Erstellt am: 2. 5. 2015 - 10:54 Uhr

Where The Happy Water Flows

Up in the misty, terraced mountains of northwestern Vietnam, colourful ethnic minorities face the dilemmas of development.

The ‘Happy Water’ burns a trail down my throat. It’s the fourth round of the strong homemade rice schnapps that my host, a thin-faced, bright-eyed Hmong farmer called Son Thein, is pouring at alarmingly short intervals from a plastic bottle into small stubby glasses. I'm just recovering my composure as she thrusts a refilled glass in my direction, glaring at me across this dark room on a cold night in the northwestern Vietnamese mountains.

Chris Cummins

“Another!” she urges – her candle-lit face glowing across a wooden table littered with the debris of a big meal.

“Enough!” I cry; thinking longingly of the creeping under a mosquito net in the room next door and sleeping off a long days' hiking. We've spent the day on the rugged paths that cling to the steep slopes which are terraced with steps of flooded paddies.

“How many fingers do you have!” she exclaims, holding out a spread palm act

It’s a winning argument. There are undoubtedly more than four.

“Just one hand, OK?” I insist, resigned to my fate. “And don’t even mention toes” I’ve heard these sessions can last all night.

Cabbage and Coriander

Son Thein runs a homestay in a village called Xian Ta Chai. Her farm is by a rickety wooden suspension bridge by a fast stream, strewn with boulders, that runs under a shady bamboo plantation. A waterfall plummets from the near vertical mountainside at the end of the village, and, near its pool, children play with simple poles that push a metal wheel. Women hawk shawls and bracelets with admirable persistence.

Chris Cummins

The village lies slightly off the main tourist route, but Son Thein still has a busy time cooking for the guests that are brought to her farmhouse by Hmong guides, giving them a simple bed and plying them with food and rounds of ‘happy water’. The vegetables come from the garden and the meat comes from the free running chickens that you see clucking around the steep, traffic-free, mud path that runs up the centre of the village.

We all prepare the food together, squatting on the floor in front of giant wooden boards and mountains of greenery – chopping vegetables for spring rolls; cabbage roughly cut among herbs and coriander. Son Thein cooks the rolls over an open fire in the kitchen:

Chris Cummins

Tourism began, in its present form, in the early 1990s, with the opening up of the nominally communist one-party state of Vietnam. Since then it has been a welcome economic and social life-line to these remote communities which have traditionally been among the poorest in the country.

A Constant Fight With Nature

Even now life is very hard, says my Hmong guide Nu, a self-taught English speaker, as we walk past families hoeing the weeds away from the still dry mountainside paddies. They have been working since dawn, rebuilding the crumbling mud barriers of the terraces and basically beating the mountain-side up until it is again a garden capable of sustaining a hungry population.

Chris Cummins

Over centuries the locals have turned the mountains into a series of shelves so that they look like Mayan pyramids gone green - a Hundertwasser dream of nature's union with architecture. Every bit of flat land is used; if not for rice then for beans or spinach of greens. Ducks swim in the paddies. Every family keeps black snuffling pigs – each village giving off that distinct odour of swine. Food is security.

The Power Of Nature

Although the whole mountainside is ribbed with terraces, green shoots poking out of murky water, each family only really produces enough food for their own needs, says Nu. “We eat a lot of rice", she smiles, as I fail to conceal my astonishment.

Growing rice in this capricious climate is not easy. Every year nature bares its teeth and shows its dominance. The frantic hoeing is a battle of the mountain’s determination to reclaim the slopes with shrubs. Nature can be harsh here. You’ll see the odd brown scar among the greenery where a landslide had hit and Nu said last year there had been little or no rain. Last year the government had to step in to prevent a hunger crisis.

Chris Cummins

And tourism, though lucrative, tends to benefit only the communities on the well-beaten track. Nu takes us to another village called Nan Trang, up a hill high above the valley and home to an ethnic group called the Red Dzou.

Their name comes from the red scarves that the women wear wrapped around their heads, whipped backwards from their foreheads like Tudor maids with flowing red tassles hanging back over their shoulders. They shave their eyebrows when they marry and soak in herbal tanks. I’d been eager to meet them.

But few tourists venture up this sweaty hill and the village looks dustier and more desolate that the ones lower down in the valley near the rocky river – and slightly unfriendly. The women scowl when, finding no change, I refuse to buy a bracelet.

