Our breakfast today was another traditional Vietnamese meal of banh cuon (raviloi style noodles in a dipping sauce). Delicious and very filling! Our students are troopers and fully partaking of all the strange and exciting foods we are encountering, even though a few of them are having trouble mastering the art of chopsticks : ) After saying goodbye to our host Dao Anh Khanh we loaded back onto the bus for our next adventure.
Today we headed out of Hanoi on a two hour drive to visit an ethnic minority Muong community. There are 54 ethnic communities in Vietnam (53 minority communities make up 15% of the population). However, they make up 50% of the rural poor.
Our guIde today was from Bloom Micro-ventures, an NGO which supports rural minority communities through agricultural tourism and micro lending. The rural communities keep livestock and engage in farming activities for cash crops like cassava and canna (a root vegetable that looks like ginger). Our trip today will fund some of these activities.
Bloom gives out micro-credit loans of between $100-$400 primarily to women. Small loans for first time clients and then larger loans after they pay back. There is a one to two year period for the loan and the Interest rate charged is 5% per month. Currently they have 200 clients in six villages.
Bloom is trying to enable these areas to capitalize on rural tourism - the poor communities are rich in culture and environmental resources. This is an opportunity for them to supplement their income. It is a way for them to maintain their way of life and most importantly alleviates the need for them to migrate to the city. As a development economist this was a fascinating opportunity to see in practice, a lot of the types of things I teach about in the classroom.
Once we left Hanoi we were in the midst of beautiful green fields and rice paddies surrounded by low lying hills in the background. It was a scenic, picturesque drive punctuated by bumpy roads and pot holes that reminded us that as typically the case in developing countries, there is much to be desired in the infrastructure and quality of roads! We visited a farm today and our trip funds microcredit loans to the women farmers in that village. We visited a farmer called Mrs. Tinh who will be getting a loan in 2 days.
Along the way we learned that the there is Fragmentation amongst the rural poor - richest, middle, lowest. Richest - family members work in the city and send back remittances. The lowest are typically unable to work due to health or disability issues. Mrs. Tinh belonged to the middle tier. She grows rice and corn for family consumption. She lost her land to a private corporation which had bought up the land belonging to individual farmers by convincing them that it would plant orchards and build factories for processing fruit and thus provide employment for the villagers. The farmers received a small lump sum payment as compensation but the factory only operates 4 months a year and employs 30 people so the farmers regret their decision now because they've lost a steady source of income. Ms. Tinh is receiving a loan to buy breeding pigs.
Our guide also told us that the plots of land are extremely fragmented due to the communist system of distribution which had lowered productivity. In addition the farming methods employed are really labour-intensive.
We visited Mrs. Tinh and she talked to us about the loan that she was about to take. All the people we visit are so hospitable. She brought out some rice flour paste and sugar cane cubes and the students learned to make rice flour dumplings with cubes of sugar which she then boiled and we sampled.
Upon our return to the farmstead we ate another humongous, delicious lunch with yet some more new dishes that we hadn't tried yet. The students then shucked corn and learned to weave shrimp baskets (pictures included).
After walking to a nearby reservoir we ride back to our bus in three tractors which chugged their ways down bumpy dirt paths. Suffice it to say that are food was well digested!
We are now back on Hanoi with a few hours to spend in the center of the city eating, walking and shopping. We catch the train to Sapa in a few hours so you may not hear from us until we get back to Hanoi in a couple of days.
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