down the sampan villages, but without education and job training, the efforts were for naught.  Though tourists love to see the boats, the time has come for their cycle of poverty to end and the river to be cleaned up.  We can only hope this little girl’s future is a good one.

Comments

[Tom Murray]

Last December when my college students were doing poverty relief in three villages near Hue we were introduced to what was my first experience with "public housing" in Viet Nam. The village People's Committee was relocating "boat people" to small government provided houses. Poverty is so pervasive in Viet Nam that the government really has little or no capacity to assist the poor. This was an interesting sight for me. It shows that the government does make and effort to help some of the poor although limited.