What’s the point of a tourist who doesn’t buy anything?

Lai

For those who can benefit from tourism, guiding is a lucrative business and a way of widening their contacts and languages. In the next village I meet another young Hmong woman Lai with a high-pitched laugh and a sense of almost permanent hilarity.

She should be guiding an Italian couple but the woman has taken to bed with fever. Clearly restless, Lu teaches me to count to 10 in the Hmong language, laughing at my clumsy mistakes. As we prepare food and chat, scrawny cats stalk around the kitchen.

Lai pinches me flirtatiously in the neck, pulls at my blond chest hair and enquires why I am not yet married. I ask her why she became a guide?

Chris Cummins

Guiding has given Lai and her sister a chance to make an independent career for herself away from the drudgery of the traditional farming which her father and brothers practice on the steep paddies. Lu taught herself English from chatting to tourists passing through: it’s a remarkable achievement.

But Bill Hayton, author of the book Vietnam: Rising Dragon, says tourism is a double-edged sword for the ethnic minorities of the mountainous north-west of the country: “They resent just being a tourist attraction,” he says, pointing out that it isn’t just the obvious challenges of a remote locations and difficult climate that have seen them fall behind as the rest of the country marches on economically.

“They are sort of paraded as a full part of the country and given space in the media to wear colourful costumes,” says Haydon,” but at the same time they are discriminated against and have been locked out of much of the development of the country.”

Barbara Köppel

In these highlands interesting alternative cures for common ailments. Son Thein, for example, has red marks on her neck. It comes from using a heated buffalo horn pressed against her skin to suck out the saw throat she has. Many others in the village have red marks on their forehead to cure headaches. Lai keeps threatening me with such therapy if I drink too much happy water, letting out her high-pitched giggle as she burns an imaginary horn onto my forehead.

"Buffalo Horn For Headaches"

Nicole Girard, Asia Programme Coordinator of the group Minority Rights Group International, says it is these picturesque practices, however, that have caused the prejudice against the highland minorities from the majority ethnic Kinh who, living mostly in the Vietnamese lowlands, dominate the country’s politics, economy and media: “There is a prejudice that people in remote areas are backwards, superstitious and even stupid.” These prejudices come from the lack of exposure to the cultures of the more remote areas, conditions that “allow stereotypes to develop and flourish.”

Chris Cummins

Other prejudices were developed during the tumultuous war-torn 20th century. “Some are seen as potentially subversive and this dates back to the time of what the Vietnamese call the American War, when US special forces tried to train up some of the mountain people, known as montagnards, to become anti-Communist fighters. Some members of the ethnic minorities concerted to Christian evangelicalism and, rightly or wrongly, there is a perception in the capital Hanoi that hotheads abroad are stoking disquiet.

Chris Cummins

But Nicole Girard credits the Vietnamese government with making a concerted effort to fight prejudice and improve the lot of the minorities. The government has officially listed over 50 ethnic minorities, some with populations of just a few hundreds, kept a careful account of economic disparities. In other words we know there is a problem because the government has documented the problem – which is usually a good sign.

But improving matters is a slow battle, says Hayton, and can’t be won by decree alone. Minorities might get access to better schools and health facilities but then, when inside, they have sometimes been patronised or ostracised by health workers or teachers and these deep-set mentalities can be hard to break down.

Remoteness is becoming less of an issue. Better roads are improving communications and health care and education facilities are improving greatly. I saw a full primary school in the village – 20 or so tots eagerly listening to the words of an enthusiastic teacher and, among them, one child fast asleep on the floor.

"Don't leave anyone behind!"

Lu, while teaching me to count in Hmong, admitted that she hadn’t been able to speak her native language at school. Girard says that these schools should use the ethnic languages so that the minorities can look to the future without being handicapped: “They have to have an education that caters to their needs so that they don’t get left behind.”

Barbara Köppel

Will development and those big roads and riches swamp their cultures as the ethnic minorities embrace more mainstream culture and development? It's the dilemma of development: how do you embrace the wealth of modernity without throwing away the riches of your heritage?

“Something’s will fall by the wayside and other things will survive," says Nicole Girard.

She points to the example of Native Americans in the USA, where traditional housing has been mostly abandoned and where many languages have died but others have survived as has a strong sense of identity:

“If these groups are allowed to keep their rights intact, then they can keep their cultures and communities intact.”